As I see more deeply into reality, I get better at see more deeply within, which allows me to cultivate the inner piece more powerfully, which then allows me to see more deeply into reality, and the two spin on each other.
Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome John Vervaki to the show. John is an award winning professor at the University of Toronto in psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology. His academic interests include wisdom, mindfulness, meditation, relevance, realization, general intelligence, and rationality. He's the author of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis YouTube series and co author of Zombies and Western Culture, a twenty first Century Crisis. This episode,
I talked to John Verviki about the meaning crisis. There's a growing number of people who are struggling to find purpose in life. Society seems to be losing touch of its humanity. John argues that we can address the meaning crisis by appreciating and grounding ourselves in reality. We can find relevance by deepening our relationship with the world and the people around us. In turn, this reverence affords us peace of mind while recognizing interconnection of all things. We
cover quite a lot in this episode. We also talk about the topics of transcendence, mattering, narcissism, spirituality, and artificial intelligence. Once we got going, it was quite hard to stop us. John is a really thoughtful and insightful human and scientist, and we nerded out at such a deep level that we together felt a great sense of meaning by the end of this episode. We hope you feel it too,
and we hope you learn a lot. In fact, I know you will, so without further ado, I bring you Professor John VERVICKI, well, I heard you were trained as a philosopher. Is the word on the street true about that?
Well, yes, in some ways. I did a BA and an MA in philosophy, and then I got so sort of disheartened, almost disillusioned about academic philosophy, and I went away for a year and reflected not a particularly good year for me. But I discovered cognitive science, and I went back and did a BSc in cognitive science, a
specialist degree. Now, because I had done all of the philosophy, I was not able to take any philosophy courses as I did my COGSID degree, So I ended up taking the psychology courses equivalent to doing a specialist undergraduate degree in psychology. So I sort of got a training in CogSci, especially in psychology, and then I had my training in philosophy. Then I went back and did my pH d in philosophy but on cognitive science. So that's how it all worked out. Yeah.
I fell in love with the cognitive science in high school and it seemed to me like the field that would allow me to combine multiple interests. Yes, which was so cool about it, you know. Yeah, at the time, I think it was linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, computer science, and those are the branches of cognitive science. Have we have we added anything since then in the field that.
We Psychology has usually been one of the branches too.
I mean psychology. Yeah, it's not for good psychology, of course.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I just fell in love with the field of cognitive science so much, and there's so much we can explain through that method. You know, I really resonate with your search for meaning, you know, within psychology and in the field of psychology, there's there's like theories, there's like people mean different things by the word meaning. Yes, recently, Frank Martella and Michael Steger proposed three meanings of meaning, coherence, purpose, and significance. So I'd like to start off to hear
your view. What does meaning mean to you?
So I think that I mean that that's seminal work by them. There's been more re some work of fourth factor. Oh, really, mattering, which I think is very significant. In fact, some of the evidence suggests that mattering is more important than purpose, and probably that significance folds into mattering.
I think they're similar.
Yeah, they're similar, but mattering gets I think mattering is a little bit clearer, and it has the advantage I think being appropriately named vastly because that connects it with the precedent work in philosophy by Susan Wolf on meaning in life and why it matters, and so that connection is really important. I think the notion of coherence is
a work in progress. So some of the original experimental work on coherence by by Huntelman Samantha Huntelman has failed to replicate, which of course doesn't mean we throw it out. That's not what failure to replication means. It means that there's something probably wrong in our construct in an important way. And I think the kind of coherence we should be talking about is not sort of simple perceptual coherence to kind or narrative coherence the friend she was testing in
her experiment. So for coherence, I think we have to look at that about our cognition that helps us resist falling prey to absurdity. And so I think it's more of a perspectable coherence. I'm making use here of Nagel sense of the absurd, where a third person cosmic perspective undermines our personal, local perspectives. It makes us feel like our lives are insignificant, they have no meaning, And it's it's this perspectable clash that I think threatens meaning in life.
The opposite would be a way of interweaving these perspectives to see the world in a grain of sand. Quote Blake, I think that's the kind of coherence that is actually central to meaning in life. And the mattering I think is we'll target it is it's the sense of being connected, is something that has a reality and a value beyond your own existence. And I think that's what they were trying to get at with significance, but they didn't capture
the connectedness part. So I would argue that what contributes to meaning in life is purpose, perspectable, coherence, and mattering.
The mattering one is really front and center in my mind these days. We can integrate a little positive psychology in here as well. Isaac Priltenski's research on mattering, I don't know if you're familiar with it.
I have read about it while I've been reading some of the some of the research I've been reading on mattering, But go ahead, please.
Yeah, Isaac's work is really great and showing that wellbeing needs to take into account the mattering construct if we want to really have well being for all, because a lot of research and positichology is like, well, let's help happy people become happier people who are languishing, let's see how we can get them to be happy, you know. And a big source of languishing is when you feel like you don't matter. Yes, So I really like how he's brought that into the happiness and meaning framework. So
I really like that. But it's been on my mind as well because I've been really interested in integrating narcissism into our understanding of well being. And it seems like people who have a lot of experiences in their life where they feel like they don't matter. They become very preoccupied with mattering. And yes, it's like the need for self esteem. It's almost like the need for self esteem is a part of this mattering construct and that hasn't
really been discussed as much. And I'd love to get your point on this well.
I think, first of all, excellent move. I think seeing narcissism as a pathology of mattering, I think that's insightful and astute. But first of all, thank you for bringing up forward. That's excellent. I think that dovetails with a lot of the work I do. I try to integrate mattering with a lot of the work I do on the nature of embodied cognition, and that this sense of connectedness I call it religio because the way it often has these kinds of religious connotations, for a sense of
the sacred. But the sense of connectedness I think actually results from sort of the core functions of intelligence and consciousness, which is to screen out what's irrelevant and get us to hone in on what's relevant. And that honing in isn't something like relevance isn't in us or in the world. It's a fundamental between us and the world it's a fundamental connectedness and that relevance realization and I need realization, both awareness and making That connectedness, I think is the
central thing to human cognition and consciousness. It's central to our agency. And so anything that properly nourishes that is deeply nourishing to the core of our cognitive agency. And I think that's part of what gives it its spiritual signalsificants, its sacredness. And I think our culture is struggling, and I think your book has perhaps I detected a subtext of you know, our culture isn't really structured well to helping us meet these kinds of needs. And I felt
a kindred spirit in that. And that means I think what we see more and more a self centeredness that is trying to demand that connectedness, but in exactly the wrong direction. And I think that's why narcissism, ultimately, in very fundamental ways, undermines cognitive agency. And we need to do a little bit more research into the cognitive effects of narcissism and the way it undermines certain kinds tasks.
Let me instead of that sounding empty without tieth, let me give me one quick yet that makes it a little bit more plausible. I think it's becoming clear that a sort of the main connectedness that makes us intelligence isn't sort of our raw processing power. If you take a look at measures that predict our IQ, like measures of working memory, there's pretty clear evidence that chimps have better working memory capacity than us, pretty undeniable. And so
are they more intelligent than us? Well? Why do we have all of this? And the chimps are basically just doing what they're doing, right, And this goes to the idea that what our intelligence most allows us to do is to plug into the collective intelligence of distributive cognition. And that's exactly the place where the narcissist is most problematic, because they don't. They're sort of thwarted. They misunderstand or
misapprehend how to tap into that social interfacing. And I would predict that would have significant ways in which they are going to suffer cognitive impairment. One and I'll shut up after this. One clear example would be we need to study it. But I would hypothesize and proposing that there's an overlap between narcissism and being autodidactic in a way that exactly thwarts you about properly interfacing with social cognition, so you properly can transcend your own ecocentrism, et cetera.
So that would be a proposal I would make. No.
I love what you're saying, and it makes it I just think of this distinction that the Abraham Maslomide between the deficiency realm of cognition and the growth realm of cognition. Yes, I think it's a really important distinction to make, and it seems like so many people in our society right now are so stuck in the deficiency mode. And what I've been really struck in the meaning of literature. You know,
they've psychometrically tried to measure. They come up with the Meaning scale, and they found that if you score high in having a lot of meaning in your life, it's correlated positively with so many positive things. But if you score high and I'm still searching for a meaning, it's
actually correlated with lots of like depression and anxiety. And I know it's the same exact parallel in the mattering literature, and they have the anti mattering scale, which is the extent of what you feel like you don't matter, and that's correlated all these negative things like depression. But if you do feel like you matter, it's crow with all these positive things. So I think there someone needs to integrate these two literatures. When you're I think the overarching
thread here, correct me if I'm wrong. It is like if you're really stuck in this deficiency realm where you see everyone you meet not as a potential growth connection, but as a way to validate you. That's the only way, that's the only thing you view people as is do they respect me? Or do they not respect me? Versus? Oh, let me find let me actually care about this person independent of me. You know, you're you're constantly full of
strife and constantly full of anxiety and depression. And how can we get people and move them to the promised land, the growth realm of existence?
I think that's right and and for me, that's where you find the inevitable connection between these three things, sort of a sense of sacredness. Sacredness is an apprehension of reality that it has a growth dimension affordance for us.
That's I think that's ultimately sort of I wouldn't say that's a complete metaphysical definition or anything like that, but that is certainly it's phenomenological way it becomes phenomenologically present to us, I would argue, And so there's the sacredness, and that's the religio, and then there is, right, the degree to which we are affording people avenues for that connectedness,
the meaning. And then that connects with degree to which people have to engage in real self transcendence, which means really fundamentally a project of you have to say this the right way, You have to say it paired with self transcendence, or will fall into the deficiency mode. So please remember that. But self correction, right, the capacity to cultivate virtue because you realize your proclivity for vice, the capacity to cultivate seeing through illusion into reality, which is
a central feature of wisdom. So like, and then when you're seeing through reality, seeing through illusion into reality, then the sacredness of reality starts to open it self up. So like, we don't do enough about the connecting the wisdom and the meaning and the sacredness together in an appropriate way, I would argue in our culture right now, yeah, I.
Love that you bring the word sacredness. Some psychologists be like, well, how do you operationalize that construct?
Right?
But I think that there is a certain sacredness to each individual's self actualization journey that we don't really appreciate. You know, we view people through the lens of ideology and through the lens of all these things. These days, we don't treat the whole human as in their own unique journey is sacred. So I love it.
Well, I'm glad. I mean, I think there is a way and to think about it, And I mean Plato made disargument. It's not my argument, his argument, but the things that afford that connectedness are a reduction of internal conflict because that undermines your agency, and that makes you prone to self deception. That because one part will mislead the other. So peace of mind and we can bring back a deep meaning of that. But we don't want that peace of mind to come because we are disconnected
from reality and sometimes of spiritual bypassing. The other thing we want is we want a connectedness to reality. And Plato propose that those are two meta drives for us, because those are essential to mattering. Now I'm making an argument on his bath all right. In addition to whatever we desire, we want that desire to be realized within us. In peace of mind. And we want whatever satisfies that
desire to be really real. And those two metads I think point to when we find things that satisfy us, they strike us as sacred for that reason, because they afford the meaning. Plato's insight is these two things can be put into a relationship where they reciprocally afford each other. As I see more deeply into reality, I get better at see more deeply within, which allows me to cultivate the inner piece more powerfully, which then allows me to see more deeply into reality. And the two spin on
each other. And I think that's a way in which we can operationalize it. And here's why I think we can operationalize it. We have operationalized the reverse. Mark Lewis's model of addiction is reciprocal narrowing, the exact opposite. We understand what this means as a model of addiction, Well, then we could we thereby understand the opposite, which is reciprocal opening. And I think the things that afford reliable and deep reciprocal opening are the things we regard as sacred.
Love that yeah, kind of creating upward spirals.
Yeah, the possibility right, that that spiral isn't just psychological. What I mean by that is and I don't, I don't, I'm really I mean, I did quite a bit of Maslow. But there was a long, long time ago in a galaxy far far away, and I'm enjoying your book because it's bringing that back. And one of my ta's former tas, he's now an RA and a collaborator, he give me. He gave me a copy of Maslow's journal, So I'm going to actually tick that up because your book is
inspiring me. So I would have said this of Maslow in the past or Young. I'm not so sure now, So just take it then as as a point of departure, not as a final claim, but one a criticism that had been leveled of Bens Young and Maslow, as they completely psychologize the notion of transcendence. This is kind of a Hydegarean critique. It doesn't carry within it any existential
or ontological significance. But the model I was just proposing to you says that not only are you rising up levels of the self, you're closing deeper and higher levels of reality as you do, so that there are truths about the world that are being disclosed. Not only is there psychological improvement in connectedness, what you're able to connect to has now been more deeply disclosed to you as well, And so it has an ontological and even an a
pistemological significance to it. It's not just a kind of psychological improvement, it's epistemological and existential improvement as well. And I think those are all the kinds of improvements that are available to us. So I think this model that I'm proposing to you, that's ultimately a platonic model, offers a richer notion of transcendence at least or the psychologized versions that have come into the common understandings of Young and Maslo. You know, Young had the psychoid and maybe
he was reaching out to something there. But I'm getting a sense that Maslow has something too about there's an ontology in there. This is not just a psychological state, but it's a state that has epistemic gain in it.
And absolutely, yeah, yeah, well he would say that in the throes of a peak experience, you see reality more clearly than ever before. So I do think he makes those claims.
That's good, what's needed. I would then argue and so I'm not making an anachronistic criticism of him. What's needed is that doesn't make any sense in an ontology that's a flat world, ontology that has no levels, that everything is reduced to a fundamental single level. If the levels aren't real, then that notion of seeing more really doesn't make any sense. So you also have to re and this is a project I'm engaged in. You have to re argue for an ontology that is not a flat
ontology such that claims like that makes sense. They're not in antagonism with your worldview.
Yeah, that can be a very anxious state.
I believe me. I've been at it. I was like, Wow, I'm seeing all of this and then how does this go with the reductive materialism? And the answer is it doesn't because reductive materialism needs you to be able to say that there are levels of reality in some real way. Sorry, directive to materialism prevents you from saying there are levels of reality in a real way. Transcendence need you to be able to say that, and to say it with
real teeth. No reality is layered. There is ultimate reality, and it's other than just the bottom level pointed to by physics.
Yeah, this is why this might be relevant. It might not be relevant, But I really have argued that we need to think of transcendence not as vertical but as horizontal. That there's too many theories of transcendence that are vertical. For instance, Ken Wilber's theory is all about levels, and he makes clear delineations, you know, and then you have the green level, which is the highest level. Yes, I recently had him on my podcast and I just challenged him on that a little bit because I just I
don't like that way of thinking about reality. Do you agree?
What depends what you mean? I mean, okay, there right. I think if you're talking about when I talk about this, I talk about horizontal and vertical, and both of them are problematic because they both rely on a two world's mythology that largely isn't going to work for us anymore. I would argue, like, there's a lower world in an upper world, and transcend even means the going up and over right and all that stuff. And so I agree
with you about that critique. What are we trying to say about levels is we're trying to say something like there is there are emergent holes that have capacities and properties that are not captured by the underlying constituents. So it's an argument for real emergence. And if you have emergence without top down emanation, you have just epiphenomenalism, the upper level emergence, but it doesn't do anything. And then
and that doesn't that's not a real ontology. So you need if you want to turn the emergence emanation horizontally, and we're going deeper into the world and those depths that are more and more right calling to us and transforming us. I don't have any problem with that. In fact, I'm happy with that. I tend to separate them for
this purely pragmatic reason. I try to keep the horizontal for talking about what's happening when we're interacting with other people in dialogue and we're opening up to each other, and then the vertical for how the you and I together are opening up to something that transcends us both. That's my pragmatic reason for doing that.
Cool. That's cool. I like that You're like yes and not either or so I like that.
Yeah, yeah, well I don't want I mean it's kind you're making a really I mean, you're not turning it into a criticism or anything. But it could be, and so I appreciate the graciousness. Yes, talking about this language without falling into two worlds. Talking is something I keep proposing. We have to figure out how to do properly, and we're trying to do it right now, and that's where my spirit lies. My spirit doesn't lie in trying to get a hierarchical thing going again, that's not my interest.
My interest is can we pull out these different ways. There's something at least phenomenologically about how you and I can transcend together when we get caught up in a conversation. Right, but that conversation could take on a life of its own and transcend both of us and call both of us. And I want to get those two dimensions at least schematically represented, so we can talk about how we bring them into proper resonance with each other.
Well, this is great, let's just both share. Let's share each other's definitions of transcendence. I'll start. I want to hear what you think of my crazy complutive definition. Please that I put in transcend By the way, you know this is a spoilerver you know, I know you probably haven't finished the book yet, but this is right at the end of it, trying to integrate everything else in
the books. So here we go. I say healthy transcendence, and I distinguish healthy transcendence from spiritual narcissism, which I see as very vertical. Yes, I'm transcendent and you're not. That's what I mean by vertical. That's what I mean. So healthy transcendence is an emergent phenomenon resulting from the harmonious integration of one's whole self in the service of cultivating the good society.
Yes, I like that. I like that. So here's how I might tweak it with you. I'm not just going to propose we're so I'm going to say that transcendence is that emergent wholeness, but it also is an emanation back down. To paraphrase Nietzsche, the height of my spirituality has to reach into the depths of my sexuality or it's not real transcendence. So it's not just the emergence up,
it's the emanation down. And it affords wise mattering to myself, to other people, and to reality realized as inexhaustible to me.
Hm, that's really clever. I'm actually low key obsessed with your notions about wisdom, because I mean, I've watched your lectures on YouTube, and I love your distinction between foolishness and ignorance really important, and you associate foolishness with a lack of wisdom and ignorance with a lack of knowledge. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Yes, that's correct.
So I think like wisdom and transcendence are so close. Yes, I think these things are so close. And Maslow saw wisdom a lot in the dichotomy transcendence, in the ability to transcend all these You know, society is stuck at all these different levels of dichotomies, good versus evil, selfish versus unselfish, male versus female, Yes, et cetera, et cetera.
You can go down the line so many things. Pleasure versus and wisdom, according to Maslow, really incorporated this ability to think in dialectics and kind of transcend and kind of refuse to think in terms of these binaries along these lines. What are your thoughts on this.
I think that's deeply right.
Yeah, Gos.
As long as we don't just mean Hegelian, we should not exclude, but we shouldn't just mean Hegelian sense of dialect, but also the Platonic sense of dialect. Yeah, And for Plato, the ultimate wisdom comes in the ultimate overcoming, sorry, the overcoming of sort of the ultimate dichotomy. And Drew Hyland brings this out beautifully, but D. C. Schindler does as well, some of the best work on Plato and part of
what's called the third way of Platonic scholarship. That is, I'm deeply invested in I think it's deeply on the right track. But what's that? And this is the economy between finitude and transcendence. Plato makes the argument that the deepest thing we face, and the deepest proclivity we have towards foolishness is if we lose the polarity and fall into one of the polls. If we think we are merely finite, then we fall into despairing servitude and our
prey to the tyrant. If we fall into merely transcend it it, then we suffer hubris and inflation, and we become the tyrant, and so we have to overcome. The wisest thing is can we get to a place where we really accept our fun we really realize. In Maslow's sense of the word right, like actualized, but become aware of it. Right, our mortality, right, our mortality capture in the Hydigerian sense, we are the beings whose being is in question, and we are the beings who know that
we are finite. In that sense, we are capable of profound transcendence, but it is precisely that we realize that we are finite beings who will never be God's. There you go, right, and you can see so much of foolishness as moving between right, you know, the self deception
of despair and the self deception of hubris narcissism. Yes, exactly, yes, And so I think I think Plato's notion of wash them as that capacity for and you remember, right, in all of Plato's myths in the positive sense, where the person doesn't just go up and see the sun, the person also returns into the cave. Right, it's always up
and down. Right, So we have to cultivate a capacity for both self transcendence but also self grounding, so that we are constantly at that sort of meta virtue where we are godlike but never gods, lovers of wisdom, but we never claim to be wise.
Yeah, I love that it's so spot on, and I wonder if we're going to disagree on anything today, but so spot on. You know, part of my research, I think this really it's part of my background. I was trained by Robert Sternberg.
I didn't know that. That's mazing.
I did my pH d at Yale. In fact, my Colin de Young was the post doc at the same time that I was there. That's our connection. That's our connection.
Wow, lots of connections. Wow.
Yeah, Jeremy Gray and Robert Sternberg were my advisors. I studied intelligence, the neuroscience of intelligence. It just relates to a lot of what you're saying. I mean, some of the most wise people I've met in my life were uneducated. Yes, to somehow assume that just because you ace the vocabulary section of an IQ test means you're going to be wise seems a very faulty assumption.
Yeah, And that's where the work of Stanovich and others and yes, and the work that I've done with in a redial about all the rationality debates, like, but you know, even Stanovich's work that our best measures of general intelligence are only weakly correlated with our best measures of rationality and even those measures of rationality I think are far too pruncated. It's just largely propositional logical rationality and not all kinds of other important rational like intentional rationality and
other things like that. But even so, think about that, right, so think about that, Scott like these two measures measures of G and sort of we could call it measures of R. They are correlated, but at a round point three. Now point three matters especially in social science.
Three Sorry, what's R? What's R is?
Oh? Oh? Sorry, you know how in G you have a positive manifold between different tests and intelligence? So are the work that Stanovich shows?
Oh the rationality quotion is that?
Yeah? Yeah, oh gotcha?
Gotcha?
Yeah, yeah yeah. There's a strong positive manifold between how you do on all these rationality tests. So we really got pretty clear measures. There's problems with both, but nevertheless it's a good like, it's a good basis to claim, well, what's the relation? And correlation is about point three? Now that's important. That's you can publish with that correlation and the social sciences it's above point two five, but it's only point three, which means most of the variants is
not accounted for. It by your intelligence. So there's nothing and this is what Stanovich has alreadyet consistently, there's nothing paradoxical or contradictory or weird or saying that person is very intelligent and very foolish. There's nothing, there's no contradiction.
Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up Stanovitch's work. He was one of the biggest influences on my dissertation work Robots rebellion like influenced my whole dissertation, and I proposed a dual process theory of intelligence that took an account both system one end system two. So that was my dissertation.
So huge, huge props to case Stenavich and for acknowledging there are lots of forms of rationality like the my side bias, and we see all over the place these days, and I'm sure there are a lot of people with high IQs who are still showing them side bias and politics, right.
Oh, in all kinds of things. I mean, I think the argument that many of the other biases collapsed into the my side bias. Yeah, attribution errors, confirmation bias, it's pretty plausible that those are variations on the my side bias. So yeah, and that's exactly the case. And notice how that's not overcome by how technically good one is at the inferential management of one's propositions, because it's a perspective
on the ability. It's the ability to over calm a kind of ecocentrism, take other people's perspectives really into account, realized in an efficacious manner. And see how that connects up with the meaning and life stuff, right, Because that ability to relate first to third person perspectives right, right, is so central. You've seen some of the research is that people go higher up some of our social hierarchies, like corporation, they get less and less able to pick
up on the perspective of other people around them. Right, And think about again how that overlaps with the discussion we were having about narcissism, like it's it's all this stuff is like, well, I get over excited and preps to I see, I see A lot of stuff is converging together in a coherent manner. So that talking about a cognitive science of spirituality, where we mean something like the whole person capable of being caught up in transcending finitude. Right,
it's no longer wishy wishy woo woo. This is this is this is stuff that we can bring really good cognitive science to bear on. And I think that's very exciting and very important right now given some of the really significant challenges that are on the very near horizon to our sense of who and what we are spot on.
And I really resonate with your work as well, because I see what you're trying to do in combining Buddhism with psychology, and this is what Maso tried to do to then life. This is what I try to do and transcend as well. You'll see if when you get to get through it is an integration of Western and Eastern notions of self actualization don't have to be at odds with each other at all, and we can integrate them.
Yeah, that goes towards the So I'm the next big series I'm working on Cool. So I did awakening to the Meni Crisis and then after Socrates. In the after Socrates, I tried to reawaken us to the whole Socratic Neoplatonic tradition and not just theoretically, but how could you put it into practice individually and collectively? How could you aspire to it? As a fundamental philosophy as a way of life.
The third series is going to be this is not the title, this is the working title, something like Zen Neoplatonism. How can we take Neo Playanism which was sort of the the courtyard of philosophical spiritual discourse, and you know, it even served as a courtyard between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, possibly Vedanta and It's and then later on it enters into deep discourse with Zen through the Kyoto school. Can
we do something with that? And I actually want to journey along west to east as much as I can of the Silk Road and try and try and do something like that, but not just do it as a talk, but actually try to undergo sort of the you know, the philosophical geography, and actually undergo what it would be like as a person caught up aspirationally on this journey to try and weave these two great synthetic visions Neil Playtonism together.
Wow, I can't wait to watch the series.
I can't wait to do it. But there's a lot of preparation that's going into it. But yeah, that's the next big one.
You know, I've been I've been really getting interested more and more recent. Yes, And I see such great connections between Daoism and Masow's notions of self actualization, particularly towards the later years of his life when he was facing
his mortality. And so there is something, you know, he he did show a huge shift when he realized he could have died of a heart you know, he got hit a heart attack, and he realized he was living a life on borrowed time, and he shifted from talking about peak experiences to and he co opted in East Indian term the plateau experience.
Yeah.
Yeah, So it seems like self transcendence where it's at, is really at the Plateau's not the peaks, you know, not the manic stages, not the mania, but the every seeing the sacred in the every day is what he said is really the peak of self transcendence. And he only said that the last couple of years of his life.
I think that's beautiful. I mean, I've been doing Daoist practices for thirty years of jed jong. Each one. I do them religiously, and of course, and then that allows you to read some of the literature I think a little bit more deeply. If you're doing these practices like reading the tata Chin before and after I had been doing Taichi was very different for me, and so I
understand to some degree what you're talking about. And this is why I'm interested in Zen, because you get Zen by basically integrating Daoism and Mahayana Buddhism together and then taking it to Japan and letting it touch sort of Shinto aesthetics, and that's how you get Zen. I think we have tended to lose the Taoist aspects of Zen as it's been brought to the West. There are some good books out there that of Zen and things like that that try to remind people that Zen is has
both Daoist and Buddhist roots. That's something I'd like to bring out in the series. I always consider myself sort of on the precipice of Zen because I've been I've been practicing Buddhist practices for a very long time, but passna Meta, contemplating the Three Marks and Dallas practices for a very long time, and then using something like a neoplatonic framework to see how they talk to each other,
and then how they can talk to Neoplatonism. So I want to exemplify to not just talk about it, and I want to go through it, but I don't want it to be about me, right, you know? And so it's how do we how do we properly do that? Like we gotta, we gotta, We got to rely on a lot of the medium. I take heart from some other documentaries I've seen, like John Rohmer's book on the
Bible of the Testament as templates. But that's one thing I'm really trying to wrestle with, how do you how do you how do you do this with the way it needs to be done well without giving into hubris? Right, So that that's a challenge that I am facing right now. But I do I do. I do think that like if we properly understand the dynamic within the dynamics within Zen, it's it's Taoist and Buddhists, and with the neo Platonism, it's Stois Stoicism, Orstilian and Platonism, and in this dynamic
emergence that they're sort of inherently self transcending things. And then these two things can be put into proper opponent not oppositional, but opponent processing with each other. What kind of spirituality could that be for us? Right now.
Well, I think that you answer that in some of your lectures. You know, you're not giving yourself enough credit. You have noticed, you've said, it's no coincidence that a whole bunch of things are happening right now in our society together the convergence. There's an and you provide a unifying account, or at least they're trying to find, provide a unifying account of why all these things are happening.
To me, that highest level transcendence is all about unity, is being able to see all sorts of different things as all parts of a of a larger whole. You're you're, you're, You're like a modern day guru, even though you've you're you've you have way too much humility to say that to me. But but in the sense that you're able to show people what the bigger hole is. To me, I think that's what the integration of all this stuff looks like, is being able to see that and teach it to others.
Well, thank you. I don't know quite how to take that guy, especially coming from you. I value what you have to say about this something, So yeah, I mean I want to avoid I really aspire to avoid all the dangerous traps associated with gurification.
Absolutely me too, Yeah, absolutely.
But getting people to catch the beauty of the whole such that they are willing to leap towards it aspirationally, that platonic project is something that I've committed myself and my life to, and I now think it's becoming more and more important. I think we are on the advent of a change in which the thing that is going to be the most distinctive about us is going to be our spirituality, and a lot of the things that
we wanted over the world are going to be undermined. I'm, of course, referring to the emergence of real AGI, which is now very much closer than even I thought it was. Meaning even I because I've been I didn't mean like I have special authority. I mean I've been generally somebody who is very skeptical of AI claims because they have been so frequently fraudulent, or so frequently fraudulent is the wrong word, so frequently heubistic in misplaced, that's a better word.
I apologize for the olier word. But now there's something real on the horizon, and it's not AGI, but and
there's deep reasons for that. I won't get into that right now, but it's getting close enough now that those things about us that connect us to the ineffable, the non propositional, that connect us to an enlightening realization of truth, good and beauty, those are the things that are going to remain It's both hard for the AGI to get and if it gets it, it will only get it by becoming like us, and maybe that's part of our responsibility. And if it doesn't, then that is what is going
to remain valuable. So the two things we have to do is can we bring ourselves to the place where we can properly give birth to an AI that is open to the humility of the spirit, Or if it can't do that, then we make a home for ourselves in that about us which will not be captured, which is our spirituality, our connection to the non propositional and
the ineffable. I think this is what is being made clear to us because both those are the only two options, and both of them require a preponderance of a prioritization, a foregrounding of our spirituality as that thing that matters and that used to sound hokey and California and granola and people who just don't get economics and just don't get the real world, well, wake up, because the real world has made that now the case. At least that's an argument I'm now starting to advance.
I'm right there with you. I think that the more that AI advanced artificial general intelligence advances, the more it actually will be an exercised in showing how the separation between IQ type intelligence and wisdom. I mean, it'll become clearer and clearer and clearer and clearer that it already is. Yeah.
Yeah, And I foretold this. I gave a talk in these Center for Ethics and AI, and I said, because of standard riches work, we have very good reason to believe that we can make something very intelligent and very foolish these you know, the big problem with this machine is how much it can fabulates, how much it hallucinates. And as we're improving it, it's just getting better at misrepresenting things and persuading us of stuff that's not true.
And you know, and people are acknowledging this. And it may have to do with the fact that we have to put in a randomness through the temperature function and all. And I won't get into the details. But like, yeah, it's like we made something that's plausibly at least a pantomime of our intelligence. And guess what it also carries along with it the inevitability of self deception. And the thing that's troubling, of course, is it because it doesn't
really have relevance realization yet. Well, I won't get into again that point. It doesn't care about the fact that it's deceptive or confabulating or even deceiving itself. Right, And that's foolishness. That's a definition of foolishness.
Right, Well, it almost doesn't care about anything.
Well, it can't care about anything because it doesn't have a body. It's intelligence isn't emergent from. Like, it can't care about anything because it is not taking care about itself. Because it doesn't care about itself, it can't care for anything. We have needs because we are self making things. We are literally embodied. We literally have to import things into us. Things are literally important to us. They literally matter to us. Listen to the language. That is not the case for this.
Machine, and it probably never will unless we have the fusion, the great fusion, but the cyborgs. But you know, roll, this is why I love the existential humanist to psychologists and why I'm trying to bring them back. I call myself a cognitive humanistic psychologist these days. That's amazing, thank you. That's what I'm trying to like integrate these things because I love the work of role Roll May. I don't know if you read any role a.
Mazed I've read a long time ago.
Like Love and Will, for instance, is just such a beautiful reflection on just how much care is essentral to what it means to be human. Yes, and I mean that's that's it. That's how it would summarize the whole book, you know, And and care takes work, you know. That's that's where the will and the love come. Is that he you know, this kind of He doesn't have this overly romantic view that you have love and then forevermore you'll have love. He says, love emerges from work, working at it.
I agree. I I think we've misrepresented love as a feeling. It's not and we've represented it as an emotion. It's not right. My love can make me loving someone can make me angry, sad, jealous, happy. Love is is an existential mode. It's a way it's a way of being reciprocally, reciprocally connected and identified with somebody, and that's that's a
much more challenging thing. I want to point out that the thing I was talking about earlier that goes right into how you're paying attention right, relevant realization isn't cold calculation. It's caring. It's a caring about this is Iris Murdoch. Attention is the most moral of acts because it's caring about this and not that. Right, and that right in the very moments of the guts of the of the emergence of cognitive realization, right is care. This is a
Heidi Garrian point of course. And so I think that appreciating care in the right way I like the best maybe, And this is Plato too, right, you know, knowing how to love wisely is I think, like the thing for a good human life, right. I think sin is loving foolishly, right, loving foolishly as opposed to loving wisely. And so I think that we face a challenge. I am bringing this around to just give me a million We face a challenge that I think we have to become in the
way we've talked about it here. And I really appreciate what we've worked to on together here. Right, we have to cultivate our spirituality in a profound way in a culture that has washed us in bullshit and has denuded our realization of the centrality of the care that is bound up even in how we are paying attention to amen.
Imen Maslow called it be love, love for the being of others.
Yes, yes, yes, that's a good I mean, and that is the great insight of you know, the Mahayana, Buddhist and Christianity, agape and karuna. The love that's not the love of being one with something like in the consummation sense, or the love of reciprocity and friendship. These are all important too, but the love that is the love that is the creation the agape right that the creating of the real that the affording of something else coming into being.
And the prototype example used in both the Buddha and christ right is you know the love that a good parent has for a child. Right.
Do you hope the next Buddha is the sankha.
I believe Tip not Haunt, is right about that, and I think we were. And again Agi is giving us strange evidence for this, as Agi is undermining the Enlightenment project. It is also revealing because if you think about something like the GPT machines, what they're basically doing is they're taking the collective intelligence of distributed cognition and then basically internalizing it into a single nexus point. It's like sort of fully automated epistemic tradition come to life. Right, it's us,
you know, in a really profound and deep way. And that goes along with a lot of the research that For example, we're talking about rationality. In those rationality tests, take a standard test like the waste and selection task. I won't go into the details, it's not necessary, you know it, right, But the the failure rate amongst highly intelligent educated people, because most of the participants in the experiments are psych students first and second year university, right,
all right, the failure rate is like ninety percent. Only ten percent of people get it right. But if you replace that, instead of having an individual do the waste selection task, you'll have four people and they talk with each other. The success rate goes from ten percent to eighty percent. And this is just one example of many examples of how distributed cognition I mean, it's a plausible case.
I have a lot of criticism of the Enigma of Reason book by Merciernesberber, but the evidence they mount for like, we evolved, and I mentioned this earlier with the difference between us and the chips, we evolved to plug into the power of distributed cognition. Way before we are coming to confront the power of distributed computation. We learned how to plug into the power of distributed cognition, and we rightfully often treated that the collective intelligence of distributed cognition
is something sacred. I do think we should resacralze that, and that is properly what Tichnahn is calling us to the next Buddha is the saying, yes.
That's awesome. On December fourteenth, at eight twenty five am, for some reason, you decide to sit down and write the following sentence. I think the through line of my work is the exaptive transmutation of rall relevance realization into renaissance realization, which is then itself exacted transmutated into reverence realization. Yes, can we unpack this for our general audience? Yeah, And we first needed to find an acaptation and what reverence realization is.
Let's finding Yeah, yeah, let's let's see.
Yeah, it's too important, it's too important to stake there.
I made a mistake there. That was an active foolishness. I was failing to pay attention to that. I was involving myself with the Twitter medium. I just had this great well to my mind, so let's not be overly.
I love it.
I had this what I thought was important insight and then I thought, oh, I should share with people, and and then I made the incorrect deduction. And the way you share things with people is on Twitter. But of course Twitter is not the medium in which you share stuff like that.
And I appreciated it.
Okay, well, thank you for that. Many people were unkind, and you know, deservedly. So that was that was in many ways a huboristic and cryptic thing to do. But
let me try and pack. I've tried to indicate, and I've got a lot of publication in literature, but today that sense of relevance realization right, zeroing in on what's relevant, and that's this fundamental connectedness to what stands out, what can be important to you, right, whether it's at the center of your attention, what's arousing your affect, et cetera, all of that, and I tried to indicate it's not cold calculation, it's fundamentally what you're caring about. Read Monkeing,
you said it great. The difference between us and computers is we care about information and right, right, So that's the relevance realization, and it's the deep depth of our intelligence and our caring and we should put them back together. The Enlightenment separated them and we have to deeply see them back together. So that's relevance realization. Resonance is when your irrelevance realization and mine get into that reciprocal opening.
What you're zeroing in on relevant is insightful to you because of how I'm challenging you, and then you reciprocate by taking that insight and challenging my relevance realization. So it opens up and we start to get into resonance realization and it's found way and then right that brings us into a sense of being called into ratio religio well proportioned connectedness to that which transcends us both together in reverence.
Yeah, I think of the all experience when I hear reverence.
Realization, Well, but here's the interesting thing, and I'm going to meet in July, and here's the thing. So we're running an experiment at UFT and we've already presented some of the findings at a conference, so I'm not jumping the gun too much. And we're thinking with Jennifer Steller, who's done some really cool work at UFT at sorry about AWE, Michelle Ferrari who's done a lot of the work and I've been worked together on wisdom, and then Jensen Kim that's the TA who what former TA ra
A and collaborator a workway fat. He presented our material at the conference in the Netherlands. So you induce AWE in people by standard techniquess, overview effect, things like that, and that I thought, well, if Keuntner's right and AWE is just sort of accommodation, you should see measures of enhance cognitive flexibility, because accommodation means you're breaking out of
an old frame and you're starting to make a new frame. Right, You're starting to adapt and reframe reality or it maybe even transframe your apprehension of reality in a powerful way. So I said, what we should do is we'll induce AWE and this hadn't been done, and we'll put in these measures that are measures of sort of cognitive flexibility precursors of insight. And the idea was we should see a difference between people who are put into the art
experience and people who aren't. And we didn't find it, and we had and we looked again and again we're still looking and so we're really trying, so we're not pe hacking or HARKing or anything like that. Like there's where we're we there's already a preponderance of this claim that AWE is accommodation, and we're trying to make sure that we've given it its full due. And I think we're so. I think we're being epistemically honest and doing
good work. And what seems to be coming out and it's coming out into the discussion around this, is that AWE is the frame breaking part of this process, but not the frame making part of it. And you did this in part of your book. You talk about people who have peak experience that that doesn't necessarily mean they integrate it into their life, right, and that transform it.
That's reverence, the integrating right, creating the new frame awe breaks your frame, but you can just choose to ignore it, or you can just choose to be traumatized or horrified or terrified because you don't like the frame that has been broken. There's all kinds of options available to you. Reverence is no, no, no. I have to understand that is more real, and I have to tap into my meta desire to be connected to what's more real, and
that's a virtue. I think Woodruff is right. I think reverence is a virtue that has to be properly cultivated, and reverence is the appropriate virtue for all.
Oh wow, wait, say that sentence one more time.
I think reverence is the appropriate virtue for AWE experiences.
That makes sense. Yeah, that, I like that. What's the point of an acid trip if you don't have some sort of insight.
And it's going to be it's going to be like a systematic and systemic insight. It has to be an insight not just into what you're having in your experience. It has to be able to transfer broadly and deeply into your life, broadly and deeply in different levels of your psyche and in a resonant fashion, or else you
don't get transformative experience. And I think the work that's been done on transformative experience is higher states of consciousness as something above and beyond psychedelic or even mystical experiences.
I think that's what really matters. I have a suspicion, man, I can't make this argument tight right now that as I was talking about in peak experience, where he's coming to see that, it's it's these higher states of consciousness, these transformative experiences, and not just the experiences.
Well, that's what he really I think, would refer as the plateau experience.
Yes, exactly, yeah, shed Oh wow, that's wait. I just want to savor that. That's really good, right because if it becomes a transformative experience and does that permutation and percolation broadly and deeply, that would be a plateau. Oh that's good. That's really good. That's really good. I like that. Thank you for that.
I can fill Nasle here with us right now. I feel like he would get it very excited too. I feel like he would get very excited too. You know, when you talk about convergence, all these converging you are spot on. There are a lot of dark factors that are converging as well, like we're going through a mental health crisis. But also you have rightly pointed out there's an abandonment of trust in our society. We're not trusting
our institutions, we're not trusting each other. Yeah, you see, spirituality is the way out of this.
If we don't understand spirituality as an individualistic, narcissistic project of gathering wonderful experiences we put on the ego shelf that we can show to other people.
That seems to be the feature of our society right now.
Yes, because we have to come out everything and make it all about competitive status. You know, From's modal confusion. We're trying to take fundamental being on needs and satisfy them in the having mode, and it is deeply frustrating, which is why we keep getting more and more fanatical about it and more and more destructive about it. As From predicted we would when we got caught up in motal confusion.
He predicted a lot of things that are relevant right now.
I try to find people that are prescient in things that I can now see how they're prescient, and then look for things where what they are pressing about has not yet occurred, and pay deep attention to it and in that way, and in only that way, please everybody. I try to be prophetic in the sense of trying to speak what is pertinent and is percolating up, and so that I think is I mean, I think From as a profit in that way in the Biblical prophecies,
not for telling the future. It's telling forth what needs to be seen and is not being seen. And I think of people like From and Tillic and Young that is what I call profits of the meeting crisis.
Oh yeah, Tillic was such a big influence in all the humanistic psychologists.
As he should be. I you know, I like Tillick better than Heidegger. I'm, for you, cognizile deeply influenced by Heideger and you know, by Marlo Punky. But I like Tillick better than Heidegger in a lot of ways. I think he got Tillic, sorry, Tilli got, but I think he also got depth psychology. He refers to it repeatedly. He gets right also the other existentialist thinkers, and he synthesizes them in a powerful way. Around the meaning crisis. He's one of the profits of it, in a very powerful way.
He really is. He really is. I mean, the courage to be is really powerful and relevant today where I feel like people are so disconnected from themselves. Yes, it's almost paradoxical. They're stating so clearly who they think they are, but they are actually, in react, really disconnected to who they really are.
You know, it's a performative contradiction.
Yeah, exactly, performative. That's right.
Yeah, it's a perform Yeah, it's McGee Barbera said, it's a performative contradiction. If anybody says to you, I'm wise, because that's probably good evidence that they don't have the humility that is actually essential to wisdom.
I'm writing that down. I like that phrase poor performative, performative contradiction.
I contradictions matter as much as propositional contradictions, if not more. And I think anybody who easily states this is who I am is engaging in a performative contradiction. And this is a This is a Socratic point. I think the true self is not romantic, and it's not socially constructed. I think it is aspirationally cultivated. And this is a
Socratic proposal. And I think there's something also analogous in you know in Godanta, in Taoism and Buddhism that getting at the true self, which can be no self and whatever right is like a profound task. And so the fact that we are I don't want to. I don't want to. I'm not denying that there are real issues around social justice, and I try, I do try to stand for those, but I think that we are also there's a negative side effect of how we're framing it.
I think we're framing it largely in the having mode, and the virtues and justice have to be grasped in the being mode. And that's a problem we're in right now.
Oh boy, oh boy, do I agree with this. I would love to see a shift from deficiency social justice to growth social justice.
Well exactly exactly within.
The mass of framework. Yeah, well, I thought what you said, all said, but yeah, yeah, no, I'm right there with you, and I'm trying to try to put it within a humanistic psychology perspective as opposed to a deficiency lens on only viewing others as their purposes to validate you or to Again, the mattering things is, it's so central to our to all these these I think, to the mental health crisis, I think that's what it is.
I've argued that, I've argued there's an overlap between the meeting crisis and the mental health health crisis, and Chris Chris master Pietro and I have argued that, yes.
I love it well. I think we covered a lot of good territory today. Who can leave it here? Is it to be continued? I love the work you're doing, and I hope you know that you have a great supporter in me and thank you.
Well. The reverse is also the case, and I and I hope to give content to that. Like I say, when I talk about your excellent book.
Thank you, thank you.
And now that we've used this word in a way we can I think both properly understand and appreciate. I think in addition to the content of your book, not excluding the content, but in addition to the content of book, the spirit of your book is very beautiful, and I think people should pay as much attention to that as I do to as they should to the rich content therein So.
Well, thank you that made my life right. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thus psychology podcast dot com or on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want
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