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John Vervaeke on the Transformative Power of Stoicism (Episode 6)
2.1k Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
***Bonus episode***
In this conversation, Caleb and John Vervaeke talk about the nature of transformative experience and how Stoicism can deeply transform who you are. The discussion is deep and will repay multiple listens.
John Vervaeke is an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. His work constructs a bridge between science and spirituality in order to understand the experience of meaningfulness and the cultivation of wisdom so as to afford awakening from the meaning crisis.
Check out John Vervaeke's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpqDUjTsof-kTNpnyWper_Q
(1:06) The Meaning Crisis
(11:59) The View From Above
(22:34) Participatory Knowledge
(24:39) Transformative Experience
(33:25) The View From Nowhere
(42:46) Contemplative Practice
(44:26) The Meaning Crisis
***
Stoa Conversations is Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay’s podcast on Stoic theory and practice.
Caleb and Michael work together on the Stoa app. Stoa is designed to help you build resilience and focus on what matters. It combines the practical philosophy of Stoicism with modern techniques and meditation.
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com
Caleb Ontiveros has a background in academic philosophy (MA) and startups. His favorite Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/calebmontiveros
Michael Tremblay also has a background in academic philosophy (PhD) where he focused on Epictetus. He is also a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His favorite Stoic is Epictetus. Follow him here: https://twitter.com/_MikeTremblay
Thank you to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to John Verveke and His Work
00:00:00
Speaker
Today is a special episode. We're releasing a classic conversation between myself and the eminent psychologist and philosopher John Verveke. Previously, this conversation was only available on the Stoa app.
00:00:16
Speaker
But we are going to release it and a number of other classic episodes over the next few months, so you'll be receiving a few bonus conversations now and again. Without any further words of introduction, here is my conversation with John for Vaking
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome to STOA. Today, I will be speaking with John Ravecki. John Ravecki is an assistant professor in cognitive psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. His research is designed to bring a bridge between science and spirituality, and he's especially interested in the meaning crisis.
Cognition and Self-Deception
00:00:55
Speaker
I came across his work via a talk he gave at STOIC on the STOIC view from above. Thanks so much for joining.
00:01:04
Speaker
No, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Great. Maybe we can start by asking about what you are fundamentally interested in. It seems like you are especially interested in tackling this problem of meeting. Yes. Not like you could say a bit about that. The idea, the essential idea that this sort of begins with is the idea that our cognition is a self-organizing adaptive process.
00:01:34
Speaker
And that it's very, in that sense, it's very dynamical in nature. And key idea that comes with that is the very processes that make us intelligently adaptive also make us prone to self-deceptive self-destructive behavior.
00:01:50
Speaker
And so that means that this is not a surprise, but now it can be crowded. The proclivity towards self-destructive behavior is a universal. And in that sense, human beings through all times and places have come up with practices for trying to address
00:02:14
Speaker
that capacity for self-deception. And because what I was talking about, our adaptivity is this dynamical system, it's not so much about having no belief states, it's about the way in which you're dynamically coupled to the environment, the way that you are, the way brain and body are coupled together, the way brain and environment, the way that embodied brain is coupled to the environment. So when I say
00:02:36
Speaker
that your self-deception, those coupling processes, the way you're connected to your body, the way you're connected to the world, the way you're connected to other people comes under threat, right? So you start to lose touch, you start to think about how we use, we lose touch with reality and we're not as close to people as we should be, we lose all this connection, right?
00:02:57
Speaker
So what happens is what cultures have developed is they've developed sets of practices for addressing this perennial threat to self-deception. And you have to do a lot of different kinds of practices. You have to put together what I sometimes call an ecology of practices that have certain checks and balances and direct, because your cognition actually works in multiple ways. And so you need multiple kinds of interventions, multiple strategies coordinated in sort of a dynamical evolving fashion because your cognition is dynamical.
00:03:26
Speaker
Now that being said, if you'll allow me this word, those ecologies of practices and the way they can alleviate our proclivities for self-deception, I want to call that that's what wisdom does. That's what it is to cultivate wisdom. So universally cultures have ways of
00:03:48
Speaker
generating and curating and evolving ecologies of practices that allow us to overcome self-deception and enhance that connectivity. I was talking about that sense of connection to oneself, to the world, and to other people.
Meaning Crisis in Modern Society
00:04:03
Speaker
Now the problem for us is
00:04:07
Speaker
What cultures typically have is they have a worldview that makes sense of those practices, fits them in to the ontology, tells people how to model the world and model themselves such that the practices make good sense, legitimate, valorize the process, give a big picture of guidance to the ecology of practice. And of course, the West had this for a very long time, but that framework for a bunch of historical reasons
00:04:38
Speaker
has largely collapsed. So the worldview that we are now largely beholden to, even though people thrash against it in various ways, is a scientific worldview. The thing about the scientific worldview is it has this very interesting property.
00:04:54
Speaker
It gives us explanations of so many things, but it gives us no explanation of how we generate explanations, how we make meaning, how we are connected, how we are properly connected to ourselves, to each other, and to the world. And while this worldview is generating lots of knowledge, it's got precious little to now tell us about how to cultivate
00:05:15
Speaker
wisdom. And so what happens is we have fragmentary advice, we have a therapy here, and we have a practice there, and people clobble together what they can in an autodidactic fashion, which is extremely dangerous because autodidactism really increases the tendency towards self-deception. And so we have this autodidactic fragmentary, often
00:05:40
Speaker
deeply misleading attempt to cultivate wisdom, however they can, often in, like I say, a very isolated and truncated fashion. And so that's the meeting crisis. We don't have a worldview
00:05:57
Speaker
that supports and legitimates and makes intelligible and inspirational an ecology of practices that situates us within our scientific worldview so that our quest for wisdom and meaning makes sense within that worldview and is actually guided to some degree by that worldview.
00:06:21
Speaker
And so that's the meaning crisis. So what it means is people largely have increasing senses of disconnection from themselves, from each other in the world. They lack like a normal logical order. How are we properly connected to reality, to put it in a simple term?
00:06:42
Speaker
And then because of the scientific revolution, right, we no longer see the universe as having a cosmological narrative, so how their own personal narratives don't seem to fit in to the overarching cosmological narrative.
Self-Transcendence and Virtual Worlds
00:06:57
Speaker
And in order to overcome self-deception, you have to engage in processes of self-transcendence. That's why self-transcendence is so crucial to wisdom. And yet we have no normative order that's telling us, well, this is how self-transcendence works. So most people don't know what to do, literally, if they have an anomalous experience or a mystical experience, or what to do when they're sort of questing to self-transcendence.
00:07:21
Speaker
So those three orders are just missing—a normalogical, a narrative, and a normative order. And that's why you see people—I mean, the symptoms of this are pervasive, like there's the loneliness issues, suicide issues, there's mental health issues, but there's also stuff that you might not initially see, but it makes sense, like what's called the virtual exodus, that people are spending more and more time in virtual worlds.
00:07:47
Speaker
And think about why there's a book called Reality is Broken, why people are preferring, like let's take a video game as a prototypical example. What does a video game give you? It gives you a world that makes total sense. You know the rules, you know how to connect, and you can connect so well that you can get into the flow state, which is by the way predictive of how meaningful you find your life.
00:08:08
Speaker
Not only that, there's a narrative, there's a story in that video game and you know what it is and you have a central role in it, and then you know how to level up. You know how to self-transcend in that world. So people go to those worlds precisely because those three orders are so present, unfortunately only in simulated form, because they're finding those orders so lacking in the so-called real world.
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. So let me see if I can try to restate that in my own words and then you can tell me what I may have described poorly. So initially you have this thought of we are human beings with particular, say, ways of deceiving ourselves. Often those ways of deceiving ourselves are advantageous in a particular way. But yeah, we have things like confirmation bias.
00:09:01
Speaker
But eventually these ways of deceiving ourselves, they keep us away from reality and that has its own costs. In particular, we don't have false police, which will bite us in some way. And there's also a sense of potentially like a
00:09:22
Speaker
a loss of meaning, if you understand meaning being this connection with reality, seeing past the illusion. So then you have institutions like religion developing to solve this problem. And then for a variety of different reasons, today we are in a world where science and this sort of scientific institution is becoming a lot more powerful.
00:09:45
Speaker
And that has all kinds of goods, but it doesn't provide as much of a sense of who we are, why we have the purposes we do, what legitimates those purposes. And this is sort of the vacuum that you touched on. There are a variety of different ways in which we might have purpose. That's good. So yeah, it's sort of purpose, depth,
00:10:13
Speaker
intelligibility. It's not all one thing, but there's this dimensionality. And also, there is this ability to guide you in the cultivation of, like I say, well-functioning ecologies of practice for dealing with the myriad and complex and evolving ways in which we deceive ourselves.
00:10:35
Speaker
Precisely because our cognition is constantly evolving how it is making sense of the world. The processes of deception also do that as well.
Stoic Practices and Perspective Shifts
00:10:47
Speaker
What religions used to do is they used to do that.
00:10:54
Speaker
as you said, comprehensively, but they are, religions pretend as if they don't change, but they actually have mechanisms of evolution by which they're constantly reconfiguring, right, their ecology of practices. And so I want to, I just want to make sure that that temporal developmental dimension is also added to the picture that I'm talking about.
00:11:13
Speaker
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00:11:32
Speaker
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00:11:59
Speaker
So I think we'll probably come back to this larger problem, but it'd be useful to jump into one kind of practice, which is the view from above. Sure, that's how I found your work. And in short form, when you do the view from above, which is a practice that Stokes took from the Pythagoreans, I believe, what you're doing is you are changing how you perceive the world along different dimensions.
00:12:27
Speaker
instead of seeing yourself just occupying this room, you imagine I'm actually a much part of a greater whole, a part of a city, a part of a nation, a part of the Earth, a part of the universe. And you step back into a much larger third-person perspective. And then you take that a long time and potentially other ways as well. So this is a main idea of the view from above.
00:12:54
Speaker
What are on your view, what are you doing when you engage in this kind of practice?
00:12:58
Speaker
So let's be really clear for the listeners that, although of course you're using statements to explain it, that's not what you're doing in the view from above, right? You're not sort of just running through those statements. You're actually doing this, you know, you're imagining it. So it's very important that you're engaging, well, let's talk about it now. In addition to your propositional learning, your propositional knowing, your knowledge of facts, your knowledge that something is the case, like cat is a mammal.
00:13:28
Speaker
And, um, right. That's propositional knowing and the way in which you sort of grasp that the way it motivates you or like direction behaviors, perhaps a better way of putting the way direction behavior is the proposition only creates sets of beliefs. And a lot of our behaviors dictated by our beliefs. And that's important. But when you're doing the view from above, you're moving to.
00:13:50
Speaker
Three other kinds of knowing that I talked about the procedural and the perspectival and the participatory. Let's do the procedural first. That's knowing how to do something. That's knowing how to catch a baseball. That's knowing how to swim. Let's talk about why that's important first. You may know that there is a view from above. That's not the same as knowing how to get to the view.
00:14:16
Speaker
What the procedural knowledge gives us is it doesn't give us belief. It gives us skills. We can't get a skill. And so part of what you're doing in the View from Above is you're training a procedural ability to direct your attention. You're learning skills of how to redirect your attention and make use of basically your working memory.
00:14:38
Speaker
Now that's important, but what you're also doing is you're moving into, you literally use the language, you're moving into perspectival knowing. So think about, we use that word a lot, so we should stop and sort of think here a little bit more carefully. Well, what is a person?
00:14:54
Speaker
Well, the problem is we can equivocate. Sometimes we use perspective just to mean a person's sets of beliefs or opinions. And that's not what we're talking about here, because that's purely propositional. We're talking about what you have on me right now. You have, let's say, a visual, attentional, and also an auditory perspective.
00:15:09
Speaker
So what is that doing for you? Well, what that's doing for you is it's doing what I call a salience landscape. Salience is how things stand out. So certain things are being foregrounded and standing out. Other things are being backgrounded. There's patterns of obviousness. Now, it's obvious to you what you can do and how you can interact. And there's also patterns of attraction. So what acceptable knowing does is it gives you kind of you're here now
00:15:38
Speaker
a topography of attraction and obviousness, which is so obvious and attractive to us that it's almost transparent to us. We don't pay attention to the fact of how we're doing this landscaping with our perspective of knowing. But we do pick up on it when we say, for example, try to take somebody else's perspective.
00:16:00
Speaker
And what you do there is, and then notice, you have to know how to redirect your attention and reconfigure, you know, figure and ground, background and background, reconfigure your patterns of obviousness and attractiveness, so you can start to see what it would be like to be me.
00:16:18
Speaker
Right? Is that taking? So that's perspectival knowing. And perspectival knowing, what it's doing is it's like they say, it's creating these patterns of salience and attraction and obviousness, which is, these are all experiential ways in which decisions about what is relevant are being made for you. Right? So relevant meaning, what should you pay attention to? What matters for you? Right? And how should you interact with it? And so your perspectival awareness gives you basically your
00:16:48
Speaker
like I said, your sense of here now and what's attractive and what's obvious. This all goes into, so what we care about our propositions is whether or not they're true, and what we care about our skills is whether or not they're powerful, whether or not they fit, whether or not they work, right? What we care about our perspectives is whether or not they give us a sense of presence.
00:17:09
Speaker
But the sense of presence is that salience landscaping that I've been describing. And you know that this really matters to people. Let's turn back to something I just mentioned. Think about the virtual world and games, video games. The quest is very often to try and create a sense of presence because that really makes the game more real to people.
00:17:30
Speaker
It's not the same thing as having beliefs. It's not the same thing as just they have their skill. You have to shape how they're sailing and landscaping. And then they get patterns of attraction and obviousness, a sense of here and now and what it's like to be in that world. That's all crucial.
00:17:47
Speaker
The next kind of knowing is participatory
Transformative Practices in Self-Identity
00:17:51
Speaker
knowing. This is the knowing that is involved, how you identify with things. So this is how you know your body. If you don't just have beliefs about your body, and you don't just have skills about your body, and you don't just have your perspectival awareness, you actually identify, you inhabit, you live through your body. You know it by identifying it. This is also the way you know your culture.
00:18:14
Speaker
It's become part of your identity. So if you do a propositional knowledge basically through inference and language, and you do procedural knowledge is, like I say, it's basically through your cognitive skill.
00:18:32
Speaker
The perspectival knowing is knowledge by being able to enter into a particular state of consciousness, knowing what it's like to be me, knowing what it's like to be drunk, knowing what it's like to be here now and that way. And then the participatory knowing is knowing not with the machinery of the self. It's the way you know something because of the way you have become
00:18:54
Speaker
a different kind of self in relationship to it. So typically, this is how you will also, you know, know somebody that is your beloved, somebody that you deeply love, because you don't just have beliefs about them and skills directed at them and a perceptible aware of them. You actually find how your identity is forming to how, right, you are knowing them. So in participatory knowing yourself knowing and you're knowing of the other are sort of stereoscopically fused together.
00:19:22
Speaker
And this is important because this is sort of the foundational knowing. This is the knowing by which you are always doing the following. So you're always coming into a situation and you're assuming an identity and you're assigning identities out in the world. So right now you're an interviewer and I'm an interviewee. That's the identities that are taken up, the roles. And so that is the basic way in which you and the environment are coupled together.
00:19:51
Speaker
So that, that, and notice how it's both an identity you're, you're assuming in a way in which you're identifying me. And those are just fused together. Like you can't pull it apart and have your identity sort of separate from the identity you're giving me. They're co-determinated. Right. Okay. So now let's go back. So in the view from above, right.
00:20:14
Speaker
It's not primarily about trying to change your belief. That's in fact the power. We're going to talk about this because you're trying to bring about a transformation and the work of, brilliant work of both L.A. Paul and Agnes Keller for reasons I'll go over in a few minutes. You can't infer a reason your way through fundamental transformations, right? You know, fundamental developmental changes.
00:20:39
Speaker
So what's happening in the view from above is you first getting people to practice a set of skills, procedural skills. And then what are those skills directed towards doing? Changing the perspective of knowing. Well, what does the perspective of knowing do? Well, as I said, it changes the salience landscape. Well, when I change that, what might I be doing? Well, what I might be doing is if you'll allow me the metaphor that's actually being enacted.
00:21:02
Speaker
I can change the space in which my identity is forming and which myself is developing so that I can become a new kind of self.
00:21:11
Speaker
And so the view from above is not directed primarily towards changing your beliefs. It's primarily directed towards giving you skills that then help change, right, help change your perspectival and participatory knowing. By the way, and that reverberates back because as I change my capacity for identification, and as I change my situational awareness and perspectival knowing, that also affords me now learning new skills. So I sort of go up to the view from, I get a set of skills that take me up,
00:21:41
Speaker
I can undergo some transformation, and then that makes possible new ways of identifying, new capacities for situational awareness, different fundamental changes of what I find relevant, and then that means I can now cultivate new skills. And then after I'm activating those new skills from a new identity and a new perspective, that will fundamentally change beliefs that are otherwise not directly changeable by me.
00:22:08
Speaker
Yeah, so when you start the practice, you are building this skill. And as you say, take a perspective of that's quite a lot larger, this third person's perspective, you might notice what seems important to you, seems even more so, and the trivial might fall away. So in that way, you might be paying more attention to specific figures of your life.
00:22:36
Speaker
Well, let me show you one where the perspectival and the participatory really kick in, which is what you're gesturing towards. So if I do the view from above, what will often happen is my own egocentric perspective will lose its sort of unquestioned authority.
00:22:56
Speaker
So that egocentrism and all the biasing, remember our original point is self-deception, all the biasing that comes from the egocentrism is revealed. And the sense that I had, that egocentric framework is sort of the only way things can be, is challenged.
00:23:17
Speaker
And what happens is if I can now, I know the challenges that an existential challenge, I know face this issue. Oh, well, they're right. The egocentric perspective is not absolute.
00:23:31
Speaker
There is another way of being in the world, and then that opens up this possibility, this challenge. Can I move to a sense of self, a sense of agency that is not bound anymore to that egocentric perspective? Can myself grow so that I have a less egocentric identity?
00:23:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think the philosophy of religion, John Hick, I don't know if you know of his work, but he has a phrase. I know of his work, and I read his work, and I talk about his work. So yes, I do. Okay, cool. I've read enough of your work that otherwise I probably would have known this. But he has one of his views of the fundamental aspect of religion is that you are moving from egocentricness to this reality. Twantocentrism, which takes us back again, getting more in contact with reality.
00:24:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. So you change your, this is where the participatory bit comes in, you change your sense of identity to something much larger to yourself. It might in some sense be your community or the cosmopolis, but it could also be potentially like quite larger than that. Right. The way things are. Yes, and it might be a self that you're aspiring to, a wiser self. But notice how until you go through that perspectival participatory shift, you don't know what it's going to be like.
00:24:51
Speaker
And this is the point that L.A. Paul and I guess Taylor makes. You don't know what a perspective is like until you are in it.
Rationality Beyond Inference
00:25:01
Speaker
And you don't know what that identity is going to be like until you're capable of living it. So let's say I'm here. I'm in the egocentric perspective and identity. As long as I stay in that perspective, I don't know what it is I'm missing.
00:25:17
Speaker
Because I don't know what it's like to be in a non-ego-centric perspective. And I also don't know what order of preferences and what set of values I'm going to have until I acquire that larger identity. Now, what that means is you can't use standard decision-matrix decision theory.
00:25:41
Speaker
Yeah. Do you have some expected value calculation? Right. Because, yeah, I lost the word decision, decision came up, but not theory, which that's really worrying for a philosopher and scientist. The word theory disappeared from the side. Anyways, less theory.
00:25:57
Speaker
So I don't know the probabilities because I'm ignorant, because this is not a matter of being able to state propositions in my head. Of course, we're doing this now. We're stating propositions. That's not the same as knowing how to get into that perspective, knowing what it's like to be in that perspective. But coming the kind of person I'm going to become if I want to form an identity around that new perspective. So I don't know the probabilities, and I don't know the utilities.
00:26:25
Speaker
I can't infer. There is nothing that I can use to infer my way through there. So you can't go through this transformation in an inferential fashion. And here's a key point I want to make, and this is especially important for Agnes Keller. She said, look, we have to include these non-inferential developmental processes in our account of rationality.
00:26:50
Speaker
If we say, no, no, rationality, we sort of have an enlightenment model of rationality, right? I mean, enlightenment in the European historical period sense. Yeah, of course. Which is, you know, okay, what rationality is, it's the logical governance of inference to alter belief. And when we do that well, we're being rational. Okay. If you say that, then you say this process that we're describing, because it's not inferential, must not be a rational process.
00:27:16
Speaker
Now you're really, really screwed because the aspiration to becoming rational is exactly this kind of process.
00:27:27
Speaker
If I'm not very rational and I'm trying to get to the identity and perspectival abilities of a rational person, I can't infer my way to there. See the point? The process of aspiring to rationality, if we say that rationality is totally just argumentative in nature, inferential in nature,
00:27:48
Speaker
then the process of aspiring to rationality is not itself a rational process. And now you're really, really messed up because you know what I cannot do? I have no justification for telling you to become more rational because the process I'm telling you to engage in is initially an irrational process. It's not one I could engage in for rational reasons on this view.
00:28:12
Speaker
Yes, on this year, because you can't, you can't, right? But, so what you need to do is you need to be able to broaden the notion, and this is what I'm going to propose to you, you need to broaden the notion of rationality so it can include what, this is what Kellogg calls pro-leftic rationality, these processes by which we aspire to perspectives and participatory identities we do not currently have. And that's what all of education, all the cultivation of wisdom, all of the cultivation of rationality, all require this.
00:28:42
Speaker
So here's what I propose to you, and I think this is more consonant with there being multiple kinds of knowing, and with the ancient wisdom traditions, like Stoicism, for example. And this goes back to the original point I make that we should say of rationality, not in terms of just inferential processing.
00:29:02
Speaker
We should think of rationality is present wherever I have a practice or set of practices that is systematically reliable for helping me deal with self-deception.
00:29:13
Speaker
And insofar as the view from above, and we just walk through how it could systematically and reliably help me deal with self-deception, insofar as the view from above has helped me to do that, even though it's not an argument by any means, it is a deeply rational process because it is helping me reduce self-deception and it is helping me to prolectically aspire towards becoming a more rational person.
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah, excellent. Yeah. I think that makes sense. I'm not totally sure how much I buy the transformative experience is type line, but I think I understand.
00:29:49
Speaker
Well, I mean, yeah, well, about buying it. I mean, the thing about this is we've got lots of empirical evidence, right? So this is not just philosophical argument. We've got all the evidence from construal level theory that if I get you to move perspectivally this way, you will actually become less biased. You become more creative, you become more open.
00:30:09
Speaker
you are you also got you've got the work of the gross men right so you get people to describe a problem there and what they'll do is the list of first-person perspective think about what we're talking about and their prototypical default identity right and then they can't solve this problem and then you say to them i want you to try to describe this problem from a third-person perspective as if you were somebody else.
00:30:30
Speaker
They do that, right? And then what they have is they get insight into, right? They get insight into the problem that they couldn't get both. And this is something you can't infer your way into also is an insight. Yeah, I totally think that's, I guess I think that's right.
00:30:49
Speaker
construal level theory is probably true. And there are, you could get different insights from taking different perspectives. I think I am less confident in the idea that this is something you couldn't reason yourself into.
00:31:04
Speaker
This is just another kind of uncertainty, and it can be hard to make decisions like this. Well, I guess the pushback on your pushback would be, I take seriously that most of your knowing, and this is what cutting-edge cognitive science is actually arguing, most of your knowing is not inferentially driven.
00:31:29
Speaker
I mean, a lot of your behavior, I mean, this advertising depends on the fact that a lot of your behavior isn't driven by your beliefs, it's driven by your patterns of attraction and obviousness. So advertisers work to make things attractive and obvious to you, not convince you about the beliefs, the truth of certain beliefs. They sometimes do that, but most, you know that most of the stuff, you know that most of the stuff you're being shown in commercials
00:31:56
Speaker
It's not true. Drinking this alcohol will not make you more attractive or more socially acceptable, right? In a way that will gain more sexual partners. That doesn't track that well. But nevertheless, the commercial has made the product more attractive to you. And it's made it more salient to you. That's why you buy the product. So I take seriously that a lot of
00:32:22
Speaker
what drives your behavior. I'm not denying that your beliefs don't drive your behavior. You understand that. Of course they do. But I'm saying that a lot of your behavior is driven by things other than your beliefs, which means, definitionally, it's driven in a non-inferential fashion.
00:32:35
Speaker
Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. OK, cool. Yeah, that seems right to me. Well, you pay attention to matters quite a lot. What you pay attention to and what you identify with. Yes. Yeah, those are the two bits, the purpose, spec, type of bit and the participant bit. Yeah. Excellent. One piece you touch on in your talk was that you have one worry when you're doing the practice, like the view from above, that you might end up actually
00:33:03
Speaker
Divorcing yourself from things that you thought were meaning so if you take the You know very a very classic perspective where you realize all things are
00:33:15
Speaker
finite, all things will come to pass.
Cosmic Perspective and Human Experience
00:33:19
Speaker
Things like relationships might seem less important. How do you think about avoiding this kind of problem? Yeah, I think that's important. So there's two thinkers that have influenced me the most on that. One is Thomas Nagel and the idea from the view from nowhere, which is sort of the ultimate view from above. He argues that we carry around
00:33:41
Speaker
a model of objectivity that is at least identified with, I don't know if it's identical to, but it's identified with this kind of, you know, perspectival knowing that's the view from nowhere, which is really not of any kind of perspective. And so
00:33:58
Speaker
and but he says that's sort of our notion of objectivity and we can move to that and then he brings up what he calls the possibility of the absurd which is I think a more intense version of what you're pointing to. I can move towards this sort of all-encompassing god-like perspective and from that god-like perspective the doings of mortals can lose their significance. Now that can be very valuable because a lot of the doings of mortals
00:34:24
Speaker
deserve to be criticized because they can be petty and small-minded, ambitious. But the doings of mortals are also the compassionate concern for your child, the taking care of the planet more properly. And so if you start to become unconcerned with the petty concerns of the mortals, the perspective in which you live your life can seem absurd or irrelevant or insignificant from this cosmic perspective.
00:34:54
Speaker
Velman argues something similar, which is, as I constantly move up this ladder of perspective-taking, I become more and more distanced from the machinery of my agency that actually couples me to the world. He calls this the prominent problem of Hamlet. I keep stepping back and looking at lower order perspectives.
00:35:17
Speaker
You know, it just robs me. It just undermines my agency. I lose agency. I become completely indecisive and disconnected the way Hamlet does. And meanwhile, people are dying all around Hamlet, right? So I think that both of them, I think they're not saying exactly the same thing, but their arguments converge on the same place, different features of the same place. Bellman is emphasizing a loss of agency in what he calls the reflectiveness gap.
00:35:46
Speaker
And Nagel is offering a loss of a sense of connectedness, right? Because that's what the sense of insignificance is. What I do doesn't matter, right? And so that's in his discussion of the absurd. So I take that very, very seriously. And the thing is, many thinkers across different traditions have. Now, this is not something that I have found within the ancient Stoic tradition.
00:36:16
Speaker
And so this is more of a stretch if I wanted to include it within the Stoic tradition, but this is where I turned to Spinoza. Now Spinoza is obviously deeply influenced by the Stoic tradition in a lot of important ways. And what I find in Spinoza is something that is also deeply analogous to practices and experiences I've had within a Buddhist and a Taoist framework.
00:36:43
Speaker
But Spinoza talks about this possibility when he talks about Sciencia and Tuativa. And the thing is, when you're reading the ethics, you have to read the ethics like Lectio Divina. You have to read it and resonate it. You have to study it, if you'll allow me, religiously. You don't just read the ethics in an argumentative fashion.
00:37:01
Speaker
And because that's not what Spinoza is doing, he's patterning the ethics on, you know, Proclus' Elements of Theology, which was a Neoplatonic thing, which was designed to take you through these kinds of transformative processes we've been talking about.
00:37:17
Speaker
So you read through the ethics, and he's talking about various things, and he talks about sciencia intuitivea, this way of knowing that's deeply connected to blessedness. But what's supposed to happen is, you're supposed to get it not just in what he's referring to, you're supposed to get it in the reading of the text. So what happens, right, when you're reading the ethics, is you get
00:37:46
Speaker
I don't want to, you can get, so I'm trying to make my language very careful here, right? You can get to this state where you see the pole of the argument in each premise and you see how each premise fits into the whole argument. Very much like you see the whole word in order to disambiguate the letters and then you see the letters within the word, or you hear the notes within the whole music, but the whole music
00:38:10
Speaker
you know, informs how you're hearing each note, that kind of Gestalt-Pietro fusion that human beings are actually, in fact, we rely on that in order to be some of our most adaptive problem-solving.
00:38:22
Speaker
And so the idea is I can get to a state where, right? And then the thing is when you, because you're doing, you're doing the ethics, right? You've got the, you've got the huge ontological perspective of part one, you know, a thought in nature. And then you have, you know, the, the human scale perspective, uh, of the, uh, the cultivation of wisdom and blessedness. But what happens is you get the state that is like, it's, it's.
00:38:47
Speaker
And I don't want to sound like a Zen poem, but it's simultaneously the view from above and the view from right here, right now. And so the way in which the broader perspective can undermine
00:39:06
Speaker
Right. This year. Yes, I see it is lost because they're not they're not they're they're they're not juxtaposed to each other. In fact, they are completely interaffording and interpenetrated. And then with for Velman, he turns to the Taoist tradition. He says the answer is we need a state of being related to the world. Right. That gives us both. Right. So the problem with agency is you don't write is
00:39:34
Speaker
The answer to being Hamlet isn't to become what Wellman calls a wanton, which is completely impulsive, because then you lose flexibility because you're just acting chaotically. So you need a state that gives you the involved connectedness to the world, but the flexibility that you have when you're Hamlet
00:39:54
Speaker
And so there's a state that we can achieve that seems to
Integrating Wisdom and Science
00:39:57
Speaker
do that as well. This is something I've done a lot of work on, and this is the flow state. Because in the flow state, you are very deeply coupled to the environment, but you also are experiencing tremendous insight, tremendous creativity, tremendous flexibility, tremendous adaptivity. So like as a martial artist, I'm trying to get into the flow state.
00:40:16
Speaker
because keeping deeply immersed in your presence, there's the perspective of a language, but I'm not acting mechanically or automatically. Instead of what's happening, it's like, well, I call it an insight cascade. I'm getting a flurry of insights. That's why one way to induce flow is to spar or to play jazz.
00:40:40
Speaker
What you're getting in the flow state is you're getting something that, again, gives you both the flexibility of the higher order, but it gives you the connectedness of the lower order. And so what's interesting is both of those are available to us. And then in the Buddhist and Taoist traditions, when they come together, for example, in something like Zen, that's what you get.
00:41:03
Speaker
right, you basically get a flow state that's also Gansi-Intuitativa. This is Prajna. I've got the, you know, like in Scansi-Intuitiva, I have the cosmological interpenetrating with the personal, but that's not just sort of a static state I'm in, it's putting me into a constant flow state with the world. And so, the fact that both of these states are available to people and can be cultivated,
00:41:33
Speaker
says to me that it's possible that we could bring that in to connect it with, things like the view from above, so that there's appropriate normative checks and balances. Yes, do the view from above, but pursue Stiencia and Tuativa. And then don't do this just sort of sitting statically in your chair. Learn how to do this like a Taoist master within a flow state and engagement in the world.
00:42:03
Speaker
So what would this look like in practice, you know, suppose I are one way of understanding what you said that one thing this brings to mind for me is that you can imagine well doing the V for above suppose you're just sitting, you decide to picture.
00:42:19
Speaker
and then picture yourself and then enlarge your perspective. But while you do this, you may want to continuously monitor yourself in the way you would as if you're just sitting, focusing on your breath and focusing on your sensations. And I imagine when you do those two things, perhaps you can find yourself and perhaps avoid the view from nowhere,
00:42:44
Speaker
inhabit both perspectives at once. One thing I do when I teach my students how to practice this is I teach them to when you can see this actually within the traditions. First of all, I teach them a meditative practice like vipassana, so they learn how to go very deeply inside if you want to put, if you'll allow me those metaphors.
00:43:08
Speaker
And then I teach them a contemplative practice like Mada, in which you learn to really open off your attention out into the gaps. And it's not just your attention, it's the processes, it's how you're identifying with things. So we're engaging the perspectival and the participatory in both directions. So you teach people both of those and then how to do them deeply. And then you teach them how to cycle, you teach them the cycle. So for example, as I'm inhaling,
00:43:32
Speaker
My attention is contemplatively extending out. And then as I exhale, I let my attention meditatively move in towards the center. And then I cycle between the two, cycling between the two. And what happens is, for a long time, it's just like this, right? Just back and forth. And then it starts to be like this, right? Parallel. And then it goes like this.
00:43:58
Speaker
all at once. Now what you then also do is I teach my students also tai chi and in tai chi you have the two eyes you're always looking in right and you're also tighter eyes looking out.
00:44:10
Speaker
And so what you do is you practice doing this with movements, you practice getting into the flow state. Now, if you're doing those sets of practices together, you get much better at getting into, like, gets you into a tebow or the prajna state, you know, where it's cosmological and personal at the same time, while also learning how to bring that into a flow.
00:44:33
Speaker
relationship with the environment. So that's how I teach people. Excellent. Yeah, that's really helpful. Last question, I suppose. So going back to the very initial discussion of the meaning crisis, what we just talked about, how does that inform how you think of building out institutions for wisdom and practices for building wisdom going forward?
00:44:59
Speaker
Well, I guess what I've tried to do is I tried to exemplify what I think the answer is we need something. You'll forgive me I mean my series is 50 hours long and so it's a long argument.
00:45:14
Speaker
These sets of practices, notice there's two aspects to our discussion. We're trying to see how to cultivate them. We need how to cultivate them. How do they work, right? But notice what I tried to do also. I tried to connect it up to cognitive science and explain it, connect it to the scientific worldview so that the processes that I'm invoking, right, they're not, we will, they don't hang free
00:45:39
Speaker
in some unintelligible fashion from our scientific worldview. They're coherent with it. They make good sense of it. And so what we need is we need a combination of that. We need more of the cognitive science of meaning making wisdom cultivation. That's what's happening.
00:45:55
Speaker
that restituates all of those things back into the scientific world world while also helping engineer and reverse engineer sets of practices and notice what I gave you I gave you an ecology of practices and how they sort of
00:46:09
Speaker
you know, have to be coalesced together in a self-organizing fashion in order for them to get sort of optimal functionality. And so what you're going to see is you're going to see something like where you're going to have something like, you know, what Buddhism and Taoism were or Christianity. You're going to have something that is the language by which we constellate and curate.
00:46:33
Speaker
uh, the ecology of practices, but it is going to be in deep connection dialogue with the language of cognitive science that explains how and why it works. And you're going to get a reflective equilibrium between them. If we do that, then, and there's, I have to say, there's so much more to say on both those sides. Really quick here. If we do that really well, then we can bring back.
00:46:58
Speaker
right, the cultivation of wisdom, which is the way in which we respond to our personal issues of meeting laws. But then, but we can situate that, right, into a worldview that makes sense of it and legitimates and guides it. So we also, so we don't have to do it in an autodidactic fashion. We can have a shared scientific framework that we can all make use of. And that will also help us to constellate communities of practice together.
00:47:26
Speaker
And I think doing that is what we need to do in order to respond to the meaningful crisis.
Conclusion and Further Resources
00:47:48
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.