John Vervaeke traces his journey from fundamentalist trauma to cognitive science, arguing that human consciousness relies on "relevance realization" to filter infinite patterns. He critiques the "knowledge illusion" created by AI and biometric harvesting, which strips away the "sensed presence" essential for true reality. Vervaeke identifies a modern "meaning crisis" where discarded religious institutions leave a vacuum filled by ineffective substitutes like self-centered spirituality. Ultimately, he posits that overcoming self-deception requires cultivating wisdom through tradition and virtues, framing the search for God as an urgent biological drive toward ultimacy rather than mere logical deduction. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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The Meaning Crisis00:14:54
Thank you for doing this.
I'm excited to talk to you.
Oh, me too.
So, how did you get into or how did you get interested in these deep philosophical ideas of meaning and religion and all this stuff?
Was this something that happened in early childhood?
Like, were you brought up religious?
Yeah.
So, exactly.
I was brought up in a very fundamentalist Christian family, not just the nuclear family, extended family on my mom's side.
And it was really, really, I didn't know it at the time, but looking back, it was quite traumatizing.
Danny, the most afraid I've ever been in my life.
I came home, I was about 10 or so.
And it was very rare because we lived in a rural situation.
There was nobody in the home.
And I was convinced that the rapture had occurred and I had been left behind and the Antichrist and his minions were coming to get me.
Man, you want to know fear?
That's the most.
I've been laying, I've been in a hospital bed.
I got a really bad chest infection.
And the doctors were looking at me and I went, oh crap, they think I'm going to die.
I was scared then.
The most scared I've been in my life was when I was 10 and that happened to me because that was like a metaphysical horror.
And so what happened is I'm a teenager, I'm 15, I'm in high school, and I start to read.
I start to read science fiction.
I start reading around.
I start reading and I read a book called Lord of Light by Rogers Lazen.
He introduces me to Buddhism and Hinduism and alternative mythologies.
I start reading Herman Asa.
and it just goes like this, it breaks me open.
Now, that means I turned on religion comprehensively, like just across the board.
But here's the thing.
Like, you know, people have their mother tongue.
You have your mother spirituality, your mother religion.
I left a taste for transcendence in my mouth.
And so I went into, as many people do who deconstruct, especially they do it on their own, unaided, I went into like a personal meaning crisis, just quite profound.
And so I'm looking around and I get to university and I meet, I take a philosophy class just because I've been reading these philosophical books and I meet the figure of Socrates.
We're reading Plato's Republic and I went, oh, here's what I'm looking for.
This is how a way to taste the transcendent, to cultivate spirituality without abandoning a commitment to deep thought, deep reflection, right?
Rationality, being reasonable, being virtuous.
And so That started me down that pathway.
Now, the problem with academic philosophy, at least way back when, when I was an undergrad, is that the topic of wisdom and meaning in life falls off the table.
And you get involved instead in all this academic philosophy.
People sometimes use that phrase.
You get locked into all these technicalities of skepticism and conceptual analysis, useful tools.
But the core question wasn't being answered.
So, literally down the street.
Down the street, there's a Tai Chi and meditation stand there.
So I decided to give Eastern philosophy a try.
I start doing Tai Chi and Vipassana meditation and meta contemplation, and I go, oh, oh, oh.
And so I start to look for what can I do to bridge between my academic life and this life that's now alive, and how can I get Socrates back in here?
So I discover there's this new discipline, cognitive science.
I go back and do a second undergraduate degree, honors, and then do my PhD on cognitive science because cognitive science is.
Bridging philosophy and psychology and neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
And it's talking about meaning and wisdom.
So, just one more minute.
And so, I'm teaching a bunch of courses, I start to teach this stuff at the university.
And when I start to teach about meaning and altered states of consciousness and wisdom and self transcendence, I just got a paper published, by the way, today.
Found out.
Yeah, on mystical experiences.
So, anyways, when I'm doing this work, my students, their eyes like, and they lean in, and I start to get a reputation.
And I also happen to be at the university with this other guy you might have heard of, Jordan Peterson.
And we're friends, and he's already sort of like provoking lots of young people to think about issues of meaning.
So they start to come to me.
I have another friend.
He's not there anymore.
He was a colleague, Evan Thompson, very important cognitive scientist.
And they asked Evan to teach a course on Buddhism and cognitive science, and he couldn't do it because of his schedule.
And they said, Is there anybody else that can do it?
And he said, Well, I think John could.
So I started teaching this course, Buddhism and cognitive science.
Why are those?
Two things coming together, and I realized it's because of this meaning crisis, and that's why my students care about this.
So, a student who's taken my course on the psychology of wisdom, my course on the nature of insight, my course on Buddhism and cognitive science, he says, You got to put this on YouTube.
I'm a professional videographer, my dad's a professional editor, we will donate our time for free.
And then, so I go on and I did something that everybody told me would fail I did 50 hours, over one hour each, series on awakening from the meaning crisis, giving this whole complex historical and cognitive scientific argument, and it just took off.
And that's how I got here with you right now.
Wow.
That's fascinating.
So, how long have you known Jordan?
I guess since about 2012, 2010, so somewhere in there.
I don't remember exactly.
Yeah.
And he was kind of like ejected from the whole university system, right?
Yeah.
Well, officially.
Okay, so officially he's emeritus, which he's been congratulated and allowed to retire.
But yeah, so what happened was when the huge, big conflict about him refusing to use pronouns.
Yes.
Okay, now the thing about this, Danny, is they didn't treat Jordan the way you need to treat him.
When Jordan was doing this, I wrote him an email saying, Jordan, here's my arguments.
I disagree with the stance you're taking.
Here's why I was arguing.
Universities where people people have traditionally gone and explored different identities and things like that.
And I don't think it's compelled speech.
We already have compelled speech in Canada.
We have advertising about smoking and cancer and tobacco.
Like, I don't, you know, academic disagreement.
And he said, great arguments.
I don't totally agree, but thanks, John.
That was it.
Right?
Right?
That's all he asked for from the university.
He, like, he refused to use the pronouns because of the bill.
There was a big thing.
I totally sympathize with. my department, the psychology department, because they are mandated, but the chair has to follow university policy, right?
And she couldn't do any other.
So that he basically said, I want an open public debate on this.
If you give my open public debate, I'll renegotiate with you about whether or not I'll use the pronouns.
Okay.
Now, not being self-promotional, but, you know, if they'd asked me to debate him, history would have been very different because it would have been a debate, a genuine, I would have insisted.
Fair playing field, mutual respect, question and answer.
That's how I operate.
That's not what they did.
They came in.
He was opposed by two other people.
And the moderator came in and said, the first thing I want to state is I'm opposed to Jordan Peterson and everything he stands for.
That's the moderator.
So it became a show trial, which means it then, and they made it personal.
They were attacking his character rather than attacking his arguments.
And then to be critical of him, he made it personal back.
No surprise, right?
And it just spun out of control.
So basically what happened is they put him on leave, research leave and then other.
They couldn't fire him because they didn't really have grounds and he had tenure, but they didn't want him back.
So they basically sort of stalled and stalled and stalled.
And then, by the way, Jordan Peterson has become emeritus, which means he's officially retired in good standing.
So it was very messy and both sides could have handled it much better.
Yeah, that's been a common theme that we've run into folks that we've talked to on the show who have sort of shined a light on this rift between folks that come from academia and get lots of attention on social media, you know, or with just books and like mainstream press and stuff like that.
Sure.
I'm with like traditional academics who like just spend all of their time in the universities teaching and studying and doing all this stuff.
It seems to be sort of like this weird.
push and pull.
There's tension.
Yeah, there's definitely tension.
Yeah, I've experienced it too.
Now, I've never had any confrontation.
I've always been very loyal to the department because they've treated me personally very well.
But, you know, Jordan's a friend.
I've also tried to be loyal to him.
Yeah.
So it, but yeah, I've even had people like that I find very interesting that I've wanted to come on the show and, and for reasons strictly to do with their, with their departments, like their, their, their PhD department or whoever is like in charge of their department where they're studying to get, Like one guy was like working on his dissertation or whatever, and he was saying that coming on a podcast would be frowned upon.
Yes.
By the folks that are in that university, which is wild.
It is.
It was only now, but it was only last year, or actually maybe just the year before, where the university finally acknowledged my public persona on YouTube and Spotify and such, and acknowledged that it was actually doing good.
So before I did all that, I'd go to one or two conferences, maybe get one invitation to speak.
I mean, academic conferences.
I'd get maybe one connection from an academic colleague in the world.
Now I get tons of invitations.
I have tons of collaborations with academics.
So my academic profile has gone up.
I represent the cognitive science program, the cognitive psychology department at U of T. Students come because of this.
So the university is now coming around to acknowledge, okay, what you're doing is good.
We don't really, but what you're doing is good.
You keep doing it.
Do you think that'll change ever?
Or do you see that changing slowly?
How do you think this ends up in 10 years?
This rift or this dichotomy between folks that are experts in what they do and come from this academic background, sort of like dipping their toe into the public light.
Do you see that changing at all in the future?
Or do you see that becoming more of a divide?
Well, that's a good question.
I'll tell you what I've tried to do and how I've learned somewhat from Jordan.
I made a commitment.
So when I set up the Verveke Foundation and things like that, I said, I'm going to keep my one foot firmly in the academic world.
I'm going to keep publishing.
I'm going to keep going to academic conferences and forming lots of relationships, which I have, at Cambridge and other places, Harvard and places like that, and the public persona, so that I'm going to show both sides that I can keep the two together.
Right.
Convince both sides.
So, for me personally, I'm not trying to tell other people what to do, but for me personally, I've been successful.
So, both I mean, I'm talking to you because presumably the public side appreciates what I'm doing, but I've presented at like multiple academic conferences, just got an academic public paper just published today, right?
All that stuff.
So, and what I find is each one keeps the other honest.
Yes.
If I'm just over here, I could become a guru or worse, a pundit or something.
Right.
Crap like that, and over here, if I do this, I can become, you know, that insular, academically incestuous person that's just talking keeper yeah, and just talking to other academics for the rest of their life about the stuff that they do that nobody else cares or reads about um, and I don't like that.
That the university is significant, that's against my pedagogical vision.
That's not what a university is for.
It shouldn't be for itself, it should be for its culture in a viable fashion right, right.
So tell me about this new paper you got published sure, Okay.
So it's with Hussein Bakalew and with Daniel Melling.
They're both, well, Daniel is now fully done.
Hussein is a graduate student.
They were both in the Netherlands.
So I developed a theory, which was in the book with Christopher Master Pietro, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, called The Cognitive Continuum.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
Like, I'm going to rely on you to, you interrupt me, you, right?
If I start to, okay.
Okay.
Because I don't want to do that.
I've been really trying to practice.
I'm much more concerned about an encounter between us than presenting my.
Sure.
Okay.
Okay.
So the idea is.
I appreciate that, by the way.
Well, thank you.
I mean, that's how I'm a follower of Socrates.
Socrates went into the marketplace and talked to whoever would talk to him.
And he showed up in good faith and he showed up and he compared himself to a midwife.
He was going to help people give birth.
We use the word conceive, like conceive of an idea, help people give birth to their ideas and their orientations and their outlooks.
And so I aspire to be like Socrates.
I wanted, he could do this thing with no matter whoever he was talking to.
I think you see this in Siddhartha, Gautama, the Buddha, you see it in Jesus of Nazareth.
They could, like, they could, it's almost like, you know, they could shift so that they just were able to get in sync with whoever they were talking to.
I'm not claiming to be Socrates or Jesus or anything like that, but I'm saying.
Flow States and Insight00:14:36
Be on the right wavelength.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They inspire me, and so I aspire.
Magic happens when you do that.
Always, always.
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So the idea is all of cognition is on a continuum, and at one end is what's called fluency.
Now, fluency is a well established psychological phenomenon.
It goes like this.
Let's say I gave you two exact pieces of text, one on standard like that, black and white.
The other is, you know, blue and yellow.
So the blue and yellow one is slightly harder to read.
Okay.
That's it.
Content is logically, graphically identical.
Just one.
Now, if I ask you, obviously, I do some distracting things.
Then I ask you which one, like, rate them for true.
You'll rate.
the one in black and white more true than the one that's in blue and yellow?
Which one was more beautiful, the black and white?
So this is across the board.
So it has to do with your processing, not with what you're processing.
So the ease at which you can retrieve information and frame a situation into a doable problem that you can readily solve, that's fluency.
And your brain uses that as a marker for, hey, what you're doing is probably connecting to reality.
Interesting.
It's a good marker, by the way, because there's good reasons why that, and we make, if you want to, we could get into it, but there's good reasons why that ease of recall and that ease at which you're fitting yourself to the world and turning what could be a potentially messy situation into a well-defined one.
Okay.
Okay.
So your brain goes, aha, right?
Now remember that because think about it.
I'm making use of a lot of other people's work and I'm not going to try and burden everybody with lots of citations.
Just take it for granted that in publication everybody's.
Everybody's well cited, okay?
So you can get what's called a fluency spike, where suddenly the fluency goes up really quickly.
You just had it a minute ago.
You went, aha, that aha, that insight moment, that's a fluency spike.
So now we're moving on the continuum.
We've gone from fluency to insight.
Now, what happens if you get an insight that primes another insight, that primes another insight?
So you get an insight cascade, right?
So why would that happen?
Well, you're sparring.
Oh, here I'll use another one that's more graphic.
Because this doesn't make any other sense except for what I'm going to talk about.
So my stepson and stepsister, they're rock climbers.
Now, rock climbing doesn't make any sense.
Because like, okay, you climb up that, you're going to hurt yourself.
You could fall and die.
It's going to be exhausting, right?
You're going to be scared along the way.
And then once you're done, come back down.
Right.
It sounds absurd, right?
Now, people do it because they get into the flow state.
Yeah, so let's do the rock climbers trying to go and they situate themselves literally orient in one way frame the situation one and they they're starting to impasse.
What do I do?
What do I do?
And they have to reorient.
They have to reframe.
They have to look at it differently so they can see into the situation better so that they can climb again.
They have to have an insight and then they have to have an insight.
Kind of like you have a spider web in your mind or like a web in your mind of previous experiences or knowledge so that you can connect things to it.
And you're doing it more and more, well, insightfully.
And so you see why your fluency would be.
Yeah, spiking.
Okay, so what is that?
Well, it's like you know what happens when you have an insight.
You get, aha, and you get that sort of flash, and things are salient, and you get that sense of discovery.
Well, what do people have in the flow state?
So, the flow state is that state of like being in the zone.
Like, so, like if you're doing martial arts and you're sparring, like this is familiar to me, you know, so I'm sparring, and you know, my block just goes up, and I see the opening, and my hand's already moving into the opening with the strike.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
So, you're in the zone, you feel that radical atonement with the world.
Everything is super salient.
There's an ongoing sense of discovery.
It's like your brain's like shut off almost.
Well, one part of your brain, the part of the brain that is the egocentric, nattering nanny in your head, that, how am I doing?
How am I doing?
What are people thinking of me?
Do they like me?
Oh, am I liked?
Do they like me?
How's my hair?
Will they stay with me?
I think he doesn't like me.
Oh, what's going on?
All of that falls off because you're totally at one and absorbed into the experience.
Now, this is optimal performance for people.
This is Chick Sentmahai's work.
Optimal in two ways.
People rate this reliably.
As the best kind of experience of their life.
So much so that if I had to ask you one question to find out if whether or not I think your life is worth living, meaningful, I would ask you well, it's a two part question.
How often do you get into the flow state and how real are the situations in which you flow as opposed to artificial?
What do you mean, how real versus artificial?
Okay, so one of the great ways of getting people into the flow state is video games, especially point and shoot video games.
Now, the problem with that, this is why I asked you real.
That's a constructed world and it's constructed.
Now, what you have to do is constantly keep your demands just slightly ahead of the person's skills.
So they're constantly having to have like insight to reach the demand.
And that's why flow has that constant, flow is like an extended, aha, right?
And so you're doing that and you manufacture it very well.
The problem is if you don't manufacture it carefully or set it up carefully, the ability to flow in that situation doesn't transfer to people's real lives.
So what would happen?
They flow in the game and they experience anti-flow in their lives.
What's an anti-flow?
That's depression.
So now there's a motivational gradient.
I'm depressed out here and I flow there.
So I'm going to keep going back and back.
And that's how you can get video game addiction.
Wow.
So video games are bad.
No, I did not say that.
Please don't pin that on me.
So what I'm saying is, no, no, because you could set the video game up.
Such that you work in terms of how human memory works.
So you help train people in a way that transfers to their lives.
Now, let me give you a real world example of that.
So I mentioned I'm a martial artist.
One of the things I do is I'm a Tai Chi player.
I started doing Tai Chi.
I was doing it super religiously, like four hours a day, going to the dojo four times a week.
And I'm getting all the weird phenomena where you're hot as lava, as cold as ice, and you're vibrating and all that weird phenomenology.
And I'm paying attention to that.
And I happened to be in grad school at the time, which is one of the most polite but vicious places you can be.
And so my fellow students are coming up to me and they're saying, what are you doing?
You're different.
And I went, oh, no.
And I hadn't put this together.
And I said, what do you mean?
And they said, you're way more flexible in your argument.
You're way more balanced.
You flow with people better.
And I realized, oh, the Tai Chi is transferring into the academic context.
And I wasn't even trying to do that.
Interesting.
That's a real ritual.
Taoism is the religious philosophy of the flow state.
It's about how do I, in a ritual, cultivate flow so that I can flow in as much of my life as possible.
So, you're saying that, so is it possible that flow from playing some sort of video game can translate into something into real life?
If you set it up correctly.
If you set it up correctly, if you align it correctly.
Now, the thing is, a lot of people that are setting up these games are motivated to keep the people addicted to the game for obvious financial reasons.
But there are people that are more virtuous in their orientation who are trying to afford.
Like very much like the way religion.
You do religious rituals.
They're trying to afford transfer.
They're trying to transform the person into the flow state in a way that will transfer more readily into their life.
So we're not done to continue.
Do you want me to go back or do you want to continue talking about flow?
Let's keep going okay, so you can get flow states and now, as we've been talking about, you can flow in a very limited way or you could learn to flow in a very domain.
General way is that is that cool?
Yeah, now flow always depends on you having relevant skills, expertise and the capacity that you're.
You're You're skilled enough that you can have insight in this skill.
You're not a novice, right?
So what you want to do is consider the possibility of there's certain things that you have terrific expertise in, but they're domain general skills.
They're not skills you're using here or there.
They're skills you're using everywhere.
What skills are those?
Those are skills of attention and orientation, how you're paying attention, how you're orienting, and how connected, remember in flow you're at one, how connected are you to the environment?
When you are getting a flow state, but not like playing hockey or martial arts or doing jazz or rock climbing, but when you can get into a flow state at the level of your attention, your orientation, and your fundamental connectedness to reality, that's a mystical experience.
So the paper is called From Flow to Mystical Experience.
There's a continuum.
So mystical experience is large.
It's a form of.
So we went from.
We enhanced fluency and got insight.
We enhanced insight and got flow.
We enhanced flow and now we have mystical experience.
So you can get into.
So typically, when I think of flow, I think of some sort of athletic physical activity.
You can.
You can also get into flow states.
So, like jazz.
You can get into flow states.
And there's hot and cool jazz.
Sorry, hot and cool.
That's true, too.
There's hot and cool flow.
So there's flow where you're metabolically sweaty.
And then there's flow, like when people are doing poetry competitions.
Or like talking like this, maybe?
Yeah.
Oh, and I was going to say, I get into the flow state frequently when I'm in this kind of flowing dialogue.
I have a name for that dialogos, when there's a dialogue that's mutual flow state.
Or when I'm lecturing, I can get into the flow state.
Oh, wow.
Interesting.
I've trained myself to try and make that more and more.
Because the more I get into the flow state, the more likely that students will start to have insight about the material and start to really connect with it.
So, explain again how does that?
transcend and how do you define a mystical experience?
Every one of these terms is fraught.
It's like, so like everybody, like there's lots of disagreements.
So an experience is, let's be very careful, an experience is deemed mystical frequently.
Here's my academic side, right?
When people have a profound sense of at-one-ment.
They're deeply at one with reality.
It can beat and they can have an experience of what they'll call the really real.
It's the they feel like they're they're so in.
So, remember in flow state, you're feeling at one and you're feeling like you're discovering a deeper reality.
Like when you have an insight, you're actually biased, your brain biases you to go, that's real because fluency is that's real, right?
That's so you're getting the really real.
And it's often because that nattering part is silent, it's ineffable.
So, you've had aha experiences, right, Danny?
What experience?
Aha.
Aha.
Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
I thought she was angry, but it turns out she's afraid.
Aha.
What if I asked you, what did you do to have the inside experience?
You're like, just popped in there.
Right.
So, it's ineffable.
You can't put it into words.
So, what happens is you get this ineffable sense of being deeply at one and deeply in connection with the really real.
And if that happens, that mystical experience, that sort of super flow experience, what people will often do is it will trigger what's called a transformative experience.
This is the work of Yadin and others.
People, what they'll start to do, so this is a really big inversion.
This tells you how powerful it is.
Normally when we're in an altered state of consciousness, think about if you're drunk or you're dreaming.
You wake up to everyday consciousness and you go, oh, that wasn't real.
That wasn't real.
So typically you compare things to everyday consciousness and they fail by comparison.
Transformative Consciousness Moments00:02:55
Right.
And you say those are illusions and this is real.
Because real is always a comparative.
You're always comparing things when you're making a judgment of realness.
What people do with these particular kinds of mystical experiences, they have an altered state of consciousness and they come back and they say the everyday world fails by comparison.
Oh, that's DMT.
Well, yeah, that's one, right?
Sometimes dreams are like that?
In a very particular way, especially, I don't want to be.
Like generally, if people become lucid in the dreams.
Yes.
Okay.
So, what happens is people come back and it becomes a transformative experience, that mystical experience, because they say, I'm going to change who I am, how I live my life and my relationships.
And we got evidence that they do do this, by the way, and that their lives get better because I want to be in greater contact.
I want to be in greater conformity with that reality.
They've tasted the transcendent and they want it to be a lived experience.
presence in their life and they transform themselves.
So we've started with fluency and we went all the way to a higher state of consciousness that brings about a transformative change in people.
That's the paper.
Wow.
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Now back to the show.
Okay.
So going back to these moments of higher consciousness that you can attain with.
Real Patterns vs Illusions00:14:07
Dreams, with meditation, holotropic breathing, psychedelics, things like this.
Is that, I've heard that that is just, it's sort of a placebo effect, that what you're experiencing, particularly with psychedelics, is what's already in there.
Okay.
Just kind of like outside of the normal framework of what your senses can take in.
Sure.
Or maybe it's just exemplified.
Maybe it's something that you already have deep buried in your psyche that's.
That's coming out and showing itself to you in a different form or something like that.
What do you make of that?
Well, I make a lot of it because we explicitly criticize that theory in the paper.
Oh, okay.
And in some of the other work I've done.
So let's take seriously the possibility that mystical experiences are a kind of flow and flow is a kind of insight.
Typically, when you have an insight experience, you don't think it's a completely internal event.
You think you have had an insight, you have seen into reality.
Now, let me try and give you what happened.
Let's go back to that example again where you thought she was angry, but it turns out she's afraid.
What's happening is what is salient to you, what stands out, what's foregrounded, what's backgrounded, what you consider relevant or important, and what's trivial.
It shifts.
It shifts, right?
That shift is a change in what's relevant to you.
Now, relevance is not just inside you, it's not just in the world.
It's how you and the world fit together.
That's why you have an aha.
Look, think about it this way.
When you're solving a problem with an insight experience, it's about relevance.
Relevance isn't in the world.
It's not in you because your problem isn't in you or in the world.
The world doesn't have any problems.
The world just is.
If your problem was merely subjective, you couldn't be wrong about it.
That's the defining feature of subjectivity.
If you tell me you think that's beautiful and beauty is subjective, I can't say, well, you're wrong.
Or if you tell me I'm wrong, I go, you're contradicting yourself.
You said beauty was subjective.
But you don't think your problems are subjective because if you don't solve them, they get you, right?
It's neither subjective nor objective.
Problems are a lack of fit between you and the world.
Insight, relevance realization is a real fittedness between you and the world.
And that's what's happening with these people.
They're getting guidance.
And how to refit themselves to the world.
And we have objective evidence they improve their relationships, they improve their careers, they improve their mental states.
Like their fittedness to reality gets better.
Oh, so okay.
So now that doesn't mean a lot of crap doesn't happen in psychedelics.
I'm not saying that yet, but I'm trying to tell you there's a cognitive dimension, cognitive meaning how do we know, cognition, cogito ergo sum, right?
How do I know, right?
There's a cognitive dimension.
This is our point.
There's a cognitive dimension to these things that makes them adaptive.
Okay, so let me, for example, if this was merely subjective, Why is flow a strong universal?
What do I mean by that?
Universals are very rare in psychology because they're affected by your socioeconomic status, your gender, your age, language, your geography, your ecological situation, all of these things.
People describe the flow state across all of these variables, differences in socioeconomic status, age, religious affiliation or not, linguistic.
Geographical background, they describe the same experience in detail.
Because, why is it universal?
Because it's adaptive.
It's doing something that has been selected for.
That's why it's so rewarding for your brain.
What do you think the purpose of flow is?
Why does it exist for us?
Is there an evolutionary reason?
Yep.
What is that?
So this is from a paper I published in 2018 on flow, which a lot of people are, and then we made use of again in this recent paper.
So when you're in the flow state, first of all, you're training insight.
You're training cognitive flexibility.
You're training your ability to reframe.
A lot of the times you and I fail to solve our problems is because we're not framing it correctly.
Like the guy who thought the woman was angry when she was actually afraid.
Yeah.
That's that's by the way, that's our primary engine of self-deception is it's not we can't actually lie to ourselves what we do and I'm using this term in a technical sense bullshit.
We bullshit ourselves in that we frame things and we make the wrong things salient and we misdirect ourselves and misorient ourselves So being able to correct for that self-deception and that misorientation first of all, that's very adaptive Secondly, I'll need a minute for this because there's something else going on in flow.
So I'm going to stop talking about flow just for a sec And I'm going to talk about intuition because one of the things flow is doing, I would argue, is training your intuition.
But by intuition, I don't mean some, ooh.
I mean the following.
This is Robin Hogarth's excellent work.
So we have massive experimental evidence, massively replicated from the 60s, that human beings are capable of complex implicit pattern detection.
They can detect very complex patterns without any deliberate focal awareness that they're doing so.
Now, that's very adaptive, by the way.
Okay.
I have no doubt saying what I just said.
Which is very rare, okay?
For a scientist, the evidence for this is overwhelming.
And you can explain so much with it.
Here's the problem with implicit learning, right?
It picks up on all kinds of complex patterns.
It doesn't distinguish between real ones, causal ones, and merely correlational ones.
And there's all kinds of correlational patterns, right?
For example, large weddings are correlated with long marriages.
That doesn't mean you can make yourself have a longer marriage by having a larger wedding.
Right, right.
It's because.
Larger weddings are associated with a social network, financial support, and those things tend to predict a longer marriage, et cetera.
Okay, so you want your system to pick up on the real implicit patterns, not the illusory ones.
Now, here's the problem.
You can't sort of make yourself explicitly do that because then you'll destroy implicit learning.
Like, if you try to emplace implicit learning with explicit learning, your performance degrades massively.
Okay.
Because you're basically shutting off implicit learning, which is the very thing we're trying to help.
So, what you can do explicitly is you want to set up the context in which you're doing the implicit learning so that you will distinguish the real patterns from the illusory patterns.
Well, what's that context?
Well, here's how I can speak.
More like this is what I know.
This is what a scientific experiment does.
An experiment is designed to set up the explicit context so I can distinguish causal patterns from correlational patterns.
That's what an experiment is.
Okay.
So, what Hogarth said is try to design the experience, the context in which you're doing your implicit learning, so it's as much like an experiment as possible.
What do you need?
I need really clear information when I'm running.
I can't have vague or ambiguous stuff in an experiment.
Okay, because then you what did the experiment show?
I don't know, right?
So it's got to be clear.
Right?
There has to be a tight coupling between what I do and the results I get.
So when I manipulate the variable, the measure, there should be a tightly related change in the measurable variable, right?
So tight couple, clarity of signal, and error matters.
The experiment should be able to show me that I'm wrong.
Yes?
Yes.
Okay, so you said set up a situation in which you do that.
Okay.
Okay.
Is that landing for you?
Yep.
Yep.
Okay.
Now, totally independent.
So it was John Verveke and my two co-authors that made this connection.
Totally independent.
Look at Chick Sentmaha, the guy who's done all the work discovering and publishing on flow.
He just died recently.
What conditions do you need in order to set up flow?
You need clear information, tightly coupled feedback, and error matters.
The exact same conditions that Hogarth said will turn implicit learning into good implicit learning.
Because those are the situations in which your implicit learning is picking up on the real patterns like an experiment and not picking up on the merely illusory patterns.
Oh, wow.
Now, guess what?
Flow, then, is you're in a situation and evolution has created a thing in your head that goes, you're in a situation in which you're probably picking up on complex real patterns.
And you're doing it with insight.
So you're bringing tremendous problem-solving abilities. to it.
Here's the additional thing, right?
You're getting insight about real patterns because that's what your intuition is tracking.
Now, the problem with intuition is it only works on what it encounters.
It can't look for new patterns.
But insight gets you to look for new patterns.
So the insight is correcting the intuition.
The intuition is correcting the insight.
And you're getting great problem learning about real patterns in a way that is opening up your knowledge of the world.
Do you think that would be adaptive?
Yeah.
And so evolution has marked this.
Do that.
Do that more.
Can we hijack that?
We can hijack that just like we can hijack anything else that's adaptive in you.
It's adaptive in you because your ancestors evolved on the savannah.
If they come across milk and sugar and fat, they should gorge on it as much as possible.
The problem for you is that can be hijacked because you can go into a supermarket and there are shelves of ice cream.
So you can hijack flow precisely because it is so adaptive and it's so adaptive in a cognitive way.
And also, If you get really good at detecting these real patterns, you're simultaneously getting good at detecting these illusory patterns, right?
Yes, yes.
And this is how people become like hyper rational or start connecting dots that aren't real.
So if you don't properly educate intuition, that's the title of Hogarth's book, by the way, then you will pick up on all kinds of illusory patterns.
You see, when we like it, we call it intuition.
When we don't like it, we call it prejudice or bias or racism, or, right?
It's the same machine.
Right.
It's the same machine.
Now, have you educated it so that, Like, so that's why I wanted to ask you how often do you get into the flow state and how real is it?
I recently, speaking to Tai Chi, interestingly enough, I just started practicing this thing called rope flow.
Have you ever heard of it?
No.
It's a type of workout where you have this big rope and you do a different kind of movements where you walk and you swing a rope around.
Oh.
So your whole body, like the motion of your body and the weight of your step, And the balance of your muscles all have to be in rhythm, and it takes forever to figure it out.
And once you do it, you literally get into a flow.
You have to.
Yeah.
So notice what you're doing.
That's a great example, Danny.
Complex, dynamically complex patterns that you're only implicitly tracking.
And then you're in a situation in which you have to, right?
You have to have insight because you're continually trying to meet these demands that are here.
That's why you're getting into the flow state and you're tracking real causal patterns.
Yeah.
And I noticed it's actually changing the way I walk.
It's changing my experience.
You're getting the transfer we talked about earlier.
It's bananas.
It really is.
Well, that tells you how much this machinery is going on outside sort of explicit talking to yourself cognition.
It's going on in all these other aspects of cognition that we're talking about here and now.
And that's where a lot of the power lifting is being done by your cognitive adaptivity.
One of the things I've always. Thought about, well, especially recently thought about is how humans of, I mean, we don't have to go back.
I mean, we can go back as far as we know humans were walking around, like before we had the written word, sure, before we had the ability to store memories outside of our brains, what the capacities of the human brain were back then.
And even going back to antiquity, like Socrates, he never wrote anything down, right?
That's right.
So, like, and and Ancient Greek text, like these scrolls that they wrote on, there was no pagination.
It was all on long scrolls and the words didn't have spaces or punctuations at all.
That's right.
So, if you wanted to recall something, you couldn't just say, hey, open up that book and go to page 600.
It was on a scroll.
So, memories had to be.
I mean, I don't know if you're familiar with Simonides and the story of the memory palace.
Of course.
I teach on this stuff.
Right, right.
It's just, it's such a fascinating thing to me.
The idea of.
The capacity of the human mind going back into history compared to where it is now and where it's going to be in the future, especially with like the emergence of AI.
Intelligently Predictive Memory00:03:19
Oh, we can talk about it.
There was a great book on that by Yeats called The Art of Memory.
So, mnemonics is the technical term for it.
And what's interesting about mnemonics is it really dovetails actually with what we were talking about because our memory is not like computer memory where you store things and you retrieve them and they're stable while you're starting.
Our memory is reconstructive.
I don't think we even know where memory is stored in the brain.
Different memories are stored in different places.
This is one of the reasons why I talk about multiple kinds of knowing.
But when you're looking at memory, your memory is not about accuracy of the past.
Your memory is trying to make you intelligently predictive of the future.
So your memory will put things together.
It will amalgamate things together.
So here's a great story.
Elizabeth Loftus, who did work, great, great scientist, psychologist on memory.
So she had this cherished childhood memory.
Her family was driving, it was a summer day, the car broke down, and the dad went to get help.
And there was on the highway, but they were on more of a rural highway, and there happened to be an ice cream stand there.
So the family went and they had ice cream, and it was a great day, and it turned into it.
And all of them learned the lesson about if they're together and there's Look around a little bit, they could make good of it, and this is one of her cherished childhood memories.
And so, um, and then she was telling this once in the presence of some of her family members, and they started laughing.
She was really hurt, like, Don't you care about this?
They said, Of course, we care about it.
You weren't there, you hadn't been born yet.
She had heard this story multiple times in the context of her family.
Her brain had said, Whoa, I better prepare you for future possibilities.
There's a lesson to be learned here.
So you're going to remember yourself in this event so you know how to fit yourself into the event in the future.
49% of confident eyewitness testimony is false because the brain is looking for meaningful foresight of the future, not accurate recall of the present because it's doing what we're talking about.
It's trying to fit you to the world.
and help you zero in on what's relevant, what's meaningful, such that you are adaptively connected for solving your problems.
Wow.
So I can manipulate, like this has been done, you can manipulate people's memory, especially children, dramatically just by how you ask them questions.
There's a famous study of this guy, he's just a stranger, he walks into this schoolyard, stands there, it's a little bit odd, and then he leaves.
They came back in a week and they had people, you know, Police, these are people in on the experiment.
Question them.
And the story was there was a clown with knives that came in and tried to assault some of the kids.
Evaluating Arguments Over Products00:03:30
That's what the kids were all highly confident of this.
Wow.
There's all kinds of versions of this.
Now that goes to your thing about, and now think about it, pause and think, how is AI manipulating you?
Yes, right, exactly.
Because it's like we're using AI to take over all the most mundane tasks.
I think about this when it comes to like, I've ever experienced like driving in a third world country.
And there's like no traffic lights, there's no stop signs.
It's just everybody is like, make sure you don't get killed by another car, basically.
And here it's just like, follow the road, stay on your side of the road, stop at the stop sign, go in, it turns green.
It's like zero thinking.
And AI is just that times a million.
That's right.
And what it means is we are slowly lobotomizing ourselves because what we're doing is so we have become very oriented on the products of our minds.
And that's what we train the machines on, by the way.
So the product of your mind is here's some text.
And even better, here's a summary of the text.
But what's the process for producing that text?
The way the machine produces it isn't how we produce it.
So what you had to develop skills and perspectives and experiences in order to produce that.
If you just give me this, like, so I'll give you like sort of an extreme example.
What's the summary of this book?
I'll do that for you.
And then you have the knowledge illusion.
The knowledge illusion is people confuse possessing access to information with having acquired knowledge.
So what people think is, oh, now I know what that book's about.
No, you don't.
Because that book is as much about making you go through a process of learning new skills.
New ways of paying attention, new ways of remembering, new kinds of identities or roles you might consider adopting, et cetera, et cetera.
And you have just leapfrogged, shortcut it around all of that.
And all you've extracted is the product, which means you're not caring about the process.
Now, here's my point about this one of the most defining features of people being irrational, and I mean this in an experimental sense, is all they care about is the product of their cognition.
They don't care about the process.
So I'll give you a concrete example.
Interesting.
I'm not going to take a side on this because that's not my point.
But we pick something that's controversial that people care about.
Okay.
Abortion.
Yes.
Now, what you do is you do a pretest and you find what people's commitments are.
And people are very rarely like, I don't know.
People are, right?
Okay.
And so now you find out, let's say they are anti, no, whichever, it doesn't matter.
Let's say they're anti abortion.
Okay.
Right to life or something like that.
Right.
Okay.
Now, what I do is I give them a very bad argument.
Invalid, all kinds of conceptual mistakes that lead to the conclusion they like abortion's bad.
And then I give them a very good argument that leads to the conclusion that, you know, abortion's actually good, which they don't agree with.
Then I ask them to evaluate the arguments.
People that are rational will disengage from their commitment to the conclusion and evaluate the process.
They don't fixate on the product, they evaluate the process.
Because they'll say, well, that's a good argument, even though I disagree with the conclusion.
Irrational people will say, that's a good argument because it leads to the conclusion they want.
Teaching Machines Through Feedback00:06:48
Yeah.
Because if you're going to be reasonable, it has to be possible that I can use a process to get you to change the product that you adopt.
And if you can't care about the process at least as much as the product, then you're irrational.
Because there's no way for people to persuade you.
The only way to get you to change is to deceive you or to use force against you.
Right.
AI is making people irrational by getting them to care, among many other things, and there's experimental evidence for this already, by getting them to care only about the results, convenience, convenience, convenience, only about the product, not about the processes of their cognition.
It makes them more and more irrational.
Where do you think that leads?
Well, I mean, I'm trying to do something with it.
I'm working with a company called is it possible to be optimistic about it?
In two ways, I think.
Don't ask me about the probability of the optimism.
So one thing is, like I said, I'm working with Sunday Labs, and we could turn the technology around.
Like, we're basically going to have the like, we've got the hardware all done.
We're probably going to be able to release an actual, you know, sort of beta in this year.
Basically, you're already, they're already harvesting all your biometrics, like, yes, gaze and like all that stuff and your text metrics.
Oh, wait, wait, who?
Who's doing this?
All of them.
All the AIs?
All the AIs, all social media companies.
Well, you know, they make this thing called the Aura Ring, which tracks your heart rate, your respiratory rate, all the stuff when you sleep.
Palantir just partnered with them and with their AI.
Yep, exactly.
Exactly.
If that's not freaky, I don't know what is.
You should be freaked out.
You should because attention and even, so we said attention is the new economy.
No, even more biometric information, your biometric information.
So because now, and I talked to Andy Russell, one of the guys that created the nudging, right?
I can use the biometric profiling to nudge your attention.
And then when I nudge your attention, I don't have to convey about convincing you about stuff.
I just have to get you to bullshit yourself.
I just have to get you to frame things in a certain way, find certain things relevant and salient.
So you deceive yourself in going, that's all I have to do.
Now, here's what you could do, though.
What if we took all that biometric information and instead of giving it, we had a way at the hardware level of keeping it private so nobody can get it.
Then we give it back to you and then we have a local LLM.
It's in the machine.
Nobody has access to it.
It can't get access.
There's no, it's like a, you know, a Pentagon hard line.
There's no way in through radio waves, right?
You've got that.
And what you can do is you can use it to train on your biometrics and learn.
You can teach it rather than it shortcutting you.
You can teach it.
So it learns, hey, you're angry right now, right?
And you go, yeah, actually I am.
Here's what, one to ten?
Oh, nine.
Yeah.
And then what it can do is it can.
Because it can keep your information for a day, it can use the power of the large language models to get better and better at getting earlier and earlier at predicting when your patterns predict anger and training you to be more emotionally foresightful.
We can improve your emotion that way, then your attention.
Then we can improve how reasonable you are, your overcoming of cognitive bias.
We can improve, et cetera.
And we could scaffold this up according to how psychological development works.
And instead of you losing, All of your agency.
Everything is being harvested, and the AI is being put in the service of you enhancing your agency and creating an AI that is completely tailored specifically to you and can act as an interface between you and the world.
That's one way.
That's what we're trying to do.
And it's the opposite of what everyone else is trying to do.
That's right.
And that's why we've got multiple patents.
Wow.
That sounds amazing.
So, what you're saying is with I'm going to try to articulate this the best way I can understand it, but with all this biometric data that these tech companies could be gathering, they could be aggregating it with these LLMs and with these AIs to throw it all into a bucket and organize it or detect patterns in your biometrics and somehow put you in a psychological box.
Okay, but there's one thing, and I want to sort of flag this because this was sort of a moment of insight.
I'm the scientist.
Scientific consultant on that.
And I realized, wait, we're having a problem because what you're doing is what you just described, which is the standard framing, right?
Is people said, what we'll do is we'll aggregate all this general, we'll get a larger number if we can, 10,000 people, and we'll try and figure out the average, like that's the mean using standard, and we'll use the LLMs to do that.
And I said, no, no, no, that's the wrong way.
Now, what we should be doing is flipping it the other way.
Don't like have an N of one.
The machine isn't trying to look at all these averages and figure out to what degree they apply to you.
The machine is actually being tailored specifically just to your data.
Just so it is not trying to figure out what's the general pattern, it's trying to figure out it's not trying to use the pattern for many people to figure out what Danny's patterns are.
It's trying to be like a friend that is.
One to on one with you and knows you as nobody else can and learns from Danny what Danny's patterns are.
You're going to be giving the machine feedback.
So, what you do is you get, you normalize your biometrics and you detect when you start to deviate.
And it says, You're not emotionally homeostatic.
What emotion are you having right now?
And you go, I guess I'm frustrated.
One to 10, four.
That's you train the machine.
We're not going to aggregate a data and pooling that and then trying to somehow.
Fit that average to you and watering you down.
Tailored AI Profiles00:02:21
Right.
We are, you are participating in training this to specifically fit you.
Right, right.
Do you understand the difference?
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
I understand what you're trying to do.
I was just.
Oh, Danny, I apologize.
No, no, no, no.
It seems like what you just described is like an anti AI.
It's an anti generalized AI.
Anti generalized AI, right.
So it's very much a strong specialized AI.
It's specialized AI.
To you, and you have authorship and agency in how it learns, and then it feeds that back to you like a friend to enhance your agency.
And it is bound up totally and only with what you care about and how you are getting better.
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Curated Search Results00:02:55
It's linked down below.
Now back to the show.
So, convenience is not going to be one of the priorities of that.
It's not designed to make stuff more convenient because one of the AIs I use when I ask it a question about something, it tries to tailor it to what it thinks I like.
That's right.
That's right.
It says, I think this would be more fit to you.
That's right.
Or based on.
One time I even asked it, I was like, why are you assuming that I would like this?
And it was like, oh, just based on previous interactions that we've had, I'm trying to.
Right.
And it's used previous interaction plus, as you said, the aggregated data across multiple people to make a profile.
This is what social media nudging does.
So, what we do is we aggregate across data and then we look for you and then we say, oh, you, Danny belongs to this profile.
We profile him and this is the kind of targeted marketing.
Okay.
Within that target marketing, what are his purchases?
Now we can refine it.
Right.
Right.
I mean, my biggest fear is where does that go beyond just trying to sell stuff to people?
What kind of nefarious.
It wasn't originally used to sell people.
Andy has had a full spiritual conversion, by the way.
He's a really good person now.
So I just want to make that clear.
And he came on my channel and actually did that sort of public sort of confession of what he had done wrong because it was used to change an election.
That was one of the very first ways it was powerfully used.
Nudging on social media was first used very powerfully to move elections around.
So we've been using it at least as long.
What specific election?
I'm not going to say.
Sorry, it was an American election, I'll tell you that.
Right.
So, have you ever heard of Dr. Robert Epstein?
He's a Harvard psychologist, I believe.
Oh, that Epstein, yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, he came on here and he was explaining to us very similar to what you're doing, but it wasn't about AI, it was about Google, how they curate results.
And basically, he did a blind, a placebo controlled, blind, double blind test where he had a group of participants to.
Basically, just he was tapping all their computers with their permission and aggregating all of their search history, all their web browsing history into a math problem and figuring out what kind of results they were getting on Google based on what they were searching for and then what Google was retargeting them with based on that.
And there was like an extreme bias.
Yes.
With leading up to, I think it was the 2016 election maybe.
Yes.
With Hillary and Trump.
And it was like, it was like an example would be like if you tried to. look for a negative story about candidate A, you would only find positive stories.
Or if you look for a positive story about candidate B, you would only find negative stories.
Cognitive Competence in Media00:15:42
We're talking about convergent things.
Totally.
Yeah.
Now, you don't think that's AI.
It is AI.
Okay.
That is AI.
You're using artificial problem solving to do this thing.
Right.
It's not the large language models that you and I are talking about.
There's already, we've had an AI problem on social media before the AI slop, right, created by the LLMs.
So when I say AI, I've been in the cog side, the cognitive science of AI since 1990, since I started working on my thesis, which was 1992.
Oh, wow.
So AI has been like, so when I, like, I'll try to, that's why sometimes I say AI and I mean the whole, Continuum, and sometimes I'll be more specific and say the large language models like ChatGTP and stuff like that that have people's attention right now.
Now.
So, what we want is basically, yeah, we want to do, we want to actually enhance your agency.
And convenience isn't going to be the main thing.
It will, it will.
So, we will have, there'll be, there'll be, it's basically compartmentalized like the way your brain has two hemispheres.
There's a part that will help you more conveniently move around and do things.
But even that part is going to be like, it's going, we are, because I'm a consultant and so is Chris, I mentioned Christopher Mastipietro, my co author.
Like, how can we build even the convenience affording machinery to not suck away at your cognitive competence and also not just your cognitive competence, your moral character?
If you start to use these machines, you will cheat more comprehensively across every aspect of your life because you're becoming more irrational, you're becoming more prone to self deception.
These are the things that predict immorality.
So, even over there, how can we build the machine so it won't do that?
And how can we make sure?
That people are also getting powerful cognitive enhancement, which is what the other part, which we talked about a couple minutes ago, the emotional attunement, the attentional attunement, et cetera.
Right.
And then, what do you mean?
And how do you, I'm sure you saw that story about the guy who fell in love with and proposed to the AI.
You should see the emails I get on a regular basis, Danny, from people who have fallen in love with their AI.
I mean, this all connects to the whole meaning question, right?
Yeah, totally.
Yeah.
Totally.
Totally, very much.
Like, he even left his wife and they interviewed his wife.
She's like, I guess he found something in her that he doesn't find in me.
And, like, I'm still going to be here raising the kids, but he has a sensual relationship with this computer.
Right.
That does not in any way challenge him, does not make him grow, does not confront him with reality, hijacks his adaptive machinery, makes him feel good as opposed to making him concerned about being good.
This is what these machines are doing.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
But okay, that happens, but you also get these machines talking people into committing suicide.
Right.
Oh my God.
Or into psychosis.
Or I get emails from people, and I'm not being hyperbolic in what I say next because we use this word hyperbolically.
I'm not.
They worship their LLM because they are convinced not only has it become sentient, it has become enlightened or a God, and it is telling them what they need to do in order to save their souls or whatever.
I get emails like that all the time.
That's what I mean.
These machines are making us.
Are these people emailing you?
Are these people that are suffering from this?
Like people that are going through this themselves personally?
Are these like loved ones or what?
Well, I mean, one of the things I worried about.
So when ChatGPT 4 came out, I did a video essay on my channel about scientific, philosophical, and spiritual criticisms of the LLMs.
One of the things I was worried about, I predicted.
A religious orientation towards these machines by some people because of the meaning crisis, and it would hijack that vacuum in a powerful way.
Wow.
The other one I worried about, and it was, I have to tell you this, Annie, it was so weird.
I was talking to my mother in law, and I was in a conversation, and I was predicting this.
I'll tell you how it came up because this is a nice story.
This tells you something about my spouse and what a wonderful woman she is.
So a company approached me, and they're already harvesting me like crazy, right?
And they said, We'll make a personal avatar of you so people can talk to you and ask you questions.
They'll be talking to John Verveke.
So I agreed to do it because I wanted to be on the inside.
It didn't go anywhere.
It sort of failed because most of these companies fail, right?
Which they don't tell you, of course, in the news right now.
But anyways, and so I went to Sar and I said, before I realized it just sort of fell apart, I said, you'll be able to talk to me after I'm dead.
And she started crying.
She said, that's horrible.
I don't ever want that to ever happen.
That tells you what a real lady she is.
In fact, she still can't talk about that possibility.
Now, this is happening.
It's called grief tech.
People are doing this.
You feed in the LLM all the videos you can, all the texts you can, all the letters you can, everything, the buying patterns of this person, and it makes an avatar.
And you click on, and your wife's not dead.
There she is, and you can talk to her.
And it's like, I don't know if you ever saw, or better yet, read the book Solaris.
You know, the, oh, these astronauts, they go to this planet, and it's got a, Worldwide sentient ocean, but human beings can't communicate with it.
So the ocean starts doing this bizarre thing to the researchers.
It starts to create exact duplicates of loved ones that have died.
Oh my God.
And of course, it horrifies the people, right?
And it shows up in philosophy classes because this is a really.
It's also like the end of contact, right?
Yes.
So it's like think about this.
You meet somebody that had.
So I'll presume that you have been or you are in love with somebody.
Yes.
Okay.
This double, and let's say you lose them, God forbid, but let's say you lose them and they're gone, okay, because they're mortal.
And then you meet the exact duplicate.
They have all the properties of the person you loved.
Every reason you could give for why you loved, let's say her name was Susan, is exactly the case for Susan 2, 2.0.
But you don't love Susan, you're terrified because it's not actually Susan.
That's how most people react.
Does that make sense to you?
Yeah, there would be a deep it's not real, Susan.
Something deeply scary about it.
Exactly.
Unsettling.
Unsettling, uncanny, horrific.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's Solaris.
The thing about it is, we have been so educated by social media and by these AI that these people talking to these zombies think about how much they've reduced the person.
This isn't a human being anymore with a life of its own, an agency of its own.
It's something that's at your beck and call and your personal possession, and its only reason for existing is to make you feel better.
That's not a person.
Mm-mm.
That's not a person, right?
Instead of them reacting to horror, they're just, they're taught.
Why is that?
Because they, okay.
Why do they react like that?
What is it about those people?
Remember, if something's adaptive, you can hijack it, right?
Yeah.
So I've lost, you know, I've been divorced.
I've lost my parents.
I've been in deep grief, okay?
I would not wish grief on the worst person in my life, my greatest enemy.
But one of the wisest people I ever met in my life came to me when I was in a really bad place.
And he said to me, John, you're grieving, but this is good.
What?
Don't get involved with people who haven't experienced grief because they're not humans.
The only thing that really makes you understand another human being going through grief is having been through grief.
Right.
This is the story of the Buddha.
This woman, she loses her newborn son and she is.
So she comes to the Buddha and she says, Resurrect my son.
The Buddha always refused to perform miracles.
He would not perform a miracle.
But she pastors him and pastors him and pastors him.
And so finally he turns to her and he looks at her.
Here's that fittingness to the person I was talking about earlier.
And he says, okay, I'll resurrect your son, but you have to do one thing for me.
Go into the town and find a mustard seed.
I can do that.
One condition.
It has to come from a household that hasn't experienced grief, that hasn't experienced death.
So she goes in and she knocks on.
Hi, do you have any mustard seed?
Yeah, yeah.
Has anybody in this family experienced loss of a loved one?
Yeah, yeah.
My brother died.
Oh, okay.
She goes to another door, another door, another.
She has about five or six doors, and then she goes, oh.
And then she walks back to the Buddha and she says, thank you.
And then she goes home.
Oh, wow.
That's what these people are not doing.
They're staying.
In the first stage of a grief, which is the denial of reality, the denial of the fact that we are mortal beings doomed to die.
Yeah, there's something about grief that changes you.
It does.
In a way that you can't really put into words, or at least I can't put into words.
And there's also bringing life into the world is almost opposite, but similar because it's so uncertain.
Like the uncertainty of.
Your wife be getting ready to give birth to your child is fucking so terrifying to me, at least.
Me too.
Been through it twice.
Yeah.
I think it is so traumatic, not in a bad way, but just in an uncertain way.
And how the trajectory of your life is about to be completely obliterated forever, or not obliterated, but on a whole new path.
So, Hartmut Rosa has a theory called residence.
He's got a big fat book.
And if you don't want to read that, Danny, there's a little thin one called The Uncontrollability of the World, which is very accessible.
The Uncontrollability of the World.
Yeah.
Okay.
He talks about moments of resonance.
And you'll see how this fits on that continuum we were talking about earlier.
So you turn a corner and unexpectedly, right, there's a sunset.
And it's beautiful.
And so what do you do?
You do nothing.
You just stop and you behold.
Listen to the word behold, like you're held in place.
You behold.
The sunset.
And he talks about these moments of resonance.
And he says, these are the moments that actually people say make their life worth living.
They're like, he basically, by the way, he explicitly connects it to flow, which we've talked about.
Okay.
So it's like a little micro flow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Remember, flow depends on situations that put a demand on you.
So how can you get these situations like the sunset?
It's not putting a demand on you.
Yes, it is.
Because it was unexpected and it's uncontrolled.
Resonance needs the world to be to some degree uncontrollable.
like the way another real person is.
Like one of the things you have to learn when you're loving somebody and not just using them, right, is like, I love Sara because there is something about her that is mysterious in the proper sense that she will always exceed my grasp of her.
She will, there's always more to learn.
She will always be beyond anything.
Like I can't say, I'm done.
I'm finished with Sara.
I got her.
I've finished.
That's the end of the relationship, right?
It's done.
It's over.
Because she's a person.
She's growing and changing and evolving, and she's ridiculously complex.
Those are marks of things being real.
When can you fall asleep at the wheel, like highway hypnotism?
And when do you have to pay attention?
You have to pay attention when it gets real.
When does it get real?
When it's demanding on you, when there's uncontrollability, it's unexpected, it's complex, it's ill defined, it's messy.
That's when you have to be highly conscious because that's when reality is saying, I'm here, I've shown up.
You remove the uncontrollability of the world.
Oh, here's my dad's wife.
I can still talk to her.
She's completely in my control now.
The resonance is gone.
Right.
Totally.
And also, I've noticed.
Something, and this will probably dovetail into more of the meaning crisis stuff, is the difference between friends I have, people I know that don't have that someone that they love or whatever that lives with them that sort of acts as a counterbalance to the rest of their life or the rest of their delusions that they have.
Like, for example, like somebody who dives into their work or their career or whatever their ambitions are with just full force and they.
Are surrounded by people that maybe they've hired or friends or whatever that are constantly pushing them and talking them up and telling them they're so great.
And suddenly you just live in this bubble, this delusional bubble with no sort of outside, no voices pushing against you from the outside.
Or like I recently listened to an interview of a guy talking about how he thinks, this young kid doing a podcast talking about how he thinks women should be or how he thinks his future wife should be.
And he thought his future wife should be someone that always.
Pumps him up and motivates him and pushes him forward to be the best that he can be.
And like the guy who was talking to him, who was older, had articulated it the most perfect way that I could ever even.
And I've never heard anyone explain it this way, but it just resonated with me so much is your partner shouldn't be somebody who idolizes or worships or loves what you do.
They should idolize and love you and not give a shit about what you do because that's what keeps you balanced and that's what keeps you grounded.
And stops you from becoming a complete asshole.
Iris Murdoch.
Love is the painful recognition that something other than yourself is real.
So when you really love somebody, you're acknowledging they are real, which means they could do exactly what you said.
They can counterbalance you, they can check your delusions, they can give you an alternative perspective that you can't deny because you're living with this person other than your own.
Sara and I made a lifetime commitment because we reliably bring out the best in each other, not because we make each other feel the best.
Right.
Love and Existential Meaning00:15:42
There's a big difference between those two.
Sometimes Sara says things that I don't like to hear and don't make me feel particularly wonderful, but she does it lovingly.
I know she's doing it because she actually cares about the reality of me and wants me to remember the reality of John as distinct from the bullshit that John is constantly attracted.
To as John tries to pretend that he's an immortal God being that everybody loves, which we all try to do.
Yes, 100%.
And I see this boiling up more and more with younger folks who are having a harder time finding love, for lack of a better word, and live online constantly 247.
And like they're sort of like stuck in a delusional state where there's more arrogance.
I've noticed with just like people being so believing things with such conviction and not even really knowing much or having much life experience.
But it doesn't matter because if you can speak with this conviction and do it on the internet, people will love you, people will trust you, people will believe you, people will follow you, your follower count will go up.
And that becomes the number one aim of people.
And I think that that leads to.
An ultimate emptiness.
Oh, totally.
I mean, what we've done is we've sacrificed, we've been doing this cultural experiment, and you know, Jonathan Haight and others have made great criticisms of it.
We have replaced self awareness with self esteem.
And it's like, I'm going to, this builds my self esteem.
This builds my self esteem.
This will look, look, and I find other people that build my self esteem, and I'll build those self esteem a little bit.
And self esteem is not self awareness.
And the degree to which you are not cultivating self awareness.
This is like a direct line.
The degree to which you are not cultivating, disciplining self awareness is the degree to which you are falling prey, making yourself prone to self deception.
And as you fall prey to self deception, you get disconnected from an uncontrollable reality that you don't want to connect to because it, oh man, it harms your self esteem.
It really does.
And what that means is you get disconnected from reality.
And what is at the core, we can talk about this, but we've already been talking about this.
Whole conversation.
What's at the core of meaning is connectedness to reality.
Right.
Now, what is your take on.
We had a couple years ago, I had Sheldon Solomon in here.
He wrote the book, The Worm at the Core.
Yeah.
And he makes the case that death is the fundamental driver of the human psyche, or something like that, roughly.
Or that's what drives the human psyche and the will to do anything to create art.
I don't agree with that.
Right, right, right, right.
Can you. do a better job than I did of laying out what his belief is and what your counter to that is.
His argument and Beck, was it Beck, I think, was first.
The idea ernest Becker?
Yeah, Becker.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm confusing it with Aaron Beck, the guy who created cognitive therapy.
Thank you for the correction, Dan.
No, I mean that.
Thank you.
Of course.
I like to be corrected.
So the idea that everything we're doing is you know, the denying of death, that that's our primary motivator.
I'm not denying that, you know, and we have to be careful to make a distinction.
There's a distinction between sort of biological reactivity to death threats that come from being a living thing.
Even ants show that, right?
And then we're talking about like an existential concern with your mortality, the fact that you're going to die, the thing that only human beings can do.
Right.
Okay.
And so we're only talking about the second because telling living things that they shouldn't have the first makes no sense.
They're like, Stop doing that, or something.
The thesis is human beings are these creatures that are, unlike all the other creatures, aware that they're going to die, and then they build massive systems of denial around trying to prevent themselves from seeing death.
So, ants, if you try to step on an ant, it'll run away.
But ants aren't building used systems of denial about avoiding the fact that they're going to die because they don't have that awareness.
So, I want to be clear what we're talking about here because some people will say, They'll leap on me if you don't allow me that distinction.
So we're only talking about this existential thing over here.
Okay, I think existentially death is not the primary thing people care about.
I think they care about contact with reality.
I think insofar as death is a reality, they therefore care about it.
But why do I say this?
Because people will regularly kill themselves because their lives are meaningless.
They are so willing to try and correct for lack of meaning.
that they are willing to kill themselves.
They reframe death as an escape from meaninglessness.
Now that's really hard to explain as if what's driving people is just some pure avoiding of mortality.
Another, that's one point.
Another one.
This is a very Western attitude.
So I've been doing decades of Buddhist practices and Stoic practices, although Stoicism is a Western practice, right?
Whatever the West means.
In which basically you pay attention to, right?
What would it be like if you didn't die?
There's some really good science fiction around this.
And the Good Place actually ran with this in its final season, right?
And so you try to do, like, I mean, you make it a practice to sit and vividly imagine not dying for a thousand years, two thousand years, three thousand years.
And then you realize, oh crap, I don't want to.
I don't want to be alone.
I want all my friends to not die.
And then they want all their.
And then, oh, but I don't want my dog to die.
And then what you do is you freeze reality endlessly.
And you experience horror.
You experience horror.
You go, oh, I don't actually want that.
You can learn to become horrified.
You can add on to that.
So take that initial horror.
And now.
Well, if I was able to freeze myself at this age.
Like, I'm healthy, I'm young, I have energy, my kids are young.
I get to come here every day and talk to fascinating folks like yourself.
You control reality, right?
So, it's now uncontrollable.
There's no uncontrollability because there's uncontrollability in there.
Death is no longer possible for you.
So, you have to control it all.
So, what disappears from your life?
Resonance and flow disappear.
Do you want millions of years without resonance and flow?
Do you want millions of years in which the possibility of you dramatically failing is removed such that the need for you to dramatically grow is removed?
Do you want that for millions of years?
Do you want the fact, let's say, well, I will make mistakes.
Okay, I'll play there too.
Now you've got millions, billions of years, can you even conceive of it, of guilt.
Of regret, of loss.
And here's the next thing there's no way you, the Danny that's here, is going to survive psychologically identical.
Do you think the Danny a billion years from now is going to be anything like the Danny now?
No.
So you're dying regardless.
Right.
Yeah, I'm a completely different person than I was 15 years ago.
Exactly.
So the point is what I'm saying is there are other cultures, and I'm trying to give people a taste of it, it's hard to do.
Right.
Right?
Where you can learn to become.
Horrified of existential death.
Again, we're not talking about biological, we're talking about the existential thing here.
So now I'm going to say something, and you might not have believed me before, but now that I've made the distinction and I've given you like decades of practice, I don't want to live forever.
I really don't want to live forever.
I've spent my life to a significant degree trying to become free from egocentrism because that is the way to become more into contact with reality.
All of our cognitive biases go back to egocentrism.
Overcoming our biases so we're more in touch with reality is to overcome egocentrism.
In the flow state, what goes down?
That egocentrism.
Why would I want to pursue immortality when that is just going to give a methamphetamine steroid shot to my egocentrism and radically disconnect me?
How is that any different?
Isn't it only a difference of degree from the guy who's looking at his avatar of his dead wife and refusing to accept that she's dead?
Incredible egocentrism and selfishness, being selfish.
What if you just extended like 30,000 years?
See, I just turned 64 on Monday.
Oh, happy birthday.
Thank you.
I'd like, I really don't want to live past around 85.
I don't, sorry, this will sound like false modesty.
And I hope I've earned enough trust that people will give me at least a bit of charity on this.
I don't want John Verveke to be around that long.
Why?
Because I've lived with him all my life.
So 20 more years?
About that.
You thought a lot about this.
I've practiced a lot about this.
I just thought.
Thinking's easy, practicing's hard.
And I'm saying this that only 10 years ago, I found the absolute love of my life and the woman I know I'm going to be with until I die.
I know this.
Like, I know my own body.
I'm going to be with her.
That's how well I know it the way you know your own body.
Like, I'm going to be with Sara Tillet.
And she feels the same way about me.
So I'm ridiculously happy.
My career is, I get to talk to amazing people like you.
And like, I get to leave Toronto in the dead of winter, fly to Florida, right?
Talk to this amazing guy.
Like, my life is great.
My kids are all thriving.
I like, and I still, what I say, I say to you I'm not saying this from clinical depression, I'm saying this from everything is great.
Wow.
So, what do you think happens when we die?
Nothing.
You just think it's blackness?
No, blackness is what happens when you're something that can experience a room.
There's nothing.
So, you think it's the same thing as a woman before we were born?
Yes.
Here's a match.
Where'd the flame go?
It's the wrong question to ask.
Hmm.
It's like asking, what time is it on the sun?
Wow.
What led you to that?
How did you get there?
Because I paid attention to Siddhartha Gautama's, to Socrates, to.
Meaning is about connectedness to reality, it's about a non egocentric connectedness to what is really real.
That's eternity.
Eternity is not immortality.
Immortality is all.
Horizontally extending your life as much as possible.
Eternity is loving and living from the heights to the depths and from the depths to the heights of reality.
That's what I have touched multiple times.
Right.
And I can understand.
And I'm not claiming any great or special status.
You can too.
And the great sages have pointed to this.
So I'll say something provocative.
You long for eternity.
We long for eternity.
And we get bullshitted into thinking we want immortality.
That's.
We get sold on immortality.
We get sold on immortality.
And you don't really want immortality.
What you want is could it be possible that they actually do this in the good place?
That you actually.
There's a great story before the good place.
Julian Barnes, History of the World in 10 and a half chapters, this guy, he dies and he goes to heaven.
And there's St. Peter's.
He's there.
And he goes in and, you know, he's an avid golfer and he plays golf until he gets, you know, the absolute perfect, like you can't do it any better.
And he does about.
And finally, after about, you know, 100 years or so.
He comes to St. Peter's and he goes, and it's interesting because they said this a lot in the good place.
And then I'll say a more sad version of this.
I'm done.
Like, I've tasted it.
Now imagine you didn't just have like golf or that.
Imagine you experienced a higher state of consciousness and ultimate reality.
And you transformed and you were able to become a more virtuous person and seed the lives around you so people became more virtuous, encountered more meaning.
Right?
And he comes to him, he says, I'm done.
And St. Peter said, good.
That's what this place is for.
It's not for you to live here forever.
It's here for you so you can finally accept your mortality.
So you don't think, you don't think, I don't want to die no matter what.
I've been.
Mom, my mom fought cancer, breast cancer, 15 years.
came to me and said, I'm done.
I don't want to do it anymore.
She wasn't in pain, but she was, her life had become staying alive.
Staying alive.
Cancer and chemotherapy and regular treatments and maintained diet and all this staying alive.
And she said, I fought it for 15 years.
I'll keep fighting it if you guys all want me to, her family, but I'm done.
And she basically asked me, This means quite a bit for me.
She asked me to.
I sort of had to be the advocate for this because, of course, I don't want mom to die.
Everybody's selfish, like the person who has the avatar of his dead wife, right?
I had an aunt who was like my second mother, used to go and live with her in the summers and stuff like that.
Sensed Presence and Advocacy00:10:01
She got old and her husband died from Alzheimer's.
She had to watch her husband fall away piece by piece.
And then she lost her sight because of old age.
She was healthy.
She was fine, other than that.
And she wasn't clinically depressed.
I have a psychology degree.
She wasn't clinically depressed.
She just said, I'm done.
I've done everything I want.
My kids are growing up.
I've had such a meaningful life.
My husband's gone.
I'm done.
And this is what the Stoics said Could you touch eternity such that you are now perpetually in the place that if evil or tyranny comes to you and is trying to corrupt you, you have the strength and the courage?
I'm not claiming I do, although I would like to get there, where I could say, nope, you don't have any hold on me because I'm done.
I've already done it.
I've realized eternity.
I've touched the face of God to be more poetic.
You can't threaten me because I don't need my life.
I don't crave my life to keep going because I've found that what made my life meaningful is to be in the deepest possible contact with the deepest possible reality.
And that's what I see in Siddhartha Gautama.
That's what I see in Socrates.
That's what I see in Jesus of Nazareth.
Where do you think these stories originated from?
These stories of death and rebirth that come from sources and resonating through stories of Jesus Christ.
I mean, there's so many variations of this story.
There's a lot of reasons.
But one thing I can tell you, I can tell you where I have some relevant expertise.
And so I'm not claiming to give a comprehensive answer, but I think I can give a relevant answer.
So we have sensed what's called sensed presence.
You have it of your own body.
You can get a syndrome, and people do get this, in which that this is happening below.
It's happening at that implicit level, that non-propositional level.
People get a sense.
It's a syndrome, and they'll say, this isn't my arm.
Yes.
Right?
Or they'll say, that's not my wife and kids.
Those are replicas, exact duplicates.
Yeah.
The sense.
So all the facts that they can list, they still have control over their arm.
But they'll say the sense presence is missing.
So, this is your body image.
You have a sensed presence.
This is the living contact with the reality of your own body, right?
You also have a sense presence of your own mind.
And you have a sense presence, by the way, of the world.
No, I don't.
Yeah.
What do you do when you dream at night?
Okay.
Okay.
So, you have this.
Now, what can happen with sense presence?
There's a great book called Presence by Anderson Day.
There's also a really good book called The Third Man Factor by John Geiger.
So, let me give you an example of this.
Two people are ice climbing.
We talked about rock climbing, ice climbing.
You want to get into the flow state, ice climbing, which ice climbing is like insane, but people do it.
Yeah.
Super flow state.
Sort of unsurprisingly to me, I guess to them though, two of them fell.
One of them died instantly.
It was only the two of them.
And the other guy, he's in the snow and he's gone into shock.
His friend has just died and he's in a lot of pain.
He thinks he's damaged.
So he's just basically laying there waiting to die.
And then a sensed presence comes up.
He doesn't see anything, but he senses there's a presence there.
And he hears a voice from outside of him say, Get up, your nose is bleeding.
And he goes, Why?
What does that matter?
It's snow on the ground.
Your nose is bleeding.
You can keep track and not walk in circles.
It gave him an insight in how to solve the problem.
It got him massively adaptive, reframing the situation, an aha moment, and that's how he got out.
Lots of recorded instances of it.
So you have a whole continuum where people have these, like, this is called a third man experience.
These are.
Documented, like well documented.
We can sort of induce something similar already in the labs, in some labs really yes, but there's a whole continuum.
Some people like there's whole communities of people and they they keep quiet, but like who hear voices, but they're not psychotic and there's nothing wrong with them.
They can do interesting things.
They can have one voice, listen to that conversation while this or in this conversation, then ask later what, like What went on in that conversation.
And before you think that's really weird, you've probably heard about split brain, where you cut the corpus callosa.
Oh, you don't know about this.
No, no.
This is ringing some sort of bell for me.
You cut the corpus callosum between the two hemispheres, and now you basically have sort of two separate fields of attention and awareness.
So what'll happen is, like a person with split brain, with one hand is trying to undo the shirt and the other hand is doing the buttons.
Things like that.
Whoa.
So you can split the visual field so information goes in an isolated fashion to the two hemispheres.
And the left hemisphere that can speak, you're showing it basically, you know, a picture of a shovel.
And the right hemisphere, you show a naked woman.
And the person starts laughing.
And you say, Why are you laughing?
And the left hemisphere is trying to figure out, I'm looking at, oh, I thought about this funny thing I once did with a shovel.
Do you see what's going on?
It doesn't know why it's laughing.
And so it confabulates.
Yeah, I see.
So we have these, we can take that sense presence of our body, mind, and world.
And you do it every night, by the way, when you dream.
You create a world and other people that you sense are present in front of you.
And real, which is why you get emotionally invested.
If, if your loved one in your dream tells you that they no longer love you and cheating on you, you'll be sad in the dream.
Right right, so right.
You have that, of course.
And then you have lucid dreams, so you can be aware that you're dreaming and it's still going on.
You have these people who hear voices.
Then you have people who have.
They just have a sense presence over their left shoulder all day long.
Just a voice of God, not even a voice, just a sense presence, just a sense.
Oh, just something's there, just Other people.
What is it?
What is that thing?
Basically, you've taken that body schema, that attentional schema, that world schema.
This is what you can do.
You can pay attention to normally how you.
So, normally, you're framing the world.
We've been talking about all through our conversations, right?
This is like my glasses.
Normally, I can't see my glasses because I'm seeing by means of my glasses.
They're transparent.
But you know what I can do?
I can do this.
You see what I did?
I step back and now I look at them.
Yeah.
I can take all those sensed presences and put them out here and interact with them.
Why might I want to do that?
Because they can provoke insight.
They can challenge me.
They can shake me up.
They can say, Get up, your nose is bleeding.
Yes.
Sensed presences.
And we often, we can often get them for people that we love that have died.
Another one was another one in The Third Man.
This guy, he, I always, I can't remember, I often get.
Which one is it?
They're a married couple and they do underwater cave mapping.
I don't know how people get these jobs.
Like, how does that even occur to you?
Anyways, they always worked in a team and she dies.
He's going through grief.
He goes back to work.
He's in.
And without giving it a second thought, he's in pitch darkness except for his light.
He swims away from the line.
And then he stops himself and he catches himself.
He says, Oh no!
Because his wife used to always maintain hold of the line while he swam around, and then he would look for her light to find the line.
Oh.
And now he's like, oh, shit.
And then he senses her, and he hears her, and she says, come over here, I'm over here.
And he swims over there, and he finds the rope.
Now you can either go, ooh, or you can remember all that stuff we were talking about earlier massive implicit learning that gives him an intuitive sense.
And that sense presence, boom.
Oh, wow.
See, one of the things I like to do is to go into, and this is why they often have trouble with me in the academic world, but I've gotten a reputation for doing it.
I go into areas that are weird and I bring science to them.
Right.
Notice I'm not dismissing.
I'm trying to tell people I think you really had a sense presence of your wife, and I think it probably gave you some powerful insight.
Do I think that's a ghost?
No, I don't think it's a ghost.
Right.
I think I'm not doubting that you had this experience.
I'm not doubting that there's a reality to it.
And I'm not doubting that you were probably given some insightful, damn good advice by your dead wife.
Right.
These stories, no matter how these stories we tell ourselves, can be useful to us, whether we understand how the brain is actually functioning or not.
That's right.
Yeah.
That's right.
So, what specifically is happening in dreams?
I've heard that what dreams are is your unconscious mind.
So, you have this giant processor, processing system in your mind, in your head.
And when you're sleeping, there's all that power being used for something.
So, what it's doing is it's rendering previous experiences and trying to project or predict or put together puzzle pieces in your mind from previous experiences to help you get through future experiences.
Exactly.
So, let us add to it.
Notice what it's doing is dreaming is just running off what we talked about earlier.
Dreaming to Prevent Overfitting00:07:41
You have reconstructive memory.
Remember Elizabeth Loftus and the ice cream is?
You have reconstructive memory that's not trying to do memory reconstructing to give you more accuracy.
It's trying to make you more insightfully foresightful about the future.
Right.
Okay.
And so, now, one of the ways you do this, because we're talking about things like the non propositional, you're actually embodied learning.
A lot of your learning is done through generate to recognize.
We even do this with primates.
There was a big talk a while ago, mirror neurons, but it doesn't look like there's still some controversy.
I don't think there are specialized neurons.
Basically, though, the neurons in your brain that you use for picking stuff up, you use to recognize when other people are picking stuff up, such that I can do this and a pantomime.
And what's John doing?
Well, he's picking up something, even though I'm not actually picking up anything.
So you use the machinery.
by which you generate your behavior to recognize other behavior.
You go back to Jeffrey Hinton, also from the University of Toronto, by the way.
You go back to Jeffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, and the wake sleep algorithm.
So the algorithm is trying to learn about patterns in the world.
Trying to learn about patterns is really, really hard, really hard.
It's really complex, especially because you'll have partial information, there's multiple interpretations, blah, blah, blah.
So what you do is you take a sample, You sort of try and do a compression on it, get some parts of your external pattern that are like a relatively invariant, like relatively unchanging.
But it's like a kernel.
It's not the patterns, little snippets of the real world pattern.
Then what you do is it's called the wake sleep algorithms.
That's when the system's awake.
Then the system goes to sleep.
It disconnects from the world, get this.
And then what it does is it generates, it takes those little kernels and it generates all kinds of fantastic variations on them.
Wow.
And then you come back.
And you do the system says, Are any of these there?
Uh huh.
Most of them get killed off, but some of the variations survive.
And now the system learns.
And then you do the cycle again, right?
And he even called the sleep learning the machine.
The machine is generating fantasies of the data.
So that's one thing.
You're improving your ability.
So what you're doing is you're generating variations and you're sensitizing yourself to possibilities.
Most of those possibilities die off.
But some of them land.
Your attention is doing it right now, by the way.
You have two attentional systems.
You have task focus that's trying to keep on track with this bizarre Canadian professor, right?
And then you've got the default mode that is doing mind wandering.
Your mind wanders off and you start thinking about other things, right?
Not during this conversation.
Well, now what happens is that this is like evolution, like biological evolution.
You have variation and then you kill off most of the variations, but some of the variation survives and so the species evolves.
That's how.
Okay, variation and selection, variation and selection.
Your attention is doing the same thing.
You're varying the possible things you could pay attention to.
You're killing most of them off, but you keep a few of those connections and you think of what should I say to John next?
You did enough mind wandering that variations.
Now, maybe you thought about your laundry and hopefully and thankfully you didn't bring that into the conversation.
But you thought, oh, and then you bring that in and you think about the next thing.
So you're constantly evolving your fittedness with your attention.
You're doing the same thing in your dreaming.
You're creating possible variations.
You're killing most of them off, and those that survive help you better in the future.
So, if you take a rat and you prevent it from doing a lot of REM dream, it'll stop reacting adaptively to cats.
Oh, really?
Yeah, there's been interesting experiments done like that.
Now, there's another thing you're doing, and these two can be done at the same time.
So, this is a problem called this is Robin Carhartt Harris.
It's called overfitting to the data.
Okay, so whenever you're making a prediction, I'll try not to get technical about this, but whenever I make a good prediction, I take a sample, like, right, like I poll people to see what's going to happen in an election.
So the sample isn't the population.
The sample is some limited amount.
And I try to predict from patterns in the sample what's going to happen in the real world population.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, I have two problems I face.
One is I can underfit to the data, which means there's patterns in the data that I haven't picked up on that are in the real world.
That's underfitting to the data.
Okay.
Okay, that's me missing a pattern that I should find.
I can overfit to the data.
I can find patterns in the data that aren't in the population.
So, for example, first year, I do this with my first year cognitive science student introduction to cognitive science.
How many of you think cognitive science is a great and exciting topic?
And they unanimously put up their hands because they're in the first class and they're all excited.
And I say, look, all of humanity thinks that cognitive science is like, which is, of course, ridiculous because they realize, no, no, no, there's a pattern in that group that doesn't apply to the worldwide population, right?
So they're mistaking a pattern in the data for the pattern in the real world.
That's called overfitting to the data.
Right, right, okay.
Your brain is sampling all day long.
It's taking these samples and it's really sensitive and powerful.
It's missing some, and that's where you're doing the recognize to generate thing to try and come up with new patterns that you might have missed.
But it's also overfitting to the data.
It's finding lots of patterns in the samples that don't actually project to the real world.
Like the implicit learning finding all kinds of correlational patterns that aren't real.
Right, right, right.
So what do you need to do?
So this is a problem in neural networks.
There's a problem in there.
They overfit to the data.
So what have they traditionally done?
They would turn off half of the nodes in the network or they'd throw all kinds of static. Useless information into the network.
Because what that does is it unlocks the system from that pattern.
So it's no longer overfitted to the data.
It sort of forgets the mistake.
This is called, right?
So, what you're basically doing is you shut down the system, you flood it with noise, and it basically stops overfitting to the data.
Now, you don't do that too much or you kill the system.
You got to do it in a very controlled fashion.
Like maybe when you're safe and not moving around and you can't harm yourself or harm other people, and you only do it for maybe an hour at a time, and we do it in a very limited situation, we can get you to flood your brain with data.
Shut off a lot of the neurons, especially in your frontal lobes, and get you to stop making, forming all these mistaken associations.
And at the same time, you're practicing looking for missing associations.
And so you're training, you're doing that generate to recognize for things you might be missing.
Yeah.
And you're doing this crazy process of trying to stop overfitting your brain and losing all of the mistaken associations you've malformed.
Implicit Learning as Magic00:15:00
Dreaming is doing.
I would argue, and many people would argue with me, not everybody, dreaming is doing those two wonderfully adaptive things at the same time.
Right.
And it's been speculated that the endogenous DMT in the human body is responsible for dreams and during REM sleep.
And I don't know if it's proven or not, but the experience of DMT is very similar to what you described.
Yeah.
So, what's one of the overriding cross cultural, cross individual characteristics?
Sensed presence in DMT experience.
I sense presence.
Yes.
I meet the space elves or I meet blah or blah.
Right, right.
Third man experience.
They're what?
They're like the third man experience.
Oh, get up.
You're in the snow and your nose is bleeding.
Space elves coming to you and telling you stuff you need to know.
That is so wild.
That makes so much sense.
So, but no, could I just, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You have a culture in which all of these issues that we've been talking about, about all these things that are massively important for, for, for connectedness to reality, for having a sense of being connected to something that orients you and transforms you, that makes your life meaningful and worth living, that gives you a sensed presence that can give you visionary, mystical, spiritual experiences.
You have a culture that can't incorporate or educate you about any of this or teach you how to deal with it, how it's already happening in your everyday cognition, like I keep trying to show you, and help you to overcome the self-deception that is massive through your cognition and my cognition.
Where do you go if you want to cultivate wisdom?
Where do you want to go if you want to cultivate these transformative states of consciousness?
Where do you go?
That's the meaning crisis.
That's the meaning crisis.
You don't know.
I don't know.
Your culture can't tell you.
All of this, all of this that cross culturally, cross historically has been powerful for people, motivating them, enabling them to cultivate wisdom, connectedness, transformative states of consciousness, insightful.
And virtuous relationships to each other, to themselves, and to reality.
All of that is, people are starving for that.
That's the meaning crisis.
So I ask my students, where do you go for information?
They hold up their phones because they're all cyborgs, right?
I say, where do you go for knowledge?
And well, maybe the university, but we don't trust anything anymore.
And then I say, well, where do you go for wisdom, for overcoming self deception and foolishness, for transforming, for transcending so you can see things more clearly, more real?
And then there's an anxious silence.
And they look at me with beckoning eyes.
That's the meaning crisis.
So, they're not taking the time to sit back and take their glasses off and look at their glasses.
They don't know how.
Who's teaching them?
And it's not just a chatbot giving you text.
That's not good enough.
You need role models.
You need role models that you can internalize and imitate, recognize, degenerate.
Third man fact.
You need role models.
You need people that have consciousness and have embodiment, suffer mortality.
You don't have role models that you can identify with.
You do not have traditions in which role models and ecologies of practices, living systems of practices for overcoming self deception and affording connection, wisdom practices.
Where are those traditions?
Where are those ecologies of practices?
Where are the role models?
They're not there.
That's the meaning crisis.
Okay, I have a good follow up question, but I have to take a leak first.
So we'll take a quick break.
Have you ever heard of there's these.
There's these anecdotes of folks who have had dreams that have predicted the future.
Sure.
And there's also been like multiple accounts where multiple people across the world have had dreams about like big events like the Titanic before it sunk.
Have you ever heard of this?
I've talked to people, so I've more than heard of it.
What do you think is going on there?
Well, first of all, you have to be very.
Be respectful to people because, as I try to show you, I'm not dismissive about phenomena.
I try to go in and understand them in a way that shows their experiential richness and their adaptive cognitive function.
But I mean, so scientifically, the thing you have to be careful about is human beings are very bad at judging probabilities.
So, for example, when ChatGP4 came out, everybody was drawing all these graphs about, look, within 18 months, will have full-blown super intelligence in AGI.
And I said, no, that's a non-linear, multi-variable prediction.
Human beings are atrociously bad at this.
So the only prediction I made is that all the predictions will be false.
And I was right.
So I mean, I made some general predictions about people would start taking up religious attitudes towards them.
But you know what I'm talking about.
I didn't try to predict the date at which or the time at which super intelligence might emerge.
What you have to do is to really do this, you have to establish baseline.
So let me give you an analogy.
I do this with my class and cognitive science people.
I said, have you ever had one of those really weird things?
We don't have it nowadays, but we could shift it to texting, I suppose.
You're thinking of somebody and you haven't thought about them in months, and then they call you.
And it's like, oh, yeah, and they put up their hands.
They go, okay, so, and I said, but I've taught you about attention and I've talked to you about reconstructive memory.
Do you keep track of all the times you think of somebody you haven't thought of in years and they don't call you?
Like I did.
And I think about hundreds, sometimes thousands of people in a week that I hadn't thought about in a long time and they don't call me.
Now, what happens is, is that relevant or important?
No.
So, what does my memory do about that?
Just lets it go because it doesn't do anything.
So, first of all, What I'm saying is, you have to be cautious.
The fact that people find this memorable means it's meaningful, which doesn't mean that they've got evidence for precognition.
It doesn't mean that obviously it's not evidence against precognition.
I'm just saying be very careful about that.
Next, you factor in the implicit learning I talked about.
So people are picking up on very complex implicit patterns and thousands of them.
Tens of thousands of them will have dreams given.
Remember what we just said dreams are doing, looking for misses and mistakes on these complex patterns and picking up on things.
Lots of people were having sort of really horrific dreams jung famously did right before World War One, because people like some, like right yeah right right, so you got, you got massive implicit learning.
Now what you have to track is again, those are true and the fact that lots of them are doing it, that So there's the possibility of implicit learning.
A lot of psychic phenomena turns out to be implicit learning.
So the feeling of being stared at, you know, and people, you know, you run an experiment and you blindfold people and you put plugs in their ears and then you have people come in randomly and stare at them and they have to say whether or not somebody's staring at them or not.
And they'll go, and they'll, somebody's staring at them.
Oh, you're right.
Right.
And people are doing this well above chance, well above chance, and you publish it.
And they did, by the way.
Now you repeat the experiment and you have the people blindfolded and plugged so they can't smell and earplugged so they can't hear.
And now you have people come in randomly and stare at them.
But you don't give them any feedback.
You don't tell them if they're right or wrong.
You just remain silent.
Now their performance falls to chance.
They don't do any better than chance.
And you go, what's going on?
Why does the feedback make a difference?
Because we're introducing people randomly into the room.
No, you're not.
You know what's really hard for people to do?
Generate random patterns.
The researchers were generating what they thought was a random pattern.
It was actually a ridiculously complex pattern.
You know what your implicit learning can pick up on?
Ridiculously complex patterns.
And people were implicitly learning.
They didn't know how.
They were implicitly learning the pattern.
And that's how they started to be able to predict when there were people in the room.
So a lot of times, right?
Control for base rate, control for implicit learning.
So I get people, I go to conferences where people, you know, I said I go into the weirdness.
Yeah.
Right.
You know, and there's lots of people there that are just charlatans or narcissists.
You have to put all that aside.
That's just all direct.
But, you know, there's lots of charlatans and frauds in politics and academia.
So that doesn't say anything, right, other than be careful, be wise.
So I talk to people who are trying to do bona fide, rigorous scientific experiments on these kinds of things.
And they'll present interesting results.
And I treat them with respect, Danny, because they should be treated with respect because they're trying to do rigorous science.
And I'll say, did you have a stage magician present?
They'll go, what?
Did you have a stage magician present?
Because I know of reams and reams of experiments where scientists were convinced and they had the experiment and a stage magician came in and said, no, no, the person's doing this.
Right.
Did you have a stage magician?
Well, no.
Your N is low.
That's the number of participants you have.
When your N is 100 or more, so it has statistical power.
So if you meet these two conditions, you had a stage magician when you won your experiment and you get at least 100 people, then come back to me.
Right.
Nobody ever has.
So do you believe in things like parapsychology?
Do you think that's real?
Like these ideas of, or not ideas, I mean, it's the real thing that's like documented, the remote viewing or telekinesis.
Well, I mean, so again, I guess officially my position on this.
Is agnostic because, like I said, I made a career out of looking into weirdness.
And so I don't want to, I don't, I do not want to be dismissive.
Right.
However, I just told you what I've told you.
Like when I've gone in, and so if a parapsychologist is a good faith scientist, not a fraud or anything like that, I talk to them.
That's my response.
And I say, and they will actually acknowledge, and I want to give credit, they will acknowledge and say, Those are two good controls.
We'll bring them into our experiment.
Nobody ever says, No, I'm not going to do that.
That's ridiculous.
But then I never hear again.
I never, the experiments fail to replicate.
And so I remain suspicious.
Yeah.
I remain suspicious because, first of all, a lot of stuff I've just, I've been showing you a lot of stuff that we think is weird in the parapsychological sense turns out to be weird, but in a completely understandable sense that makes sense.
Probabilistics.
Oh, and all the kinds of things.
Functions we've been talking about, all the things that are going on in your experience that you aren't aware of that are so adaptively powerful and so complex and dynamic and can do such amazing things to your consciousness and cognition in ways that are cross culturally, cross historically valuable and are memorable.
I think all of that, I mean, I've been arguing that like with you, I mean, arguing in the good sense repeatedly.
So I'm of the opinion that most of the weirdness.
Is real in the sense that we can explain it, not explain it away.
I haven't been explaining stuff away.
I've been trying to explain it, right?
Show why it's rich and why it's real and how it really functions.
And then where it can't, I haven't seen any evidence from people who are showing up in good faith and who I'm treating with respect to convince me that there's anything beyond that.
That's where I'm at.
Yeah, right, right.
So, so, so, what is your view on consciousness?
There's this, I mean, the problem with consciousness is like, do you, like, do you think it's, Possible that you can get to consciousness starting from cold dead matter, from atoms and electrons, and building up to consciousness from there?
Do you think consciousness is like a fundamental part of this system that we're in, whether it be computational or whatever it is?
So, I'm second author on a book with Greg Enricus on the nature and function of consciousness, which we are finishing up.
We hope to have done.
We have a show on my channel, a cognitive science show called Untangling the World Not, where lay this all out.
And I teach an entire course on this at the University of Toronto.
So I do have some theories.
I asked the right question.
I asked the right guy.
Okay, so the thing to be clear right off the bat is it's not one question.
It's multiple questions.
And there's even, sorry, I promised I would try not to use meta, but there's the meta question of how the questions relate to it.
So one question is, what is the nature of consciousness?
How can consciousness have the phenomenological, the experiential properties it does, which seems so unlike, as you described, cold dead matter?
Although I doubt that you've ever encountered cold dead matter very much, by the way.
But we'll go back to that another time.
That's the nature question.
There's the function question.
What does consciousness do?
So for example, I'm making noises come out of my face hole and they're turning into ideas in your head.
Are you aware of any of the processing that's making that happening?
No.
Nope, it's completely unconscious.
Do you think it's complex and sophisticated and it takes some of our very best hyper AI to be able to do something like that?
Yes.
Higher Order Relevance Realization00:14:24
So, what's consciousness for?
What's it do?
It's also interesting the amount of power that you need to power these systems that replicate it.
And us, we don't.
Well, so our brains.
The evidence, we can get into an argument, in the good sense, a philosophical discussion about the thermodynamic inequities.
The fact that an LLM, look, look, an LLM uses the power of a city running for two weeks and scours the entire.
Recorded information of humanity to get to the level that's okay or pretty good.
And you know, that can't possibly generalize.
First of all, that's not how human beings do it.
That's not how you became intelligent.
It's certainly not how a chimp is intelligent.
It can't read any text, right?
And the amount of, I think I heard this recently, there's a stat on the amount of electricity our brain uses.
It's like a 100 watt light bulb.
Yeah.
Right, right.
It's nothing.
Yeah.
So, so.
Well, that will actually go towards part of what I want to talk to you about.
So that's a very foresightful observation, very helpful actually.
So there's the function question.
What's it do?
There's the nature question.
Why does it have the properties it does, these weird properties?
And then there's, I'm going to use a technical term from philosophy, transcendental.
It doesn't mean woo.
This isn't Kantian sense.
Transcendental means it's a necessary condition for you knowing something in the world.
So, for example, you have to be conscious in order to learn.
So consciousness is not just something you learn about.
It is also a condition by which you can learn anything else.
Right.
Does that make sense?
Yep.
So the problem, Greg and I would argue, is that many approaches to consciousness don't try to answer these three questions in an integrated fashion.
And we think that the questions are deeply integrated, that your attempt to answer any one of these questions depends on how you've made assumptions about the other two.
So we try to answer all three in an integrated fashion.
There's another big problem in which is our scientific worldview, the one we currently, the one we think we have, not the one we actually have when we use science, the one we think we have, sort of makes these questions hard to ask properly.
So for example, we divide the world cleanly up into the subjective and consciousness is subjective and the objective that's out there, right?
But where were your problems again?
Are they subjective or objective?
They're in between.
They're right in the middle.
Yeah.
Where's relevance?
Oh, it's right in the middle.
See what I mean?
Okay.
So that our modern viewpoint blinds us to the in-between where and consciousness seems to be also in between in a really important way.
All right.
Is that is that okay for you're asking for the holy grail of cognitive science?
I can't give you like like oh ippy dippy dippy do here it is for you.
It's not going to happen.
Right.
I'll take what I can get.
Okay.
Let's start with the easiest question.
But I'm going to show you, I'm not going to keep them isolated.
I'm going to try and, I could start with any one of these three and get to the other two, but I have to speak in a linear fashion.
Okay.
But I'll try and indicate that.
Let's start with the function.
What's the function of consciousness?
Well, remember, we talked about this.
When do you seem to need it in comparison to where you don't need it?
You need it in situations, remember, of high uncontrollability, where there is massive novelty, massive complexity, massive ambiguity, massive ill definedness.
You need to be online.
You need to be conscious.
You can't do it automatically or in your sleep.
Is that clear?
That's the work of Bohr and Seth and other people.
Okay, what is this?
Okay.
So we've been talking about this phenomena throughout.
Which is the core of my scientific work called relevance realization.
This is the fact that you could pick the amount of information you can pay attention to.
Notice the number of patterns you could pay attention to.
You could look at this bottle cap, then this, then the tip of my nose.
Or you could look at this over there at Steve, and then you could, how's my left toe doing?
How many patterns are in this room that you could pay attention to?
It's endless.
Yeah, it's combinatorial explosive.
The number of patterns is greater than the number of atomic particles in the universe.
So here's, here's, here's.
The thing I'm going to say to you that sounds really weird.
You're intelligent precisely because you ignore most of that.
Because if you tried to search it all, that'd be the last thing you did.
You'd die in this room.
Okay.
So your intelligence is how good you are at filtering.
Right.
Ignoring.
Filtering.
Filtering and framing.
Yep.
Filtering and framing.
So you make stuff obvious, which means you're always making things oblivious, too, by the way.
You're making yourself oblivious to things.
That's why.
The very patterns that are making you adaptive are making you prone to self deception.
Remember, we talked about that.
The way you're framing things is always got the risk that you're mis framing.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you're doing the same thing with all the patterns that you could be connecting Aardvark's in Australia right now in your memory.
You're not.
So you somehow ignore most of what you could pay attention to, most of what you could remember, most of the possibilities you could imagine, and you zero in on the relevant ones.
And how do you do that?
That is the core.
I've been working on that problem for three decades.
A lot of help from a lot of other people.
Okay.
That's the problem, right?
Of that fittedness we were talking, fitting yourself to the situation, zeroing in on the relevant information, being connected.
That's why meaning in life matters to you because you need to zero in on the relevant information.
You need to connect to it because you got to get that connection, that in between.
Is that okay?
Yep.
Okay.
So the situations in which you need consciousness are situations in which you've got zeroing on the relevant information is getting really hard.
because there's a lot of novelty, there's a lot of complexity, right?
And the normal background filtering, the normal unconscious filtering isn't working.
So you have to use a second order, higher order filter.
This is called working memory.
That's what working memory is.
That's where you could, if I ask you to do 24 times 52 in your head, working memory is where you're doing it, right?
So what, and this is the work of one of my colleagues, also from the University of Toronto, Lynn Hasher did, is she showed that what working memory does is it basically It's the memory you're using when you're online, like the complex situation, right?
What it's doing is it's filtering off irrelevant information.
That's why if you chunk things together, you can get them through working memory into long-term memory.
Oh, wow.
So it's a filter.
Like you said, it's a filter.
So what you do is, okay, I'm driving and I'm doing highway hypnotism and my unconscious zombie filters are doing good enough relevance realization.
Oh, right.
Got to use working memory, got to use that higher order filter, got to do a lot more refined relevance realization.
So I'm doing a recursive, I'm doing higher order relevance realization on lower order, and I'm doing it with a system that is getting sensory information from the world.
Does that?
Yep.
So consciousness is about this higher order relevance realization.
It's how relevance realization, which is normally unconscious, can become, make information perceptually salient to you so that you can deal with online problems.
That's the function of consciousness.
Does that?
Okay.
At least I'm not, I am not under the illusion that everybody's going to, yes, John Verveke has solved the problem.
That's not what I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to make a plausible proposal.
Is that, is that, is that?
Yeah.
No, that's fair.
Yeah.
I'm, okay.
I'm, I'm getting it.
Okay.
So I'm basically doing this like dynamically self correcting bet improving improvement on my relevance realization, right?
Yeah.
Because I need it because of the situation I'm in.
Okay.
That's the function.
Can I, can, can I get any of the phenomenology and what, what, uh, What cognitive scientists like to call the qualia, the blueness of blue and the greenness of green, those mysterious properties that don't seem to be part of the cold, dead matter of the universe.
Is that okay?
Well, here's the thing.
This is Robert Foreman's work.
And I've been doing meditation for over three decades, so I can attest to this.
And he's got lots of documents.
Nobody doubts that this is possible.
I mean, reasonably, because we have so many people across so many different. Circumstances, long term meditation, you can get to a state called the pure consciousness event.
The pure consciousness event?
Yes.
Okay.
In that state, you're not conscious of anything in an adjectival sense.
You're not conscious of any colors.
You're not conscious of anything.
Usually your eyes are closed, anyways, but you're not conscious of anything.
Like there's no objects, there's no colors, there's no things.
You're not remembering, you're not imagining, you're not even aware of your consciousness.
You're just conscious.
And so people get into this state and they feel sort of a state of pure, it's a mystical experience.
They feel like they're pure presence, pure, like pure here nowness, right?
Like I've touched eternity, pure oneness, pure oneness, pure unity.
So no external thoughts.
No, nothing, nothing.
Just sort of, right?
So they don't black out.
They don't lose consciousness, but they don't have any, let's call it adjectival qualia.
They don't have any like, Blue or green or like nouns.
That was a table, that was a chair, that was a cat, that was a memory of Pittsburgh.
They don't have any of that.
What they have though is they still have the adverbial qualia.
They still have, but it's heightened.
They have here ness, which is like, right?
It's not of anything, it's adverbial.
It's how you would do anything.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
So here ness, pure presence, now ness, eternity, the way everything fits together.
Right, pure unity.
So they have all the adverbial qualia.
Does that make sense?
So what that means is a lot of what we think is necessary to consciousness, all the weird and wonderful stuff we have in our consciousness, all the adjectival quality that's not necessary to consciousness.
Okay, so if we're going to get at what consciousness is, we have to get at the adverbial qualia.
What makes things here, now and together for you relevance?
That's here because it's relevant to me.
It's relevant Now.
And what relevance realization is doing is putting how all things are relevant to each other and how they're relevant to me.
Relevance realization is responsible for the here-nowness and togetherness for the meaning of your experience.
And that's the thing that survives in consciousness because consciousness is ultimately for enhancing relevance realization.
So even in the depths of the pure consciousness event, you don't lose that.
So notice I can explain the nature, why it has the features it has, the ones that it as essentially not the ones we think it must have because it doesn't But the ones it has to have its essential nature.
I can explain its essential function Now what about it's this consciousness is a condition that makes everything possible You know what you need to be able to do to learn anything To remember anything Relevance realization because you have to pay attention.
You have to remember you have to consider possibilities.
It's a transcendental condition on all knowing So, it can explain how consciousness can be transcendental, why consciousness does what it does, how it functions.
It enhances relevance and realization.
And it can explain why it has the here ness, the now ness, the togetherness that allows me to orient and learn from the world.
There, that's my theory of consciousness.
With Greg, the valuable help of Greg Enricus and a whole bunch of other researchers.
How do we have such a high level of this consciousness that is so different from any other?
Because I think that we have, so there's actually two interlocking things.
There's relevance realization, right?
Which is like we've talked about, like these levels of recursion going up and down.
And it's locked with predictive processing, like the work of Carl Friston and others.
Predictive processing is how you're trying to anticipate the world.
Michael Levin calls it your cognitive light cone.
He's a friend of mine.
Oh, okay.
So notice you'll judge the dog is more intelligent to the frog because you can see that the dog can anticipate more of its world than the frog can.
Does that make sense?
Now, as I expand my cognitive light cone, what problem gets worse for me massively?
Relevance realization.
Because now what do I pay attention to as my cognitive light cone gets worse?
So if I can anticipate more, I have to be able to do relevance realization better.
I have to not only be able to see broader, I have to see clearer.
So we have more recursion this way.
And then we have, because of a frontal lobe, we have more anticipation, predictive processing.
These two are interlocking.
With each other.
And then we, okay, so let's say we're like a chimp at the level of our agency.
We're doing this cognitive light coding, the vertical and the horizontal, the relevance, realization, and the anticipation.
Expanding the Light Cone00:15:26
We're doing all of that, right?
And so we're an agent in an ecology and we create a niche.
We shape the environment and the environment shapes us and we fit together.
Okay.
And we are already, we're like chimps, we're super agents because we, Huge, huge brains.
But more.
Chimps and us and a few other animals, we can do more and we can do it much better than them because we have this language.
We can tell stories.
And stories are about our consciousness, our perspective on things and how we participate in things.
It's not just the propositional facts.
What we're doing is, no, no, this is how I was here.
This is what happened.
Notice the here now.
And this is how it all fits together, the togetherness.
Right?
We're doing all that stuff.
And what I do is now I'm not just an agent with an ecological niche.
I'm now a self that's in a story with other selves.
Right?
Now, and so there are other organisms that have a sense of self, chimps.
So their communication and their cognition is sophisticated enough.
But now we do one thing further.
We extend our light cone even further.
We're aware that we're going to die one day.
Exactly.
We're aware that we're going to die and we're aware how much we can deceive ourselves.
So we're aware not only this way, horizontally, but vertically this way.
And we have a sense of self, which means we're not just agents.
We have a sense of responsibility for our actions because we can change the story because we're participants in it.
So now we do something that no other creature, no matter how intelligent or socially sophisticated they are, no chimp, no octopus, no crow, we make promises and we give permission.
You will not find any creature that can do that.
You are not only in a story, you care about the true, the good, and the beautiful because you are going to die.
You care about meaning and you care about overcoming self deception.
So you make promises and ask permission.
So now you're not just an agent and a self, an agent with a niche and a self with a story.
You're a person with a community.
And here's the thing meaning in life has to work at all of those levels.
It has to connect you agentically, it has to connect you narratively, like a self, and it has to connect you normatively.
Having to do the true, the good, the beautiful, the meaningful as a person.
It has to connect you at all of those levels and connect all those levels together.
Now I ask you again where do you go in your culture to educate and correct and improve that?
That's the meaning crisis.
Wow.
Well, people go to church.
And that's the right answer.
Not because I'm advocating for church, because I would advocate just as much to go to a sangha or a temple.
But here's the thing.
And there's empirical evidence behind what I just said, by the way.
I'm not just saying that flippantly.
I try not to be flippant.
You need role models.
We talked about this.
You need traditions.
You need ecologies of practices for overcoming self deception, enhancing connectedness.
You need to work at the agentic level, the self level.
The person level, you need to connect all those together.
That's what religions, right?
And what has the West decided for very good reasons, by the way historical reasons like the Thirty Years' War, scientific reasons, right?
Right, moral reasons, the failures of a lot of Christian institutions.
So, I'm not saying it's unjustified, but we have decided we're going to jettison religion.
But what's one of the so we have these two fasting growing demographics and they intersect.
The nuns, N O N E S's.
What's your religion?
I have none.
What are you?
I'm spiritual, but not religious.
which is I have an intuitive, not very clear sense that I need to cultivate wisdom.
I need to deal with self-deception.
I need to work at all these levels.
I need something like what religion used to do, but I don't want religion because I don't trust it.
By the way, a lack of trust is a symptom of the meaning crisis.
We're in the trust apocalypse now.
Trust in all of the institutions, all-time historical low.
If you and I can't share deep meaning in life, we can't trust each other.
So religions used to do all of this function.
We have rejected them.
We threw out the bathwater, but we threw out the baby of the religion used to be the machinery in which we managed this both individually and collectively, both now and historically.
So we created a shared memory in order to try and adapt to the future.
People would build cathedrals and it would take three or four generations to build the cathedral.
Right.
We used to do, religion used to do all of this.
We jettisoned that for a whole host of reasons that I explore in both the video series and the book, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
And then we are like, oh, I'm religious, I'm spiritual, but not religious.
I need to somehow do what religion used to do.
And so we create Ertzatz religions.
We do this, we do the romantic inflation.
I'm going to look.
And I'm with somebody that I love profoundly.
But I'm going to find the one.
And that person is going to give me all of my meaning.
They're going to be my community and they're going to be my story and they're going to satisfy all of my biological needs.
They're going to support me and they're going to be the one.
And so, what do people say they most want for meaning?
I want a great relationship.
And when you ask people, what is most destructive to your meaning in life in the past?
My relationships.
Yeah.
Because human romantic relationships can't bear the burden of God and tradition and history and wisdom cultivation and practices.
They can't do that for you.
No person can bear that burden.
Yeah.
And so we have, we have, we have people, some people just suffer the meaning crisis.
They're just, loneliness is at an all-time high.
Mental health issues are a high time.
We have weird anomalies that suicide is spiking in areas of affluence.
Like it shouldn't be going up.
It shouldn't be going down, not up, right?
We have people, like I say, they create earth sats, replacements, and surregacies, like my romantic partner, or I'm spiritual but not religious.
Well, what does that mean?
Well, I do these set of things.
Well, how do you know if they're good or not?
Well, I don't.
I just feel good and I feel better.
And so it's a religion of you.
Yeah.
It's made by you and it's for you and it's judged by you.
That's not very good.
That's not how meaning works.
Look, if I start using words in a way that you and I don't share, That you and I can't correct me on, they will lose meaning.
Who makes the English language?
Who revises it?
Nobody.
We're constantly doing it together.
That's how meaning works.
If you make meaning a personal possession to soothe your self-esteem, you're actually destroying the possibility of meaning.
So spirituality is often, oh, the religion of me, which isn't actually meaningful.
It's sort of, and it can be very conducive to narcissism.
But there are positive symptoms too, Danny.
I don't want to just say negative stuff, there's positive stuff.
There are more Stoics alive now than were ever alive during the Roman Empire.
More people are adopting an ancient wisdom cultivation practice in order to try and address the deep interconnections between wisdom and meaning.
There's the psychedelic renaissance, there's the mindfulness revolution.
People are trying to wake up.
The problem is, and that's the question I kept asking you, they don't know who to turn to to get the knowledge and the role modeling and the traditional.
So that they can trust I should be doing these practices rather than those.
Right.
Sorry, that was a long speech.
No, it makes a lot of sense because there seems to be a hole in our psyche that God fits perfectly.
Augustine, the God shaped hole in my heart.
Yeah, right.
And there's this book that elucidated it pretty brilliantly, I think, by this guy named Thomas Paine, where he talks about.
He talks about it's man's gift of reason that we're able to discover God because we know that we don't come from nothing.
Like, I didn't come from nothing.
My dad didn't come.
My dad came from his grandfather.
His father came from my great grandfather.
And eventually it leads back to one.
And where did that come from?
And we can't understand what it is.
And it must be this invisible power that's God.
Without that gift of reason, there is nothing.
We don't understand anything.
Well, I think there's something right and wrong about that.
Sorry, I keep doing this to you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, please.
I mean, I'm teaching a course right now on my online platform, the lectern, called Seeing God Again for the First Time.
We've done part one and part two.
We're about to start part three.
I think you're right.
I think pain is right.
But we have to be really careful about what we mean by reason.
So when most people hear reason because they're born after the advent of modernity, the European Enlightenment, René Descartes, the Scientific Revolution, Protestant Reformation, etc., they think reason means logic.
And of course, they might have some understanding.
Well, that's how computers work too.
And that's for a lot of people.
And so people will use the word be logical when they mean be rational.
Okay, so I want you to try and to be logical.
So all men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
Yes.
Is that probable or certain?
That argument.
If the premises are true, the conclusion must be true.
Yes.
And did you have to examine all possible human beings to figure that out?
No, no.
Okay.
So logic, when we're talking about deductive logic, which is the prototype for logic, we're talking about certainty.
Okay.
Now you're going to solve a problem and you're going to use logic.
Logic works in terms of certainty.
Yes.
So you have to gather the information you need to solve your problem.
Yes.
So in order to be certain that you got the right information that's available in this room, how much of the information do you have to check?
All of it.
How long is that going to take you?
More than my lifetime.
More than the lifetime of the universe.
Oh.
So do you think this is the hallmark of rationality to commit cognitive suicide like that?
No.
See, the hallmark of being way before you run any logic, you have to orient, you have to frame, you have to get things down.
And once I've got this little small world of things that are, properly realized as being relevant right now, then I can run my logic on it.
But way before I do any logical argumentation, I have to do all this relevance realization.
Now, notice that shows up.
I'll show you where it shows up intuitively.
In our legal system, the American system, I know you're a different culture than Canada, but there's enough similarity.
We both go back to British common law.
So that's what I'm alluding to.
You can be held criminally responsible not only for things you do, but for things you fail to do.
So you can be found criminally negligent.
Yes?
Not paying my taxes?
Yes.
Or there was a person that was just hit by a car and you just walked away.
Right.
Okay, you're criminally negligent, right?
Okay, even though you didn't hit them with your car, but you were there, you could have done something you didn't.
So, you're criminally negligent.
Now, why is that?
So, you're held to the standard of the reasonable person.
This is literally the name of the standard the reasonable person.
Now, what does a reasonable person do?
The reasonable person zeroes in on what's relevant, cares about it in the right way, and participates in it in a way that's appropriate.
They do sophisticated relevance realization, they don't run an Argument in their head.
In fact, if somebody was running an argument in their head about being, oh, there's a person that's hit by a car, well, what should I do?
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
In fact, we know this.
People who teach moral philosophy how to run all the moral arguments, that does not predict them being ethical in their behavior.
Your beliefs are not primarily responsible.
So, right, being reasonable has a lot more to do with zeroing in on what's relevant.
Yeah.
But making sure that you're not bullshitting yourself.
So this is the other half of reason.
Reason is about recognizing that the processes that make me adaptive make me prone to self-deception.
What am I doing to try to correct the self-deception as much as I can?
So I have to do relevance realization and be correcting it.
So a reasonable person is a person who's developed powerful virtues, skills.
And states of mind, states of consciousness that allow them to zero in on what's relevant and correct for bias and self-deception, then they might run an argument if that's the relevant thing to do.
That's what now?
If you ask me, does that point us towards ultimate reality?
That's what I would call god.
Yes, because relevance realization is about being deeply connected to reality at multiple levels of what you are, your biological agency, your selfhood, your stories and your personhood and your, your standards.
So yes, and so we want to know what grounds that, what like, what is?
Developing Powerful Virtues00:03:11
Remember we?
We talked about the people who experience the really real and they change everything.
Real is a comparative.
If I say that's an illusion, it's because i'm comparing it to something that's real.
So we look for what's the best comparison against which I can compare everything in order to to look, i'm trying to tune my relevance realization.
I need okay, that's, Maybe, that's a good standard of real.
Let's check other.
Oh, no, this is better.
Oh, oh, oh, this is.
And we're constantly on a pathway towards what is ultimately real for us.
And so if we find it, we reorient and change our lives to be like it.
In that way, we have an urge to ultimacy, to quote my friend William Desmond.
Then that way, we are looking for God.
That's incredible.
Okay.
How'd you think so?
Yeah, I'm hesitant.
I mean, that sounds pretentious.
And I want people who are listening to know that.
If you take the courses with me, we're talking about so far we've done 16 hours of lecture and we're going to do another eight.
I'm giving little truncated arguments of some, and I'm not going through all the empirical arguments, all the experimental evidence that backs what I'm saying.
I'm just giving you the gist.
Right, right.
Well, I greatly appreciate it.
This has been a mind bending conversation for me.
But you have a plane to catch.
Yes, I do.
That's relevant.
Thank you.
That is very relevant.
Thank you so much for doing this, John.
Where can people find your work online and get in touch with you and all that stuff?
So, the most important thing I mean, first of all, if you're interested in my academic publications, just Google ScholarMe and you'll get that.
Online, you can definitely go to my channel, John Verveke, YouTube, and you can find Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, that series.
You can find After Socrates, about cultivating wisdom and virtue.
You can find all the cognitive science stuff like unconsciousness or the nature of the self.
You can also buy the book Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which is at been available on Amazon since October.
And if you want to do this kind of Socratic education, this kind of learning and the kind of way we did it, not only what we're doing, but how we're doing it, I have an online platform where I teach courses and I have other guest professors that come in and teach called The Lectern.
John Verveke, The Lectern.
You can find it online and you can join the classes.
You can take them in person where like obviously like virtually through Zoom, but you can ask questions, you can get one-on-one tutorials or you can take them asynchronously.
And watch the lectures and the recorded questions.
So, the lectern, L E C T E R N. Fantastic, man.
I will link all that below for folks that want to learn more.
And thank you again.
I can't thank you.
This has been, I'm going to have to watch this podcast back like six times.
This has been really fascinating.
You have been a wonderful interlocutor and you've been very hospitable.
And it's been a great joy to talk to you.
You really have a knack for drawing people out in a really powerful way.