​​Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
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​​NOTES / Notes on Vervaeke’s series
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​​These are shared, public notes. Feel free to leave comments or questions wherever you like. 

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​In a single paragraph (lifted from episode 45):

  • ​​“Wisdom is an ecology of psychotechnologies and cognitive styles that dynamically (and reciprocally) constrain and optimize each other such that there is an overall optimization enhancement of relevance realization. Relevance realization within inference, insight, intuition, internalization, understanding, gnosis, transformation, and aspiration. In that sense, what’s happening is overlapping with the machinery of enlightenment. Wisdom is a dynamical system that is counter-active to the machinery of self-deception, and that helps afford the self-organized transformation into a life of flourishing, a life that is deeply meaningful.”
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​​That’s a big, somewhat unwieldy definition there. I transcribed it exactly since it seems to tie together so many of the concepts covered… but the full impact of the sentence can only really come after hearing each of the concepts within it set up expertly throughout the series. 

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​High level summary of notes (first pass):

  • ​​This was an amazingly insightful 50-episode YouTube series by John Vervaeke. Every episode was additive to the overall thesis and the pace worked really well for me. 
  • ​​Central organizing concept that gets introduced around episode 28 (though hinted at much earlier) is Vervaeke’s convergence of many threads within cognitive science, sense-making, and philosophy into a theory he coins “relevance realization”. 
  • ​​“Awakening from the meaning crisis” ultimately means crafting and participating within an ecology of practices for addressing the perennial problems that is coherent with worldview attunement. This requires cultivating wisdom and skills at many levels of being:
  • ​​Subconscious skills: relevance realization, connections being made, participatory knowing, religio
  • ​​Conscious skills: salience landscape, connections being known, mythos, perspectival knowing
  • ​​Cultural skills: credo, connections being shared, procedural knowing
  • ​​Psychotechnologies move up and down, complementary relationships to each other, opposing processes. 
  • ​​Meta-virtue of wisdom to collectively pursue.
  • ​​We must continually reach down into participatory knowing and afford it upwards into perspectival knowing and propositional knowing.
  • ​​He hints at the possibility of using technology to help foster this as an “open-ended credo” that functions somewhat like Wikipedia.
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​Raw notes

  • ​​These are the raw notes I took while listening to the full series, usually on Breaker (series link), but sometimes on YouTube (series link). I didn’t take notes on every episode but the ones that really stood out to me are captured. They may or may not make sense because I was mostly using the to bookmark concepts that I may eventually want to return to. 
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​Episode 1: Introduction
  • ​​Meant for people who are interested in this personally, not academically
  • ​​Upper-Paleolithic transition (late Stone age)
  • ​​Throwing spears → project 
  • ​​Our language is all founded on the early stuff happening ~40,000 years ago
  • ​​Calendars (phases of the moon)
  • ​​Art, music
  • ​​Near extinction event (end of last ice age, super volcano)
  • ​​Lots of evolutionary pressure, come up with a socio-cognitive response (broader trading networks)
  • ​​Develop rituals for networking cognition
  • ​​Hanging out with lots of strangers
  • ​​Pick up on other peoples’ internal states (metacognition, mindfulness)
  • ​​Initiation rituals (handshakes)
  • ​​Decentering, in order to participate in rituals
  • ​​Exaptation: taking something that evolved for a specific purpose and using it for a new purpose.
  • ​​Shamanism
  • ​​Psychotechnology: We’re natural born cyborgs. We use tools to move from a physical thing to a cognitive thing (through exaptation). Psychotechnologies fit our brain.
  • ​​The 9 dot problem
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​Episode 2: Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution
  • ​​Flow and implicit learning
  • ​​Clear information
  • ​​Tight feedback loops
  • ​​Errors matter
  • ​​When in flow or psychedelic states, parts of our brain start talking to each other that normally don’t. This is our capacity for metaphor.
  • ​​Dreams, trips, etc.
  • ​​Metaphors are how we connect ideas. Bridges.
  • ​​Shaman flight = metaphors of oversight, supervision, and getting high.
  • ​​Plato internal conflict
  • ​​Teach the man (don’t ridicule)
  • ​​Train the lion (don’t exile)
  • ​​Tame the lion (don’t kill)
  • ​​Therefore be at peace with self (therefore not threatened, less self-deceived, less self-destruction)
  • ​​Getting in touch with the world makes you better at getting in touch with yourself.
  • ​​Beyond cause and effect (Uraro, dynamical system theory)
  • ​​Enabling constraints increase the options
  • ​​Variation
  • ​​Virtual generator
  • ​​Selective constraints reduce the options
  • ​​Scarcity of resources
  • ​​Virtual governor
  • ​​Cycling through enabling and selecting constraints
  • ​​Systematically regulating a feedback cycle.
  • ​​Generator + governor = virtual engine
  • ​​This helps understand the mechanisms of growth and development.
  • ​​Aristotle’s notion of character
  • ​​That aspect of us that we can cultivate.
  • ​​Virtue = virtual engine
  • ​​What is the virtual engine on a person’s development?
  • ​​How much time do we spend on our character? If it is the virtual engine regulating our development.
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​Episode 3: Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar
  • ​​Lots of tie-ins to Metaphors We Live By, which are then used throughout the rest of the series. 
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​Episode 4: Socrates and the Quest for Wisdom
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​Episode 5: Plato and the Cave
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​Episode 6: Aristotle, Kant, and Evolution
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​Episode 7: Aristotle and Buddha
  • ​​“Having mode” needs like water, air, etc. Categorize world, organize it and influence it.
  • ​​“Being mode” needs require becoming something. Become mature, become virtuous. Requires an agent/arena.
  • ​​Sometimes we suffer modal confusion when we try to satisfy being needs with having mode. Capitalism wants to encourage this.
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​Episode 8: Insight and paying attention
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​Episode 9: Mindfulness
  • ​​Tap on a cup with a probe.
  • ​​In and out: Attention can be on your fingers, out through your fingers to the probe, or through your fingers and probe to the tapping, or through it all to the cup.
  • ​​Up and down: When reading a word I derive the word from the letters and the letters from the word.
  • ​​The letter is a feature of the word, the word is a gestalt of the letters, but the word is also a feature of the sentence. Everything is a feature and a whole.
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​Episode 10: Consciousness
  • ​​The Salience Landscape
  • ​​The Presence Landscape
  • ​​The Depth Landscape
  • ​​Consciousness defines the salience landscape so that different inputs become graspable in a way that offers affordances.
  • ​​An idea at a certain distance can be grasped. Too close or too far and it can’t be grasped, but might offer different affordances.
  • ​​The affordances are a function of the relationship between us and other things.
  • ​​“Meaning” is when the salience landscape offers affordances.
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​Episode 11: Higher States of Consciousness, Part 1
  • ​​Enlightenment is release from the super-salience of the ego.
  • ​​Moving from ego-centric to alo-centric (relative time the world, not the self).
  • ​​The act of making coherence increases your sense of meaning in life.
  • ​​Optimal grip: a fluid level of focus that provide the most relevant affordances.
  • ​​“The basic level” is the cat and not the mammal. It gives us our optimal grip.
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​Episode 12: Higher States of Consciousness, Part 2
  • ​​Enlightenment is finding an insight cascade with the skill of finding optimal grip.
  • ​​Is optimal grip objective and can it be improved with a skill?
  • ​​Appreciation of nonsense is important.
  • ​​Plausibility: convergence plus elegance
  • ​​High convergence, low elegance: triviality. Simulation theory. It doesn’t matter. Small but true.
  • ​​Low convergence, high elegance: far-fetched. Conspiracy theories. Big if true.
  • ​​Plausibility is more than truth.
  • ​​Coherence can exist without it being true. 
  • ​​Self-correcting plausibility = scientific method
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​Episode 13: Buddhism and Parasitic Processing
  • ​​All is suffering = all is threatened by the possibility of losing freedom (self-destructive, self-deceptive behavior = parasitic processing)
  • ​​Dukka = destroying movement
  • ​​Create a dynamical system that counteracts with the parasitic processing that reduces options.
  • ​​8-fold path
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​Episode 14: Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics
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​Episode 15: Marcus Aurelius and Jesus
  • ​​Agape: an agent/arena relationship (parent child love)
  • ​​Conversion is awakening into a new mode
  • ​​Love turns a nonperson into a person.
  • ​​Love is rehumanization.
  • ​​We turn non-persons into people.
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​Episode 16: Christianity and Agape
  • ​​Forgiving: giving agape love before it is earned.
  • ​​Love people to make them people, just as people did for us.
  • ​​Love never fails.
  • ​​Problem with this is that it can project your shadow into others.
  • ​​Ritual is about practicing an experiential metaphor.
  • ​​Practice is a metaphor of experience.
  • ​​Ritual, play = an enacted metaphor. Martial arts. Therapy. Hungry for ways of dealing with being existentially trapped.
  • ​​Existential entrapment.
  • ​​Anagogic: spiraling upward
  • ​​We can’t know/have enlightenment any more than we can know what it’s like to be a vampire. We can only be a vampire, or be enlightened.
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​Episode 17: Gnosis and Existential Inertia
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​Episode 18: Plotinus and Neoplatonism
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​Episode 19: Augustine and Aquinas
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​Episode 20: Death of the Universe
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​Episode 21: Martin Luther and Descartes
  • ​​A maddening episode. 
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​Episode 22: Descartes vs. Hobbes
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​Episode 23: Romanticism
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​Episode 24: Hegel
  • ​​Patterns of intelligibility
  • ​​To “realize” is the act of making sense and making wisdom real to you.
  • ​​It becomes part of the landscape.
  • ​​How the world is “being” to us.
  • ​​Geist / spirit of intelligibility.
  • ​​The Geist differentiates and integrates reality.
  • ​​Thesis antithesis synthesis = new thesis. And repeat.
  • ​​This process is dialectic.
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​Episode 25: The Clash
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​Episode 26: Cognitive Science
  • ​​Plausibility is trustworthy and multi-apt ness. Profound. Very reasonable and should be taken seriously.
  • ​​Triviality
  • ​​Bullshit / far-fetchedness
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​Episode 27: Problem Formulation
  • ​​convergence to relevance
  • ​​Well-defined vs Ill-defined problems
  • ​​Insight is the process of turning Ill-defined problems into well-defined problems.
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​Episode 28: Convergence to Relevance Realization
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​Episode 29: Getting to the Depths of Relevance Realization
  • ​​Converges a lot of things about meaning crisis.
  • ​​How to explain relevance without using a circular argument that requires relevance to exist.
  • ​​Computation, processing, etc.
  • ​​Salience tagging. Enactive demonstrative reference. Pointing to something and making it salient. Similar to linguistic demonstrative reference.
  • ​​Categorizing is to use salience tagging and enactive demonstrative reference.
  • ​​All of our concepts are categorical.
  • ​​Implication: logical category relations
  • ​​Inference: selected implications to use
  • ​​Even if lions could talk we would not understand them. - Wittgenstein
  • ​​We can’t have a scientific definition of relevance, but that is no reason for despair.
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​Episode 30: Relevance Realization Meets Dynamical Systems Theory
  • ​​Science creates broad inductive generalizations of things that have an essence (triangles, gold)
  • ​​Science can’t say anything about categories without essences (tables, white things) because they are not homogenous.
  • ​​Essence: Something has an essence if it is homogeneous, stable, intrinsic. 
  • ​​Relevance has no essence (it is nebulous)
  • ​​“Events on Tuesdays” is not homogenous, stable, or intrinsic.
  • ​​What about relevance?
  • ​​Relevance can’t be detected nor is it only projected
  • ​​No essential quality to fittedness. Niches are varied and changing.
  • ​​Mindless generation + selection based on fittedness.
  • ​​Evolution can generate intelligence without being intelligent.
  • ​​Mindless propagation of new synapses and reinforce those that are useful.
  • ​​Self-organizing, multi-scale, autopoetic, process between agent and arena.
  • ​​An economy is a system for assigning, distributing, and using resources in service of the systems continuation.
  • ​​Bioeconomic theory.
  • ​​Sympathetic and parasympathetic systems aren’t both biased in different directions and correct each other towards fittedness.
  • ​​Opponent processing.
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​Episode 31: Embodied-Embedded RR as Dynamical-Developmental GI
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​Episode 32: RR in the Brain, Insight, and Consciousness
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​Episode 33: The Spirituality of RR: Wonder, Awe, Mystery, and Sacredness
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​Episode 34: Sacredness: Horror, Music, and the Symbol
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​Episode 35: The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred
  • ​​Religio
  • ​​Mythos
  • ​​Symbols allow us to connect to an inexhaustible source of religio and mythos
  • ​​There’s a difference between indispensable and ultimate.
  • ​​There’s a difference between inexhaustible and infinite.
  • ​​Mythos can be indispensable to us, in terms of allowing us to stay in touch with the world, but that doesn’t make it the ultimate mythos. English is indispensable, but it is not the ultimate language. Not metaphysical necessity and not adhering to a final absolute supernatural structure.
  • ​​Sharks must swim to breathe but that doesn’t mean swimming is the ultimate fittedness.
  • ​​Give up the idea of indispensable as a final necessity. We can give up the two worlds mythology / metaphysical essentialism. But that’s only the first step. We can re-ground it in science, on top of relevance realization.
  • ​​Create a new mythology in serious play.
  • ​​More to do: address historical factors. Unhomed us. We must rearticulate our world view to get back that deep connectedness that affords the satisfaction of being in contact, self-transcendence, etc.
  • ​​A more careful way of understanding the meaning crisis.
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​Episode 36: Reverse Engineering Enlightenment: Part 1
  • ​​Reflectiveness gap. Gain agency for a while but the you lose the ability to act (like Hamlet). Can’t optimize reflectiveness towards the middle.
  • ​​Optimization problem means it’s enmeshed in relevance realization.
  • ​​Stepping back vs stepping through. Opponent processing.
  • ​​Domicide
  • ​​Absurdity: connectedness with arena is lost
  • ​​Anxiety: connectedness with self is lost
  • ​​Alienation: connectedness between you and people is lost
  • ​​Existential entrapment (we don’t know what we’ll gain and lose by changing)
  • ​​Thomas Nagel: the Absurd, The View from Nowhere.
  • ​​The goldsmith
  • ​​Needs gold
  • ​​Needs heat
  • ​​Needs a hammer
  • ​​Needs skill
  • ​​Needs patience
  • ​​The glasses that help you see the matrix.
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​Episode 37: Reverse Engineering Enlightenment: Part 2
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​Episode 38: Agape and 4E
  • ​​Subjective attraction (to find salient, care, participation) that connects to objective attractiveness. Because of this, we know there’s no such thing as this. Nothing is objectively attractive.
  • ​​We can bullshit objective attraction if we all find the same things salient.
  • ​​4Es
  • ​​Embodiment: we evolve out of immediate coping with the world (seeking affordances)
  • ​​Embedded: 
  • ​​Enacted:
  • ​​Extended:
  • ​​Verelli
  • ​​Embodied
  • ​​Emergent
  • ​​Emotion
  • ​​Excellence
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​Episode 39: The religion that is not a religion
  • ​​Credo in service of religio
  • ​​Programmatic framework to cultivate an ecology of psychotechnologies
  • ​​Subconscious: relevance realization, connections being made, participatory knowing, religio
  • ​​Conscious: salience landscape, connections being known, mythos, perspectival knowing
  • ​​Culture: credo, connections being shared, procedural knowing
  • ​​Psychotechnologies move up and down, complementary relationships to each other, opposing processes. A meta-psychotechnology moving intuitive into explicit. Developing an ecology of psychotechnologies. Crafting the ecology of practices for addressing the perennial problems that is coherent with worldview attunement.
  • ​​Metavirtue of wisdom fgvto collectively pursue.
  • ​​Reach down to participatory knowing and affords upwards.
  • ​​Open-ended credo. Like Wikipedia.
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​Episode 41: What is rationality?
  • ​​Intelligence (normativity of inference) is only correlated with rationality with a p value of 0.3. It’s necessary but not sufficient.
  • ​​Rationality also requires relevance realization. A normativity of construal. The generation of insight.
  • ​​Finitary predicament: we can’t consider all the information
  • ​​Construal: normative understanding of how we interpret a problem. Bad problem formulation. Salience is misleading us.
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​Episode 42: Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom
  • ​​Finding good problems that, if solved, would make it easier to solve lots of other problem. Meta-skill.
  • ​​Socrates: Wisdom begins in wonder.
  • ​​Rationality needs to apply outside academia. The context of therapy. The context of disagreement.
  • ​​Active open-mindedness for inference. Mindfulness for insight. Opponent processes to generate rationality. Theoretic vs therapeutic rationality.
  • ​​Rationality is the reliable and systematic ability to ability to overcome self-deception and afford the enhancement of development and meaning in life.
  • ​​Intelligence is fixed but rationality is malleable. Growth mindset improves rationality.
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​Episode 43: Wisdom and virtue
  • ​​Book: Practical Wisdom
  • ​​Resist the idea being virtuosity having rules
  • ​​It’s impossible to have rules that handle all circumstances
  • ​​Will this reduce harm?
  • ​​Will this increase wisdom?
  • ​​Virtues can’t be maximized, but optimized based on relevance
  • ​​Henry James and Pragmatism
  • ​​Evaluate knowledge terms in relation to their efficaciousness.
  • ​​Your propositional knowing needs to be grounded in you perspectival knowing that needs to be grounded in you participatory knowing.
  • ​​Pragmatism has a problem with truth and relativity.
  • ​​Meta-heuristic is realizing relevance.
  • ​​5 criteria of wisdom. Cognitive flexibility.
  • ​​Rich factual knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of life
  • ​​Rich procedural knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of life...
  • ​​Rich participatory knowledge about...
  • ​​Rich perspectival knowing...
  • ​​Lifespan contextualism: take the big picture and zoom in and out. Self-regulation.
  • ​​Relativism of values and priorities (not endorsed by Vervaeke). Capacity for tolerance? Fallibilism? Never assert certainty. Condemnation of self-righteousness. Humility.
  • ​​Recognition and management of uncertainty.
  • ​​We are smarter by talking to other people
  • ​​Stoic: internalize Socrates
  • ​​Solomon effect: locked in the first person, a third person can identify salient things from another perspective
  • ​​Product theory: what it is
  • ​​Process theory: how it happens.
  • ​​Pick up on the way things become the product.
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​Episode 45: Nature of Wisdom
  • ​​Active open-mindedness
  • ​​Mindfulness
  • ​​Internalizing the sage
  • ​​All has to do with enhancing relevance realization.
  • ​​Wisdom is connected to insight in a way that it’s not connected to educated, or even super-intelligent.
  • ​​A wise person knows how to believe well.
  • ​​Exhibiting Sophrosyne (temperance, moderation).
  • ​​Theory of understanding still in development
  • ​​Prolaptic rationality: an aspiration to acquire a new existential state. To aspire to gain rationality must be irrational otherwise you wouldn’t need to aspire to it.
  • ​​“Wisdom is an ecology of psychotechnologies and cognitive styles that dynamically (and reciprocally) constrain and optimize each other such that there is an overall optimization enhancement of relevance realization. Relevance realization within inference, insight, intuition, internalization, understanding, gnosis, transformation, and aspiration. In that sense, what’s happening is overlapping with the machinery of enlightenment. Wisdom is a dynamical systems that is counter-active to the machinery of self-deception, and that helps afford the self-organized transformation into a life of flourishing, a life that is deeply meaningful.
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​Episode 46: conclusion and the prophets of the meaning crisis
  • ​​The wise cultivation of enlightenment
  • ​​Wisdom
  • ​​Enlightenment
  • ​​Religio
  • ​​Sacredness
  • ​​Communities of development
  • ​​Wiki
  • ​​An encouraging and welcoming worldview
  • ​​Secular, scientific, and non-hostile to religion and political ideology
  • ​​Put this into dialogue with other prophets of the meaning crisis
  • ​​Paul Tillic, the courage to be
  • ​​Religion and Nothingness (top 5 book)
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​Episode 47: Heidegger
  • ​​Philia Sophia = love of wisdom
  • ​​Philia Nikia = love of victory
  • ​​Heidegger says that we get wrapped up in the having mode with correct statements, which is not where the truth is.
  • ​​The truth is the grounded “attunement” between statement and reality that affords a relationship between them.
  • ​​We experience it as a statement, and a feeling, but it is the space that statements go through, and the relationship that triggers the feeling.
  • ​​Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything.
  • ​​The thing beyond itself
  • ​​It simultaneously shines in and withdraws
  • ​​Truth as alithea
  • ​​Modal confusion where we confuse Being from being mode with a being/organism in having mode, and then expand it to the limit into a supreme being.
  • ​​Onto-theology is the result of this modal confusion
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​Episode 48: Corbin and the Divine Double
  • ​​Pure shining = Relevance realization = salience landscaping into intelligibility
  • ​​Pure withdrawing = independence of being = inexhaustibleness of combinatorily explosive reality = thing beyond itself
  • ​​Tonos / tension of realness = A trajectory of trans-framing that is always closing upon the relevant while always simultaneously opening to the soreness
  • ​​Yin yang
  • ​​Tao
  • ​​The serious play of being
  • ​​Converging and diverging
  • ​​Corbin and Persian Sufism
  • ​​Central to philosophy
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​Episode 49: Corbin and Jung
  • ​​The divine double is a mythos way of capturing an anagogic process of internalizing the sage.
  • ​​It uses translucent symbols as a breadcrumb trail to participate in the act of aspiration.
  • ​​To taste the existentially separated. Create an inkling of a future identity.
  • ​​To aspire to rationality requires us to find a motivating path towards something we don’t know perspectivally.
  • ​​Symbols shine through to us. Teases us. Invites us.
  • ​​It shines into our frame while withdrawing out to the transframe.
  • ​​The mythos of angels shine and withdraw. They are imaginal in nature. They are about become real while redefining what is real.
  • ​​Divine double = sacred second self
  • ​​Jung’s book: modern man’s search for the soul
  • ​​Freud invents the unconscious, the process between nature and nurture, stages of development.
  • ​​Jung invents individuation.
  • ​​The psyche is going through a constant process of individuation.
  • ​​Archtypos = the founding patterns and the way by which the psyche organizes itself.
  • ​​Not images. Imaginal things that lead you into the aspirational process of individuation. Systems of constraints. Virtual engines that organize what is salient within us. The heroic archetype invites you into a process of anagogically becoming more heroic.
  • ​​Influenced by vedanta.
  • ​​Ego is the virtual engine that regulates the self-organization of the conscious mind. The archetype of archetypes.
  • ​​The Self is the ultimate virtual engine, regulating the other virtual engines.
  • ​​Set up an interaction (a dialogue) between the imaginal archetypes so that they are internalized.
  • ​​Axis Mundi is the axis of the world.
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​Episode 50: Tillick and Barfield
  • ​​Jung offers active imagination.
  • ​​Tillick offers en-courage-ment of courage but no practices. (Courage to be)
  • ​​Owen Barfield offers practices (Lost knowledge of the imagination, the fellowship, the inklings, philosophy poetry and theology)
  • ​​Nontheist is an alternative to both theism and atheism.
  • ​​Theist and atheist propositions that Nontheists reject
  • ​​God is the supreme being
  • ​​God is accessed through belief
  • ​​Theology/antitheology do not require transformative anagoge. They are propositional.
  • ​​Sacredness is personal or impersonal. (Nontheist says sacred is aspirational / transjective)
  • ​​Barfield taken with Steiner, a modern gnostic.
  • ​​Infinity of reality / inexhaustible moreness that constantly draws us and affords us into self-transcendence / finite longing for the infinite / always framed longing for the trans-frame
  • ​​Poesis = poetry = felt change in the quality of being
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