The universe doesn't care about your personal narrative.

You can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life.

It's the culmination of your whole project for happiness,

and you step into the street and a truck hits you and you die.

That's mortality.

Mortality isn't just some far flung event.

It's that every moment we are subject to fate in that way.

So you can think of lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects

and the plans you make come up against the fact that the universe can just roll over them.

The following is a conversation with John Verweke,

a psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto.

I highly recommend his lecture series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis,

which covers the history and future of humanity's search for meaning.

This is the Lex Friedman podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's John Verweke.

You have an excellent 50 part lecture series online on the Meaning Crisis.

And I think you describe in the modern times an increase in depression,

loneliness, cynicism, and wait for it, bullshit.

The term used technically by Harry Frankfurt and adopted by you.

So let me ask, what is meaning?

What are we looking for when we engage in the search for meaning?

So when I'm talking about meaning, I'm talking about what's called meaning in life,

not the meaning of life.

That's some sort of metaphysical claim.

Meaning in life are those factors that make people rate their lives as more meaningful,

worth living, worth the suffering that they have to endure.

And when you study that, what you see is it's a sense of connectedness,

connectedness to yourself, to other people, to the world,

and a particular kind of connectedness.

You want to be connected to things that have a value and an existence

independent of your egocentric preferences and concerns.

This is why, for example, having a child is considered very meaningful,

because you're connecting to something that's going to have a life and a value

independent of you.

Now, the question that comes up for me, well, there's two questions.

One is, why is that at risk right now?

And then secondly, and I think you have to answer the second question first,

which is, well, yeah, but why is meaning so important?

Why is this sense of connectedness so important to human beings?

Why, when it is lacking, do they typically fall into depression,

potentially mental illness, addiction, self destructive behavior?

And so the first answer I give you is, well, it's that sense of connectedness.

And people often express it metaphorically.

They want to be connected to something larger than themselves.

They want to matter.

They don't mean it literally.

I mean, if I chained you to a mountain, you wouldn't thereby say, oh,

now my life is so fulfilling, right?

So what they're trying to convey, they're using this metaphor to try and say,

they want to be connected.

They want to be connected to something real.

They want to make a difference and matter to it.

And one way of asking them, well, you know, what's meaningful is,

tell me what you would like to continue to exist even if you weren't around

anymore, and how are you connected to it, and how do you matter to it?

That's one way of trying to get at what is the source of meaning for you,

is if you were no longer there, you would like it to continue existing.

That's not the only part of the definition probably, because there's probably many

things that aren't a source of meaning for me that maybe I find beautiful

that I would like to continue existing.

Yes.

If it contributes to your life being meaningful, you are connected to it

in some way, and it matters to you, and you matter to it in that you make

some difference to it.

That's when it goes from being just sort of true, good, and beautiful,

to being a source of meaning for you in your life.

Is the meaning crisis a new thing, or has it always been with us?

Is it part of the human condition in general?

That's an excellent question.

And part of the argument I made in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is

there's two aspects to it.

One is that there are perennial problems, perennial threats to meaning.

And in that sense, human beings are always vulnerable to despair.

You know, the book of Ecclesiastes is, it's all vanity, it's all meaningless.

But there's also historical forces that have made those perennial problems more

pertinent, more pressing, more difficult for people to deal with.

And so the meaning crisis is actually the intersection of perennial problems,

finding existence absurd, experiencing existential anxiety, feeling alienated,

and then pressing historical factors, which have to do with the loss of the

resources that human beings have typically cross historically and cross

culturally made use of in order to address these perennial problems.

Is there something potentially deeper than just a lack of meaning that speaks

to the fact that we're vulnerable to despair?

You know, Ernest Becker talked about the, in his book Denial of Death,

about the fear of death and being an important motivator in our life.

As William James said, death is the warm at the core of the human condition.

Is it possible that this kind of search for meaning is coupled or can be seen

from the perspective of trying to escape the reality, the thought of one's own mortality?

Yeah, Becker and the terror management theory that have come out of it,

there's been some good work around sort of providing empirical support for that claim.

Some of the work, not so good.

So which aspects do you find convincing?

Can you steel man that case and then can you argue against it?

So what aspects I find convincing is that human finitude, being finite,

being inherently limited is very problematic for us.

Given the extensive use of the word problematic, I like that you used that word

to describe one's own mortality as problematic.

Because people sort of on Twitter use the word problematic when they disagree with somebody.

But this, to me, seems to be the ultimate problematic aspect of the human condition

is that we die and it ends.

I think I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm trying to get you to consider

that your mortality is not an event in the future.

It's a state you're in right now.

That's what I'm trying to shift.

So your mortality is just a...

We talk about something that causes mortality fatal.

But what we actually mean is it's full of fate.

And I don't mean in the sense of things are prewritten.

What I mean is the sense of the universe doesn't care about your personal narrative.

You can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life.

It's the culmination of your whole project for happiness,

and you step into the street and a truck hits you and you die.

That's mortality.

Mortality isn't just some far flung event.

It's that every moment we are subject to fate in that way.

So you can think of lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects

and the plans you make come up against the fact that the universe can just roll over them.

The death is the indifference of nature of the universe to your existence.

And so in that sense, it is always here with us.

Yeah, but you're vulnerable in so many ways other than just the ending of your biological life.

Because it's interesting, if you rate what people fear most, death is not number one.

They often put public speaking as number one.

Because the death of status or reputation can also be a profound loss for human beings.

It can drive them into despair.

So as the terror management folks would say, as Ernest Becker would say,

that a self report on a survey is not an accurate way to capture what is actually

at the core of the motivation of a human being.

That we could be terrified of death.

And we, from childhood, since we realized the absurdity of the fact that the right ends,

we've learned to really try to forget about it, try to construct illusions that allow us

to escape momentarily or for prolonged periods of time the realization that we die.

Okay, so first, I took it seriously, but now I want to say why there's some empirical work

that makes me want to reconsider it.

So terror management theory is you do things like you give people a list of words to read.

And in those lists are words associated with death, cough, and funeral.

And then you see what happens to people.

And generally, they start to become more rigid in their thinking.

They tend to identify with their worldview.

They lose cognitive flexibility.

That's if you present it to them in that third person perspective.

But if you get them to go in the first person perspective and imagine that they're dying

and that the people that they care about are there with them, they don't show those responses.

In fact, they show us an increase in cognitive flexibility, an increase in openness.

See, so I'm trying to say we might be putting the cart before the horse.

It might not be death per se, but the kind of meaning that is present or absent in death

that is the crucial thing for us.

By the way, to push back, I don't think you took it seriously.

I don't think you truly steel manned the case because you're saying that death is always

present with us, yes, but isn't there a case to be made that it is one of the major motivators?

Nietzsche, will to power, Freud wanting to have sex with your mother, all the different

explanations of what is truly motivating us human beings.

Isn't there a strong case to be made that this death thing is a really damn good, if

not anything, a tool to motivate the behavior of humans?

I'm not saying that the avoidance of death is not significant for human beings, but I'm

proposing to you that human beings have a capacity for considering certain deaths meaningful

and certain deaths meaningless, and we have lots of evidence that people are willing to

sacrifice their biological existence for a death they consider meaningful.

Are you personally afraid of your death if you think about it?

As somebody who produces a lot of ideas, records them, writes them down, is a deep thinker,

admired thinker, and as the years go on, become more and more admired, does it scare you that

the ride ends?

No.

I mean, you have to talk to me on all my levels.

I'm a biological organism, so if something's thrown at my head, I'll duck and things like

that.

But if you're asking me, do I long to live forever, no.

In the Buddhist tradition, there are practices that are designed to make you aware of simultaneously

the horror of mortality and the horror of immortality.

The thought of living forever is actually horrific to me.

Are those the only two options?

Like when you're sitting with a loved one or watching a movie you just really love or

a book you really love, you don't want it to end, you don't necessarily always flip

it to the other aspect, the complete opposite of the thought experiment.

What happens if the book lasts forever?

There's got to be a middle ground, like the snooze button.

Sure you don't want to sleep forever, but maybe press the snooze button and get an extra

15 minutes.

There's surely some kind of balance, that fear seems to be a source of an intense appreciation

of the moment, in part, and that's what the Stoics talked about, sort of the meditate

on one's mortality.

Sure.

It seems to be a nice wake up call to that life is full of moments that are beautiful

and then you don't get an infinite number of them.

Right, and the Stoic response was not the project of trying to extend the duration of

your life, but to deepen those moments so they become as satisfying as possible so that

when death comes it does not strike you as any kind of calamity.

Does that project ring true for your own personal feelings?

I think so.

Do you think about your mortality?

I used to.

I don't so much anymore.

Part of it, as I'm older and your temporal horizon flips somewhere in your 30s or 40s,

you don't live from your birth, you live towards your death.

That's such a beautiful phrase, the temporal horizon flips.

That's so true.

That's so true.

At what point is that?

The point before which the world of opportunity and possibility is infinite before you.

Yeah, it's like Peter Pan.

There's all these golden possibilities and you fly around between them.

Yes, very much.

And then when it flips, you start to look for a different model, the Socratic, the Stoic

model, Buddhism has also influenced me, which is more about, wait, when I look at my desires,

I seem to have two meta desires.

In addition to satisfying a particular desire, I want whatever satisfies my desire to be

real and whatever is satisfying my desire to not cause internal conflict but bring something

like peace of mind.

And so I more and more move towards how can I live such that those two meta desires are

a constant frame within which I'm trying to satisfy my specific desires.

What do you think happens after we die?

I think mind and life go away completely when we die.

And I think that's actually significantly important for the kind of beings that we are.

We are the kinds of beings that can come to that awareness and then we have a responsibility

to decide how we're going to comport ourselves towards it.

Can you linger on what that means, the mind goes away?

Like when you're playing music and the last instrument is put down, the song is over.

Doesn't mean the song wasn't beautiful.

Doesn't mean the song wasn't complex.

Doesn't mean the song didn't add to the value of the universe and its existence, but it

came to an end.

Is there some aspect in which some part of mind was there before the human and remains

after?

Something like panpsychism or is it too much for us limited cognitive beings to understand?

Something like panpsychism, I take it seriously.

I don't think it's a ridiculous proposal, but I think it has insoluble problems that

make me doubt it.

Any idea that the mind is some kind of ultimately immaterial substance also has for me just

devastating problems.

Those are the two kinds of framework that people usually propose in order to support

some kind of idea of immortality.

I find both very problematic.

The fact that we participate in distributed cognition, that most of our problem solving

is not done as individuals but in groups, this is something I work on, I've published

on that.

I think that's important.

But most of the people who do work on systems of distributed cognition think that while

there's such a thing as collective intelligence, there's no good evidence that there's collective

consciousness.

In fact, it's often called zombie agency for that reason.

And so while I think it's very clear that no one person runs an airline, and there's

a collective intelligence that solves that problem, I do not think that collective intelligence

supports any kind of consciousness.

And so therefore, I don't think the fact that I participate, which I regularly and

reliably do in distributed cognition, gives me any reason to believe that that participation

grounds some kind of consciousness.

Okay, there's so many things to mention there.

First of all, distributed cognition, maybe that's a synonym for collective intelligence.

So that means a bunch of humans individually are able to think, have cognitive machines,

and are somehow able to interact through the process of dialogue, as you talk about, to

morph different ideas together, like this idea landscape together.

It's so interesting to think about, okay, well, you do have these fascinating distributed

cognition systems, but consciousness does not propagate in the same way as intelligence.

But isn't there a case, if we just look at intelligence, if we look at us humans as a

collection of smaller organisms, which we are, and so there's like a hierarchy of organisms,

tiny ones, work together to form tiny villages that you can then start to see as individual

organisms that are then also forming bigger villages and interacting different ways and

function becomes more and more complex.

And eventually we get to us humans to where we start to think, well, we're an individual,

but really we're not.

There's billions of organisms inside us, both domestic and foreign.

So isn't that building up consciousnesses like turtles all the way up to us, our consciousness?

Why does it have to stop with us humans?

Are we the only, like, is this the phase transition when it becomes a zombie like giant hierarchical

village that first like, oh, there's like a singing angels and it's consciousness is

born in just us humans.

Do bacteria have consciousness?

Not bacteria, but maybe you could say bacteria does, but like the interesting complicated

organisms that are within us have consciousness.

I think it's proper to argue, and I have, that like a paramecium or bacteria has a kind

of agency and even a kind of intelligence, kind of sense making ability.

But I do not think that we can attribute consciousness, at least what we mean by consciousness, this

kind of self awareness, this ability to introspect, et cetera, et cetera, to bacteria.

Now the reason why distributed cognition doesn't have consciousness, I think is a little bit

more tricky.

And I think there's no reason in principle why there couldn't be a consciousness for

distributed cognition, collective intelligence.

In fact, many, you know, philosophers would agree with me on that point.

I think it's more an issue of certain empirical facts, bandwidth, density of connection, speed

of information transfer, et cetera.

It's conceivable that if we got some horrible Frankensteinian neural link and we linked

our brains and we had the right density and dynamics and bandwidth and speed that a group

consciousness could take shape.

I don't have any argument in principle against that.

I'm just saying those contingent facts do not yet exist, and therefore it is implausible

that consciousness exists at the level of collective intelligence.

So you talk about consciousness quite a bit.

So let's step back and try to sneak up to a definition.

What is consciousness?

For me, there are two aspects to answering that question.

One is, what's the nature of consciousness?

How does something like consciousness exist in an otherwise apparently nonconscious universe?

And then there's a function question, which is equally important, which is, what does

consciousness do?

The first one is obviously, you know, problematic for most people, like, yeah, consciousness

seems to be so different from the rest of the nonconscious universe.

But I put it to you that the function question is also very hard, because you are clearly

capable of very sophisticated, intelligent behavior without consciousness.

You are turning the noises coming out of my face hole into ideas in your mind, and you

have no conscious awareness of how that process is occurring.

So why do we have consciousness at all?

Now, here's the thing.

There's an extra question you need to ask.

Should we attempt to answer those questions separately, or should we attempt to answer

them in an integrated fashion?

I make the case that you actually have to answer them in an integrated fashion.

What consciousness does, and what it is, we should be able to give it a unified answer

to both of those.

Can you try to elucidate the difference between what consciousness is and what it does, both

of which are mysteries, as you say, state versus action?

Can you try to explain the difference that's interesting, that's useful, that's important

to understand?

So that's putting me in a bit of a difficult position, because I actually argue that trying

to answer them separately is ultimately incoherent.

But what I can point to are many published articles in which only one of these problems

is addressed, and the other is left unaddressed.

So people will try and explain what qualia are, how they potentially emerge, without

saying what do they do, what problems do they help to solve, how do they make the organism

more adaptive.

And then you'll have other people who will say, no, no, this is what the function of

consciousness is, but I don't know, I can't tell you, I can't solve the hard problem,

I don't know how qualia exist.

So what I'm saying is many people treat these problems separately, although I think that's

ultimately an incoherent way to approach the problem.

So the hard problem is focusing on what it is.

Yes.

So the qualia, that it feels like something to experience a thing, that's what consciousness

is.

And does is more about the functional usefulness of the thing, to the whole beautiful mix of

cognition and just function in everyday life.

Okay, you've also said that you can do very intelligent things without consciousness.

Yes, clearly.

Is that obvious to you?

Yes.

I don't know what I'm doing to access my memory.

It just comes up, and it comes up really intelligently.

But the mechanisms that create consciousness could be deeply interlinked with whatever

is doing the memory access, that's doing the...

Oh, I think so, in fact, yes, yes.

So I guess what I'm trying to say in this will probably sneak up to this question a

few times, which is whether we can build machines that are conscious, or machines that are intelligent,

one level intelligent or beyond, without building the consciousness.

I mean, ultimately, that's one of the ways to understand what consciousness is, is to

build the thing.

We can either sort of from the Chomsky way, try to construct models, like he thinks about

language in this way, try to construct models and theories of how the thing works, or we

can just build the damn thing.

Exactly.

And that's a methodological principle in cognitive science.

In fact, one of the things that sort of distinguishes cognitive science from other disciplines dealing

with the nature of cognition in the mind is that cognitive science takes the design stance.

It asks, well, could we build a machine that would not only simulate it, but serve as a

bona fide explanation of the phenomenon?

Do you find any efforts in cognitive science compelling in this direction?

In terms of how far we are, there's, on the computational side of things, something called

cognitive modeling, there's all these kinds of packages that you can construct simplified

models of how the brain does things and see if complex behaviors emerge.

Do you find any efforts in cognitive, or what efforts in cognitive science do you find most

inspiring and productive?

I think the project of trying to create AGI, artificial general intelligence, is where

I place my hope of artificial intelligence being of scientific significance.

This is independent of technological socioeconomic significance, which is already well established.

But being able to say because of the work in AI, we now have a good theory of cognition,

intelligence, perhaps consciousness, I think that's where I place my bets is in the current

endeavors around artificial general intelligence.

And so tackling that problem head on, which has now become central, at least to a group

of cognitive scientists, is I think what needs to be done.

And when you think about AGI, do you think about systems that have consciousness?

Let's go back to what I think is at the core of your general intelligence.

So right now, compared to even our best machines, you are a general problem solver.

You can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains.

And some of our best machines have a little bit of transfer.

They can learn this game and play a few other well designed rule bound games, but they couldn't

learn how to swim, etc., things like that.

And so what's interesting is what seems to come up, and this is some of my published

work, in all these different domains of cognition across all these different problem types is

a central problem.

And since we do have good sort of psychometric evidence that we do have some general ability

that's a significant component of our intelligence, I made an argument as to what I think that

general ability is.

And so it's happening right now.

The amount of information in this room that you could actually pay attention to is combinatorial

explosive.

The amount of information you have in your memory, long term memory, and all the ways

you could combine it, combinatorial explosive.

The number of possibilities you can consider, also combinatorial explosive.

The sequences of behavior you can generate, also combinatorial explosive.

And yet somehow you're zeroing in.

The right memories are coming up, the right possibilities are opening up, the right sequences

of behavior, you're paying attention to the right thing.

Not infallibly so, but so much so that you reliably find obvious what you should interact

with in order to solve the problem at hand.

That's an ability that is still not well understood within AGI.

To filtering out the gigantic waterfall of data.

Right.

It's almost like a Zen Koan.

What makes you intelligent is your ability to ignore so much information and do it in

such a way that is somewhere between arbitrary guessing and algorithmic search.

And to a fault sometimes of course that you, based on the models you construct, you forget,

you ignore things that you should probably not ignore.

And that, hopefully we can circle back to it Lux, is related to the meaning issue.

Because the very processes that make us adaptively intelligent make us perennially susceptible

to self deceptive, self destructive behavior because of the way we misframe the environment

in fundamental ways.

So to you, meaning is also connected to ideas of wisdom and truth and how we interpret and

understand and interact intellectually with the environment.

Yes.

So what is wisdom?

Why do we long for it?

How do we and where do we find it?

What is it?

This is what you use to solve your problems, as I was just describing.

Rationality is how you use your intelligence to overcome the problems of self deception

that emerge when you're trying to solve your problems.

So it's that meta problem.

And then the issue is, do you have just one kind of knowing?

I think you have multiple ways of knowing, and therefore you have multiple rationalities.

And so wisdom is to coordinate those rationalities so that they are optimally constraining and

affording each other.

So in that way, wisdom is rationally self transcending rationality.

Right.

So life is a kind of process where you jump from rationality to rationality and pick up

a village of rationalities along the way that then turns into wisdom.

Yes, if properly coordinated.

You mentioned framing.

Yes.

So what is framing?

Is it a set of assumptions you bring to the table in how you see the world, how you reason

about the world, how you understand the world?

So it depends what you mean by assumptions.

If by assumption you mean a proposition, representational or rule, I think that's much more downstream

from relevance realization.

I think relevance realization refers to, again, constraints on how you are paying attention.

And so for me, talking about framing is talking about this process you're doing right now

of salient landscaping.

What's salient to you?

And how is what's salient constantly shifting in a sort of a dynamic tapestry?

And how are you shaping yourself to the way that salient landscaping is aspectualizing

the world, shaping it into aspects for interaction?

For me, that is a much more primordial process than any sort of beliefs we have.

And here's why.

If we mean by beliefs a representational proposition, then we're in this very problematic position.

Because then we're trying to say that propositions are ultimately responsible for how we do relevance

realization.

And that's problematic because representations presuppose relevance realization.

So I represent this as a cup.

The number of properties it actually has, and that I even have epistemic access to,

is combinatorial explosive.

I select from those a subset and how they are relevant to each other insofar as they

are relevant for me.

This doesn't have to be a cup.

I could be using it as a hat, I could use it to stand for the letter V, all kinds of

different things.

I could say this was the 10th billion object made in North America.

Representations presuppose relevance realization.

They are therefore dependent on it, which means relevance realization isn't bound to

our representational structures.

It can be influenced by them, but they are ultimately dependent on relevance realization.

Let's define stuff.

Relevance realization.

Yes.

What are the inputs and the outputs of this thing?

What is it?

What are we talking about?

What we're talking about is how you are doing something very analogous to evolution.

So if you think about that adaptivity isn't in the organism or in the environment, but

in a dynamical relation and then what does evolution do?

It creates variation and then it puts selective pressure and what that does is that changes

the niche constructions that are available to a species.

It changes the morphology.

You also have a loop.

It's your sensory motor loop and what's constantly happening is there are processes within you

that are opening up variation and also processes that are putting selection on it and you're

constantly evolving that sensory motor loop.

So you might call your cognitive fittedness, which is how you're framing the world is constantly

evolving and changing.

I can give you two clear examples of that.

One, your autonomic nervous system, parasympathetic and sympathetic.

The sympathetic system is biased to trying to interpret as much of reality as threat

or opportunity.

The parasympathetic is biased to trying to interpret as much of the environment as safe

and relaxing and they are constantly doing opponent processing.

There's no little man in you calculating your level of arousal.

There's this dynamic coupling opponent processing between them that is constantly evolving your

arousal.

Similarly, your attention, you have the default mode network, task network.

The default mode network is putting pressure on you right now to mind wander, to go off,

to drift, right, and then the task focus network is selecting out of those possibilities the

ones that will survive and go into and so you are constantly evolving your attention.

Okay, so there's a natural selection of ideas that a bunch of systems within you are generating

and then you use the natural selection.

What is the selector, the object that you're interacting with, the glass?

Relevance realization, once again, you just describe how it happens.

Yes.

You didn't describe what the hell it is.

So what's the goal?

What are we talking about?

So relevance realization is how you interact with things in the world to make sense of

why they matter, what they mean to you, to your life.

Yes, and notice the language you just used, you're starting to use the meaning in life

language.

Good or bad?

That's good.

Okay.

That's good.

So what does that evolution of your sensory motor loop do?

It gives you, and here I'll use a term from Marlon Ponti, it gives you an optimal grip

on the world.

So let's use your visual attention again.

Okay, here's an object.

How close should I be to it?

Is there a right?

That's what you want to do with it.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So you have to evolve your sensory motor loop in order to get the optimal grip that actually

creates the affordance of you getting to a goal that you're trying to get to.

Yeah, but you're describing physical goals of manipulating objects, so this applies,

the task, the process of relevance realization is not just about getting a glass of water

and taking a drink.

No.

It's about falling in love.

Yeah, of course.

What else is there?

Well, there's obvious.

Between those two options.

I can show you how you're optimally gripping in an abstract cognitive domain.

Okay?

So a mammal goes by and most people will say there's a dog.

Now why don't they say, they might, but typically, you know, probabilistically they'll say there's

a dog.

They could say there's a German Shepherd, there's a mammal, there's a living organism,

there's a police dog.

Why that?

Why there?

Why did they stop Eleanor Rush called these basic level?

Well, what you find is that's an optimal grip because it's getting you the best overall

balance between similarity within your category and difference between the other categories.

It's allowing you to properly fit to that object in so far as you're setting yourself

up to, well, I'm getting so as many of the similarities and differences I can on balance

because they're in a trade off relationship that I need in order to probably interact

with this mammal.

That's optimal grip, not right.

It's at the level of your categorization.

You evolve these models of the world around you and on top of them, you do stuff like

you build representations, like you said, yes.

What's the salience landscape?

Salience meaning attention landscape.

Salience is what grabs your attention or what results from you directing your attention.

I clap my hands, that's salient, it grabs your attention.

Your attention is drawn to it, that's bottom up, but I can also say you left big toe and

now it's salient to you because you directed your attention towards it.

That's top down and again, opponent processing going on there.

Whatever stands out to you, what grabs your attention, what arouses you, what triggers

at least momentarily some affect towards it, that's how things are salient.

What salience I would argue is, is how a lot of unconscious relevance realization makes

information relevant to working memory.

That's when it now becomes online for direct sensory motor interaction with the world.

So you think the salience landscape, the ocean of salience extends into the subconscious

mind?

I think relevance does, but I think when relevance is recursively processed, relevance realization

such that it passes through sort of this higher filter of working memory and has these properties

of being globally accessible and globally broadcast, then it becomes the thing we call

salience.

And that's, that's, that's really good evidence.

There's really good evidence from my colleague at UFT, University of Toronto, Lynn Hasher,

that that's what working memory is.

It's a higher order relevance filter.

That's why things like chunking will get way more information through working memory because

it's basically making, it's basically monitoring how much relevance realization has gone into

this information.

Usually you have to do an additional kind of recursive processing.

And that tells you, by the way, when do you need consciousness?

When do you need that working memory and that salience landscaping?

It's when you're facing situations that are highly novel, highly complex and very ill

defined that require you to engage working memory.

Okay, got it.

So relevance realization is in part the thing that constructs that basic level thing of

a dog.

When you see it, when you see a dog, you call it a dog, not a German Shepherd, not a mammal,

not a biological meat bag.

It's a dog.

Wisdom.

Yes.

So what is wisdom?

If we return, I think as part of that, we got to relevance realization and then wisdom

is accumulation of rationalities.

You described the rationality as a kind of starting from intelligence, much of puzzle

solving and then rationalities like the meta problem of puzzle solving and then what wisdom

is the meta, meta problem of puzzle solving?

Yes, in the sense that the meta problem you have when you're solving your puzzles is that

you can often fall into self deception.

You can misprint.

Self deception, right.

Right.

So knowledge overcomes ignorance, wisdom is about overcoming foolishness if what we mean

by foolishness is self deceptive, self destructive behavior, which I think is a good definition

of foolishness.

And so what you're doing is you're doing this recursive relevance realization.

You're using your intelligence to improve the use of your intelligence and then you're

using your rationality to improve the use of your rationality.

That's that recursive relevance realization I was talking about a few minutes ago.

Think about a wise person.

They come into highly often messy, ill defined, complex situations usually where there's some

significant novelty and what can they do?

They can zero in on what really matters, what's relevant and then they can shape themselves,

salience landscaping to intervene most appropriately to that situation as they have framed it.

That's what we mean by a wise person and that's how it follows out of the model I've been

presenting to you.

So when we say self deception, I mean part of that implies that it's intentional.

Part of the mechanism of cognition, you're modifying what you should know for some purpose.

Is that how you see the word self deception?

No, because I belong to a group of people that think the model of self deception as

lying to oneself ultimately makes no sense.

Because in order to lie to you, I have to know something you don't and I have to depend

on your commitment to the truth in order to modify your behavior.

I don't think that's what we do to ourselves.

I think, and I'm going to use it in the technical term and thank you for making space for that

earlier on, I think we can bullshit ourselves, which is a very different thing than lying.

So what is bullshit and how do we bullshit ourselves, technically speaking?

Yeah.

Frankfurt and this is inspired by Frankfurt and other people's work based on Frankfurt's

work.

On bullshit.

Yeah.

Classic essay.

It's a pretty good title.

I think it's one of the best things he wrote.

He wrote a lot of good things.

The title or the essay?

The essay.

The title's good too.

It's always an icebreaker in certain academic settings.

So let's contrast the bullshit artist from the liar.

The liar depends on your commitment to the truth.

The bullshit artist is actually trying to make you indifferent to the question of truth

and modify your behavior by making things salient to you so that they are catchy to

you.

So a prototypical example of bullshit is a commercial, a television commercial.

You watch these people at a bar getting some particular kind of alcohol and they're gorgeous

and they're laughing and they're smiling and they're clear eyed.

You know that's not true and they know you know it's not true, but here's the point.

You don't care because there's gorgeous people smiling and they're happy and that's salient

to you and that catches your attention.

And so you know, go into a bar, you know that won't happen when you drink this alcohol,

you know it.

Yeah.

But you buy the product because it was made salient to you.

Now you can't lie to yourself, Lex.

Salience can catch attention, but attention can drive salience.

So this is what I can do.

I can make something salient by paying attention to it and then that will tend to draw me back

to it again, which, and you see what happens, which means it tends to catch my attention

more so that when I go into the store, that bottle of liquor catches my attention and

I buy it.

And that's, why is that bullshit?

Because what you're doing is being caught up in the salience of things independent from

whether or not that salience is tracking reality.

Is it independent or is it loosely connected?

Because it's not so obvious to me when I see happy people at a bar that I don't in part

believe that, well, my experience has been maybe different.

Logically, I can understand, but maybe there is a bar out there where it's all happy people

dancing.

In fact, most of the bars I go to these days in Texas, there's pretty lots of happy people.

I think you can, I mean, there's probably variation, although I think it's very the

truth seeking in there.

Let's say the intent is at least to try and shut off your truth seeking.

It might not completely succeed, but that's the intent.

At times it can completely succeed because I can give you pretty much gibberish and never

let it will motivate your behavior.

There's an episode from the classic Simpsons, not the modern Simpsons, the classic Simpsons

where there's aliens and they're running for office in the United States.

Now I'm a Canadian, so this doesn't quite work for me, but right.

And this speech goes like this, my fellow Americans, when I was young, I dreamt of being

a baseball, but we must move forward, not backward.

Upward, not forward, twirling, twirling towards freedom and people go, and there's a rush.

There's nothing there.

And yet it's great satire because a lot of political speech is exactly like that.

There's nothing there.

Right?

Well, I'm not saying all political speech, I said a lot.

There's a fundamental difference between, and it's so hilarious, I remember that episode.

There's a fundamental difference between that absurd sort of non secular speech and political

speech because one of the things is political speech is grounded in some sense of truth.

And so if that requires you talking about alternative facts and weird self destructive

oxymoronic phrases, isn't that approaching pure bullshit?

No, I think pure bullshit, like the vacuum is very difficult to get to, but I get the

point.

So what exactly is truth?

Is it possible to know?

I think Spinoza's right about truth, that truth is only known by its own standard, which

sounds circular.

There's a way in which he didn't mean that circularly, and I think this is also converges

with Plato.

These are two huge influences on me.

I think we only know the truth retrospectively when we go through some process of self transcendence,

when we move from a frame to a more encompassing frame so that we can see the limitations and

the distortions of the earlier frame.

You have this when you have a moment of insight.

Insight is you doing, you are re realizing what is relevant.

You go, oh, oh, I thought she was aggressive and angry.

She's actually really afraid.

I was misframing this and you change what you find relevant.

You have those aha moments.

So do you think it's possible to get a sense of objective reality?

So is it possible to get to the ground level of something that you can call objective truth?

Or are we always on shaky ground?

I think those moments of transcendence can never get us to an absolute view from nowhere.

And so this is Drew Hyland's notion of finite transcendence.

We are capable of self transcendence, and therefore we are creatures who can actually

raise the question of truth, or goodness, or beauty, because I think they all share

this feature.

But that doesn't mean we can transcend to a godhood, to some absolute view from nowhere

that takes in all information and organizes it in a comprehensive whole.

But that doesn't mean that truth is thereby rendered valueless.

I think a better term is real.

And real and illusory are comparative terms.

You only know that something's an illusion by taking something else to be real.

And so we're always in a comparative task, but that doesn't mean that we can somehow

jump outside of our framing in some final manner and say, this is how it is from a God's

eye point of view.

So what do you think, if I may ask, of somebody like Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism?

So where the core principle is that reality exists independently of consciousness and

that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception.

So they have that, you do have that ability to know reality.

There's two things.

Knowing that there's an independent reality is not knowing that independent reality.

Those are not the same thing.

Yeah, but I think objectivism would probably say that our human reason is able to have

contact with that.

Then I would respond and say, I believe, in fact, ultimately, in a conformity theory of

knowing that the deepest kind of knowing is when there's a contact, a conformity between

the mind, the embodied mind and reality, and here's where I guess I'd push back on Rand.

I would say you have to acknowledge partial knowledge as real knowledge, because if you

don't, you're going to fall prey to Meno's paradox.

Meno's paradox is, you know, it's in Plato, right?

To know P. Well, if I don't know P, I'm going to go looking for it.

But if I don't know P, how could I possibly recognize it when I found it?

I have no way of recognizing it.

I have no way of knowing that I found it.

So I must know P. But if I know P, then I don't need to learn about it.

I don't need to go searching.

So learning doesn't exist.

Knowledge is impossible.

The way you break out of that paradox is saying, no, no, no, it is possible to partially know

something.

I can know it enough that it will guide me to recognizing it, but that's not the same

as having a complete grasp of it, because I still have to search and find what I don't

yet possess in my knowledge.

So partial knowledge has to be real knowledge.

Right.

Partial knowledge is still knowledge.

Yes.

What do you think about somebody like Donald Hoffman, who thinks the reality is an illusion,

so complete illusion, that we're given this actually really nice definition or idea that

you talked about, that there's a tension between the illusory and what is real.

He says that basically we've taken that and we've ran with the real to the point where

the real is not at all connected to some kind of physical reality.

I hope to talk to him at some point.

You were supposed to talk at one point, and so I have to talk in his absence.

I think that, first of all, I think saying that everything is an illusion is like saying

everything is tall.

It doesn't make any sense.

It's a comparative term.

You have to say, against this standard of realness, this is an illusion.

And he uses arguments from evolution, which are problematic to me because it's like, well,

you seem to be saying that evolution is true, that it really exists, and then some of our

cognition and our perception has access to reality, math and presumably some science

has access to reality.

And then what he seems to be saying is, well, a lot of your everyday experience is illusory,

but we do have some contact with reality, whereby we can make the arguments as to why

most of your experience, most of your everyday experience is an illusion.

But to me, that's not a novel thing.

That's Descartes.

That's the idea that most of our sense experience is untrustworthy, but the math is what connects

us to reality.

That's how he interpreted the Copernican revolution.

Oh, look, we're all seeing the sun rise and move over and set, and it's all an illusion,

but the math, the math gets us to the reality.

Well, I think he makes a deeper point that most of cognition is just evolved and operates

in the illusory world.

How does he know that things like cognition and evolution exist?

I think there's an important distinction between evolution and cognition, right?

No, no, I'm just saying that's not the point I'm making.

I'm making a point that he's claiming that there are two things that really exist.

Why are they privileged?

He basically says that, look, the process of evolution makes sense, right?

Like it makes sense that you get complex organisms from simple organisms through the natural

selection process.

Whereas how you get to transfer information from generation to generation, it makes sense.

And then he says that there's no requirement for the cognition to evolve in a way that

it would actually perceive and have direct contact with the physical reality.

Except that cognition evolved in such a way that it could perceive the truth of evolution.

And you can't treat evolution like an isolated thing.

Evolution depends on Darwinian theory, genetics.

It depends on understanding plate tectonics, the way the environment changes.

It depends on how chromosomes are structured.

Actually, that's an interesting question to him, where I don't know if he actually would

push back on this, is how do you know evolution is real?

Yes.

I think he would be open to the idea that it is part of the illusion that we constructed,

that there's some, in some sense, it is connected to reality, but we don't have a clear picture

of it.

I mean, that's an intellectually honest statement then, if most of our cognition as thinking

beings is operating at every level in an illusory world, then it makes sense that this, one

of the main theories of science, that's evolution, is also a complete part of this illusory world.

Right.

But then what happens to the premise for his argument leading to the conclusion that cognition

is illusory?

I think he makes a very specific argument about evolution as an explanation of why the

world is, of our cognition operating in an illusory world.

But that's just one of the explanations.

I think the deeper question is why do we think we have contact with reality, with physical

reality?

It's, we could be very well living in a virtual world constructed by our minds in a way that

makes that world deeply interesting in some ways, whether it's somebody playing a video

game or we're trying to, through the process of distributed cognition, construct more and

more complex objects.

Like why do we have to, why does it have to be connected to like physics and planets and

all that kind of stuff?

Okay.

So if we're going to say like we're now considering it as a possibility rather than it's a conclusion

based on arguments, because the arguments, again, will always rely on stipulating that

there is something that is known.

These are the features of cognition.

Cognition is capable of illusion.

That's a true statement.

You're somehow in contact with the mind.

Why does the mind have this privileged contact and other aspects like my body do not?

So that's, but let's put that aside and now let's just consider it.

Now when we put it that way, it's not an epistemic question anymore.

It's an existential question and here's my reply to you.

There's two possibilities.

Either the illusion is one that I cannot discover, sort of, you know, the matrix on steroids

or something.

There's no way.

Because what I do, I can't find out that it's an illusion or it's an illusion, but I can

find out that it's an illusion.

Those are the two possibilities.

Nothing changes for me if those are the two possibilities, because if I could not find,

possibly find out, it is irrational for me to pay any attention to that possibility.

So I could keep doing the science as I'm doing it.

If there's a way of finding out, science is my best bet, I believe, for finding out if

it's, what's true and what's an illusion.

So I keep doing what I'm doing.

So it's an argument if you move it to that, that makes no existential difference to me.

Oh man, that is such a deeply philosophical argument.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Nobody's saying science doesn't work.

It's an interesting question, just like before humans were able to fly, they would ask a

question, can we build the machine that makes us fly?

In that same way, we're asking a question to which we don't know an answer, but we may

know in the future, how much of this whole thing is an illusion?

And I think in a second category, the first, I forgot which one, yes, science will be able

to help us discover this.

Otherwise, yes, for sure, that doesn't matter.

If we're living in a simulation, we can't find out at all, then it doesn't matter.

But yes, the whole point is as we get deeper and deeper understanding of our mind of cognition,

we might be able to discover like how much of this is a big charade constructed by our

mind to keep us fed or something like that.

Some weird, some weird, very simplistic explanation that it will ultimately in its simplicity

be beautiful, or as we try to build robots and instill them, instill them with consciousness,

with ability to feel, those kinds of things, we'll discover, well, let's just trick them

into thinking they feel and have consciousness and they'll believe it.

And then they'll have a deeply fulfilling and meaningful lives.

And on top of that, they will interact with us in a way that will make our lives more

meaningful.

And then all of a sudden, it's like at the end of Animal Farm, you look at pigs and humans

and you look at robots and humans and you can't tell the difference between either.

And we in that way start to understand that much of this existence could be an illusion.

Okay, well, I have two responses to that.

First is the progress that's being made on like AGI is about making whatever the system

is that's going to be the source of intelligent more and more dynamically and recursively

self correcting.

That's part of what's happening.

Extrapolating from that, you get a system that gets better and better at self correcting,

but that's exactly what I was describing before as the transformative theory of truth.

The other response to that is people think of science just as sort of end proposition.

Let me just use the evolutionary example again, right?

If I'm gathering the evidence, I need to know a lot of geology, I need to know plate tectonics,

I need to know about radioactive decay, I need to know about genetics, and then in order

to measure all those things, I need to know how microscopes work, I need to know how pencils

and paper work, I need to know how rulers work, I need to know how English... You can't

isolate knowledge that way.

And if you say, well, most of that's an illusion, then you're in a weird position of saying

somehow all of these illusions get to this truth claim.

I think it goes in reverse.

If you think this is the truth claim, the measuring and all the things that scientists

would do to gather on all the ways the theories are converging together, that also has to

be fundamentally right, because it's not like Lego, it is an interwoven whole.

Yes, it definitely is interwoven, but I love how I'm playing the devil advocate for the

illusion world.

But there's an aspect to truth that has to be consistent, deeply consistent across an

entire system.

But inside a video game, that same kind of consistency evolves.

There's rules about interactions, there's game theoretic patterns about what's good

and bad and so on, and there's sources of joy and fear and anger, and then understanding

about a world, what happens in different dynamics of a video game, even simple video games.

So there's no, even inside an illusion, you can have consistency and develop truths inside

that illusion and iteratively evolve your truth with the illusion.

Okay, but that comes back.

Is that process genuinely self correcting, or are you in the simulation in which there

is no possible doorway out?

Because if, my argument is, if you find one or two doorways, that feeds back.

In fact, you can't just say, this is the little tiny island where we have the truth.

That's the point I'm making.

Right.

But what if you find that, I think there is doorways, if that's the case.

And what if you find a doorway and you step out, but you're yet in another simulation?

I mean, that's the point.

That's so self correcting.

When you fix the self deception, you don't know if there's other bigger self deceptions

you're operating on.

Of course.

That makes sense.

That's right.

But again, we're back to when I step into the second simulation, is it, can I get the

doorway out of that or right?

Because if you just make the infinite regressive simulations, you basically said, I have a

simulation that I can never get out of.

Yeah.

I think there's always a bigger pile of bullshit is the claim I'm trying to make here.

Okay.

Let me dance around meaning once more.

Sure.

I ask people on this podcast or at a bar or to imaginary people I talk to in a room when

I'm all by myself, the question of the meaning of life.

Do you think this is a useful question?

You drew a line between meaning in life and meaning of life.

Do you think this is a useful question?

No, I think it's like the question, what's north of the North Pole or what time is it

on the sun?

It sounds like a question, but it's actually not really a question because it has a presupposition

in it that I think is fundamentally flawed.

If I understand what people mean by it, and it's actually often not that clear, but when

they talk about the meaning of life, they are talking about there are some feature of

the universe in and of itself that I have to discover and enter into a relationship

with and there's in that sense, a plan for me or something.

And so that's a property of the universe.

That's a very deep, serious, metaphysical, ontological claim.

You're claiming to know something fundamental about the structure of reality.

There were times when people thought they had a worldview that legitimated it, like

God is running the universe and God cares about you and there's a plan, et cetera.

But I think a better way of understanding meaning is not...

Meaning is like the graspability.

Remember, I talked about optimal grip, it's like the graspability of that cup.

Is that in me?

No.

Is it in the cup?

No, because a fly can't grasp it.

Well, graspability is in my hand, well, I can't grasp Africa.

No, no, there is a real relation, fittedness between me and this cup.

Same thing with the adaptivity of an organism.

Is the adaptivity of a great white shark in the great white shark?

Drop it in the Sahara, dies, okay?

Meaning isn't in me, I think that's romantic bullshit, and it isn't in the universe, it

is a proper relationship.

I've coined the phrase transjective, it is the binding relationship between the subjective

and the objective.

And therefore, when you're asking the question about the meaning of life, you are, I think,

misrepresenting the nature of meaning.

Just like when you ask, what time is it on the sun?

You're misrepresenting how we derive clock time.

At the risk of disagreeing with a man who did 50 lectures on the meaning crisis, let

me hard disagree.

But I think we probably agree, but it's just like a dance, like any dialogue.

I think meaning of life gets at the same kind of relationship between you and the glass

of water, between whatever the forces of the universe that created the planets, the proteins,

the multi cell organisms, the intelligent early humans, the beautiful human civilizations

and the technologies that will overtake them.

It's trying to understand the relevance realization of the Big Bang to the feeling of love you

have for another human being.

It's reaching for that, even though it's hopeless to understand.

It's the question, the asking of the question is the reaching.

Now it is, in fact, romantic bullshit, technically speaking.

But it could be that romantic bullshit is actually the essence of life and the source

of its deepest meaning.

Well, I hope not.

But technically speaking, romantic bullshit, meaning romantic in the philosophical sense,

yes.

I mean, what is poetry?

What is music?

What is the magic you feel when you hear a beautiful piece of music?

What is that?

Oh, but that's exactly to my point.

Is music inside you or is it outside you?

It's both and neither.

And that's precisely why you find it so meaningful.

In fact, it can be so meaningful you can regard it as sacred.

What you said, I don't think, and you preface that we might not be in disagreement, right?

What you said is, no, no, no, there is a way in which reality is realizing itself.

And I want my relevance realization to be in the best possible relationship, the sort

of meta optimal grip to what is most real.

I totally agree.

I totally think that's one of the things, I said this earlier, one of our meta desires

is whatever is satisfying our desires is also real.

I do this with my students, I'll say, you know, because romantic relationships sort

of take the role of God and religion and history and culture for us right now.

We put everything on them and that's why they break, right?

Strong words.

Got it.

But I'll say to them, okay, how many of you are in really satisfying romantic relationships?

Put up your hands.

Then I'll say, okay, I'm now only talking to these people.

Of those people, how many of you would want to know your partner's cheating on you even

if it means the destruction of the relationship, 95% of them put up their hands.

And I say, but why?

And here's my students who are usually all sort of bitten with cynicism and postmodernism

and they'll just say spontaneously, well, because it's not real, because it's not real.

Right.

So I think what you're pointing to is actually, you're pointing not to an objective or a

subjective thing.

Empiricism says it's subjective.

There's some sort of, I guess, like positivism or Lockean empiricism says it's objective,

but you're saying, no, no, no, there's reality realization and can I get relevance realization

to be optimally gripping in the best right relationship with it?

And there's good reason you can because think about it, your relevance realization isn't

just representing properties of the world, it's instantiating it.

There's something very similar to biological evolution, which is that the guts of life,

if I'm right, running your cognition, it's not just that you have ideas, you actually

instantiate, that's what I mean by conformity, the same principles.

They're within and without, they don't belong to you subjectively.

They're not just out there, they're both at the same time.

And they help to explain how you are actually bound to the evolutionary world.

Yeah.

So it comes from both inside and from the outside.

But there's still the question of the meaning of life, first of all, the big benefit of

that question is that it shakes you out of your hamster in a wheel that is daily life,

the mundane process of daily life, where you have a schedule, you wake up, you have kids,

you have to take them to school, then you go to work and the da da da da da and repeats

over and over and over and over and then you get increased salary and then you upgrade

to home and that whole process.

Asking about the meaning of life is so full of romantic bullshit that if you just allow

yourself to take it seriously for a second, it forces you to pause and think, what's going

on here?

And then it ultimately, I think, does return to the question of meaning in those mundane

things.

What gives my life joy?

What gives it lasting deliciousness?

Where do I notice the magic and how can I have that magic return again and again?

Beauty.

And that ultimately what it returns to.

But it's the same thing you do when you look up to the sky.

You spend most of your day hurrying around looking at things on the surface, but when

you look up to the sky and you see the stars, it fills you with the feeling of awe that

forces you to pause and think in full context of like, what the hell is going on here?

That, but also I think there is a, when you think too much about the meaning of a glass

and relevance realization of a glass, you don't necessarily get at the core of what

makes music beautiful.

So sometimes you have to start at the biggest picture first.

And I think meaning of life forces you to really go to the big bang and go to the universe

and the whole thing, the origin of life.

And I think sometimes you have to start there to discover the meaning in the day to day,

I think, but perhaps you would disagree.

In so far as the question makes you ask about the whole of your life and how much meaning

is in the whole of your life.

And in so far as it asks how much that is connected to reality, it's a good question.

But it's a bad question in that it also makes you look for the answers in the wrong way.

Now you said, and I agree with what you said, how we really answer this question is we come

back to the meaning in life and we see how much that meaning in life is connected to

reality.

We pursue wisdom.

And so for me, I don't need that question in order to provoke me into that stance.

So let's return to the meaning crisis.

Yes.

What is the nature of the meaning crisis in modern times?

What's its origin?

What's its explanation?

Well, remember what I said, what I argued, that the very processes that make us adaptively

intelligent subject us to perennial problems of self deception, self destruction, creating

bullshit for ourselves, for other people, all of that.

And that can cause anxiety, existential anxiety, it can cause despair, it can cause a sense

of absurdity.

These are perennial problems.

And across cultures and across historical periods, human beings have come up with ecologies

of practices, there's no one practice, there's no panacea practice, they've come up with

ecologies of practices for ameliorating that self deception and enhancing that fittedness,

that connectedness that's at the core of meaning in life.

That's prototypically what we call wisdom.

And here's how I can show you one clear instance of the meaning crisis, is it's a wisdom famine.

I do this regularly with my students.

In the classroom I'll say, where do you go for information?

They hold up their phone.

Where do you go for knowledge?

They're a little bit slower and probably because they're in my class, they'll say, well, science,

the university.

I'll say, where do you go for wisdom?

There's a silence.

Wisdom isn't optional, that's why it is perennial, cross cultural, cross historical, because

of the perennial problems.

But we do not have homes for ecologies of practices that fit into our scientific technological

worldview so that they are considered legitimate.

The fastest growing demographic group are the nones, N O N E S.

They have no religious allegiance, but they are not primarily atheistic.

They most frequently describe themselves with this very, this has become almost everybody

now describes, I'm spiritual but not religious, which means they are trying to find a way

of reducing the bullshit and enhancing the connectedness, but they don't want to turn

to any of the legacy established religions by and large.

Well isn't both religion and the nones, isn't wisdom a process, not a destination?

So trying to find, if you're a deeply faithful religious person, you're also trying to find,

right?

So just because you have a place where you're looking or a set of traditions around which

you're constructing the search, it's nevertheless a search.

So I guess, is there a case to be made that this is just the usual human condition?

How do you answer?

If you asked five centuries ago, where do you look for wisdom?

I mean, I suppose people would be more inclined to answer, well, the Bible or a religious

text.

Right.

And they had a worldview that was considered not just religious, but also rational.

So we now have these two things, orthogonal or often oppositional, spirituality and rationality.

But if you go before a particular historical period, you look back in the Neoplatonic tradition,

like before the scientific revolution, those two are not in opposition.

They are deeply interwoven so that you can have a sense of legitimacy and deep realness

and grounding in your practices.

We don't have that anymore.

And I'm not advocating for religion, neither am I an enemy of religion.

I'll strengthen your case, by the way.

So one of my RAs did research, and you get people who have committed themselves to cultivating

wisdom.

And you can look at people within religious traditions and people who are doing it in

a purely secular framework.

By many of the measures we use to study wisdom scientifically, the people in the religious

paths do better than the secular.

But here's the important point, there's no significant difference between the religious

paths.

So it's not like if you're following the path of Judaism, you're more likely to end up wiser

than if you follow Buddhism.

By the way, I don't know if that's my case.

I was making the case that you don't need to have a religious affiliation to search

for wisdom.

It's that I thought along to the point you just made, that it doesn't matter which religious

affiliation or none.

But that's what I'm saying.

Okay, so this is the tricky thing we're in.

It does matter if you're in one, but it doesn't matter sort of the propositional creeds of

that.

There's something else at work.

If you'll allow me this, there's a functionality to religion that we lost when we rejected

all the propositional dogma.

But there's a functionality there that we don't know how to recreate.

Yeah.

What is that?

Can you try to speak to that?

What is that functionality?

What is that?

Why is that so useful?

A bunch of stories, a bunch of myths, a bunch of narratives that are drenched in deep lessons

about morality and all those kinds of things.

What's the functional thing there that can't be replaced without a religious text by a

nonreligious text?

This is, for me, the golden question.

So thank you.

Do you have an answer?

Yeah.

I think I have a significant answer.

I don't think it's complete, but I think it's important.

And this is to step before the Cartesian revolution and think about many different kinds of knowing.

And this is now something that is prominent within what's called 4E cognitive science,

the kind of cognitive science I practice.

And there's a lot of converging evidence for these different ways of knowing.

There's propositional knowing.

This is what we are most familiar with.

In fact, it almost has a tyrannical status, right?

This is knowing that something is the case, like that cats are mammals and it's stored

in semantic memory, and we have tests of coherence and correspondence and conviction, right?

There's procedural knowing.

This is knowing how to do something.

Skills are not theories.

They're not beliefs.

They're not true or false.

They engage the world or they don't.

And they are stored in a different kind of memory, procedural memory.

Semantic memory can be damaged without any damage to procedural memory.

That's why you have the prototypical story of somebody suffering Alzheimer's and they're

losing all kinds of facts, but they can still sit down and play the piano flawlessly.

Same kind of argument.

There's perspectival knowing.

This is knowing what it's like to be you here now in this situation, in this state of mind,

the whole field of your salience landscaping, what it's like to be you here now.

And you have a specific kind of memory around that, episodic memory, and you have a different

criterion of realness.

So you can get this by my friend Dan Schiappi and I, we studied the scientists using moving

the rovers around, or you can take a look at people who are doing VR.

People talk about they want to really be in the game, and that makes it real.

They don't mean verisimilitude.

You can get that sense of being in the game with something like Tetris, which doesn't

look like the real world, and you can fail to have it in a video game that has a lot

of verisimilitude.

It's something else.

It's about, again, this kind of connectedness that we're talking about.

If I may interrupt, is that connected to the hard problem of consciousness, the subject,

the qualia, or is that a different, that kind of knowing, is that different from the quality

of consciousness?

I think it has to do with, well, I make a distinction between the adjectival and the

adverbial qualia, so I think it has to do with the adverbial qualia much more than with

the adjectival.

So the adjectival qualia are like the greenness of green and the blueness of blue.

The adverbial qualia are the hereness, the nowness, the togetherness.

And I think the perspectival knowing has a lot to do with the adverbial qualia.

Adjectival qualia and adverbial qualia.

I'm learning so many new things today.

Okay, so that's another way of knowing.

Right, the perspectival, and then there's a deeper one.

And this is a philosophical point, and I don't want to, we can go through the argument, but

you don't have to know that you know in order to know, because if you start doing that,

you get an infinite regress.

There has to be kinds of knowing that doesn't mean you know that you know that.

Yeah.

Okay.

Of course.

Okay, great.

Okay, good.

Well, there was a lot of ink spilled over that over a 40 year period, so.

My philosophers, they spill, this is what they do, they spill ink to get paid for ink

spillage.

So I want to talk about what I call participatory knowing.

This is the idea that you and the world are co participating in things and such that real

affordances exist between you.

So both me and this environment are shaped by gravity, so the affordance of walking becomes

available to me.

Both me and a lot of this environment are shaped by my biology, and so affordances for

that are here.

Look at this cup, shared physics, shared sort of biological factors, my hand, I'm bipedal,

also culture is shaping me and shaping this.

I had to learn how to use that and treat it as a cup.

So this is an agent arena relationship, right?

Use identities being created in your agency, identities being created in the world as an

arena so you and the world fit together.

You know when that's missing, when you're really lonely, or you're homesick, or you're

suffering culture shock.

So this is participatory knowing, and it's the sense of, it comes with a sense of belonging.

At every level.

So the ability to walk is a kind of knowing.

Yes.

Yes.

That there's a dance between the physics that enables this process and just participating

in the process is the act of knowing.

Right.

And there's a really weird form of memory you have for this kind of knowing, it's called

yourself.

What?

Can you elaborate?

Well, you do, so we talked about how all the different other kinds of knowing had specific

kinds of memory, semantic memory for propositional, procedural, episodic for perspectival.

What's the kind of memory that is the coordinated storehouse of all of your agent arena relationships?

All the roles you can take, all the identities you can assume, all the identities you can

assign.

Yeah, what's the self?

Do you mean like consciousness?

No, I mean your sense of self.

Sense of self in this world that's not consciousness.

It's like an agency or something.

Right, it's an agent arena relationship.

And so in an agent arena relationship, it's the sense of the agent.

And that the agent belongs in that arena.

Whatever the agent is, whatever the arena is, because it's probably a bunch of different

framings of how you experience that.

Yeah, and you do.

In your identity as a self, you have all kinds of roles that are somehow contributing to

that identity, but are not equivalent to that identity.

Yeah.

I wonder if like my two hands have different, because there's a different experience of

me picking up something with my right hand and then my left hand.

Are those like...

That's a really cool question, Lex.

They certainly feel like their own things, but that could be just anthropomorphization

based on cultural narratives and so on.

It could, but I think it's a legitimate empirical question because it also could be sort of

Ian McGilchrist stuff.

It could be you're using different hemispheres and they sort of have different agent arena

relationships to the environment.

This is a really important question in the cognitive science of the self.

Does that hemispheric difference mean you're multiple or you actually have a singular self?

So it's important to understand how many cells are there.

Yes, I think so.

But that's just like a quirk of evolution.

Surely it can be fundamental to cognition, having multiple cells or a singular self.

It depends, again, because we're getting far from the answer to the question you originally

asked me.

Do you want me to go back to that first or answer this one?

Which question?

I already forgot everything.

What's the functionality of religion?

Yes.

Okay.

Let us return.

Okay.

And then we can return to the self.

Okay.

So you said you have all these propositions and et cetera, et cetera, and they differ

from the religions and they don't seem to be considered legitimate by many people.

But yet there's something functioning in the religions that is transforming people and

making them wiser.

And I put it to you that the transformations are largely occurring at those nonpropositional

levels.

The procedural, the perspectival, and the participatory.

And those are the ones, by the way, that are more fundamentally connected to meaning making

because remember the propositions are representational and they're dependent on the nonpropositional,

nonrepresentational processes of connectedness and relevance realization.

So religion goes down deep to the nonpropositional and works there.

That's the functionality we need to grasp.

Well, you talk about tools, essentially, that humans are able to incorporate into their

cognition.

Psychotechnologies, like language is one, I suppose.

Isn't religion then a psychotechnology?

It would be, yeah, an ecology of psychotechnologies, yes.

And the question is that Nietzsche ruined everything by saying God is dead.

Do we have to invent the new thing?

Go from the old phone, create the iPhone, invent the new psychotechnology that takes

place of religion.

And so when the madman in Nietzsche's text goes into the marketplace, who's he talking

to?

He's not talking to the believers.

He's talking to the atheists and he says, do you not realize what we have done?

We have taken a sponge and wiped away the sky.

We are now forever falling.

We are unchained from the sun.

We have to become worthy of this.

But Nietzsche is full of romantic bullshit, as we know.

No, no, no.

No, but there's a point there.

Yes.

The point is, right, there's one thing to rejecting the proposition.

There's another project of replacing the functionality that we lost when we reject the religion.

So his worry that as nihilism takes hold, you don't ever replace the thing that religion,

the role that religion played in our world.

It's hard to tell what he actually, because he's so multivocal.

I'll speak for me rather than for Nietzsche.

I think it is possible to, using the best cognitive science and respectfully exacting

what we can from the best religion and philosophical traditions, because there's things like stoicism

that are in the grey line between philosophy and religion, Buddhism is the same.

Using that best cocci, that best exaptation, we can come up with that functionality without

having to buy into the particular propositional sets of the legacy religions.

That's my proposal.

I call that the religion that's not a religion.

So things like stoicism or modern stoicism, those things, don't you think in some sense

they naturally emerge?

Don't you think there's a longing for meaning?

So stoicism arises during the Hellenistic period when there was a significant meaning

crisis in the ancient world because of what had happened after the breakup of Alexander

the Great's empire.

So if you compare Aristotle to people who are living after Alexander.

So Aristotle grows up in a place where everybody speaks the same language, has the same religion,

his ancestors have been there for years, he knows everybody.

After Alexander the Great's empire is broken up, people are now thousands of miles away

from the government, they're surrounded by people because of the diasporas, they're surrounded

by people that don't speak their language, don't share their religion, that's why you

get all these mother religions emerging, universal mother religions like ISIS, etc.

So there is what's called domicile, there's the killing of home, there's a loss of a

sense of home and belonging and fittedness during the Hellenistic period and stoicism

arose specifically to address that.

And because it was designed to address a meaning crisis, it is no coincidence that it is coming

back into prominence right now.

Well there could be a lot of other variations and it feels like, I think when you speak

of the meaning crisis, you're in part describing, not prescribing, you're describing something

that is happening.

But I would venture to say that if we just leave things be, the meaning crisis dissipates

because we long to create institutions, to create collective ideas, so this distributed

cognition process that give us meaning.

So if religion loses power, we'll find other institutions that are sources of meaning.

I don't...

Is that your intuition as well?

I think we are already doing that.

I am involved with and do participant observation of many of these emerging communities that

are creating a colleges of practice that are specifically about trying to address the meaning

crisis.

I just, in late July, went to Washington State and did Rafe Kelly's Evolve Move Play, Return

to the Source, and wow, one of the most challenging things I've ever done.

That guy is awesome, by the way.

I got to interact with him a long, long time ago.

He said to say hi to you, by the way.

Yeah.

It's from another world.

It feels like a different world because I interacted with him, not directly, but...

This is somebody...

He can speak to what he works on, but he makes movement and play...

He encourages people to make that a part of their life, like how you move about the world,

whether that's as part of sort of athletic endeavors or actual just like walking around

a city.

And I think the reason I ran into him is because there was a lot of interest in that in the

athletic world, in the grappling world, in the Brazilian jiu jitsu world, people who

study movement, who make movement part of their lives to see how can we integrate play

and fun and just the basic humanness that's natural to our movement.

How do we integrate that into our daily practice?

So this is yet another way to find meaning.

I think it's actually an exemplar of what I was talking about because what's going on

with Raif's integration of parkour in nature and martial arts and mindfulness practices

and dialogical practices is exactly, and explicitly so by the way, he will tell you he's been

very influenced by my work.

He's trying to get at the nonpropositional kinds of knowing that make meaning by evolving

our sensory motor loop and enhancing our relevance realization because that gives people profound

improved sense of connectedness to themselves, to each other and the world.

And I'll tell you, Lex, I don't want to say too specifically the final thing that people

did because it's part of his secret sauce, right?

But what I can say is when it was done, I said to them all, I said, as far as I can

tell, none of you are religious, right?

And they go, yeah, yeah, and I said, but what you just did was a religious act, wasn't it?

And they all went, yeah, it was.

Yeah.

So that same magic was there.

Yes.

Bathroom break.

Sure.

What's your take on atheism in general?

Is it closer to truth than, maybe is an atheist closer to truth than a person who believes

in God?

So I'm a nontheist, which means I think the shared set of presuppositions between the

theist and the atheist are actually what needs to be rejected.

Can you explain that further?

Yes, I can.

And I want to point out, by the way, that there are lots of nontheistic religious traditions.

So I'm not coming up with a sort of airy fairy category.

Yeah.

And what's the difference in nontheism, agnosticism and atheism?

So nontheists think that the theist and the atheist share a bunch of presuppositions.

For example, it's that sacredness is to be understood in terms of a personal being that

is, in some sense, the supreme being, and that the right relationship to that being

is to have a correct set of beliefs.

I reject all of those claims.

So both the theist and the atheist see God.

In their modern version, yes, yes.

In which, do you reject it in the sense that you don't know, or do you reject it in a sense

that you believe that each one of those presuppositions is likely to be not true?

The latter.

Both on reflection, argument, and personal experimentation and experience, I've come

to the conclusion that those shared propositions are probably not true.

Which one is the most troublesome to you?

The personal being, the kind of accumulation of everything into one being that ultimately

created stuff?

So for me, there's two, and they're interlocked together.

I'm not trying to dodge your question.

It's that the idea that the ground of being is some kind of being, I think, is a fundamental

mistake.

It's void of being?

No, no, no.

The ground of being is some kind of being, so it's turtles all the way down.

The ground of being is not itself any kind of being.

Being is not a being.

It is the ability for things to be, which is not the same thing as a being.

Are humans beings?

We are beings.

This glass is a being.

This table is a being.

But when I ask you, how are they all in being, you don't say, by being a glass or by being

a table or by being a human.

You want to say, no, no, there's something underneath it all, and then you realize it

can't be any thing.

This is why many mystical traditions converge on the idea that the ground of being is no

thingness, which is normally pronounced as nothingness.

But if you put the hyphen back in, you get the original intent, no thingness.

That is bound up with, okay, what I need to do in order to be in relationship with … So,

it's a misconstruing of ultimate reality as a supreme being, which is a category mistake

to my mind, and then my relationship to it, that sacredness is a function of belief.

And I have been presenting you an argument through most of our discussion that meaning

is at a deeper level than beliefs and propositions.

And so, that is a misunderstanding of sacredness, because I take sacredness to be that which

is most meaningful and connected to what is most real.

And theists think of sacredness as what?

They think of sacredness as a property of a particular being, God, and that the way

that is meaningful to them is by asserting a set of propositions or beliefs.

Now, I want to point out that this is what I would now call modern or common theism.

You go back into the classical periods of Christianity, you get a view that's really

radically different from how most people understand theism today.

Okay, so let me … This is an interesting question that I usually think about in the

form of mathematics, but … So, in that case, if meaning is sacred in your nontheist view,

is meaning created or is it discovered?

There's a Latin word that doesn't separate them called inventio, and I would say that,

and before you say, oh, well, give me a chance, because you participate in it.

You've experienced an insight, yes?

Did you make it happen?

The insight …

Did you make it happen or did … Did you do … Like, can you do that?

I'm going to have … I need an insight.

This is what I do to make an insight.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, in some sense, it came from elsewhere.

Right, but you didn't just passively receive it, either.

You're engaged and involved in it.

That's why you get … Right?

So that's what I mean by you participate in it.

You participate in meaning.

So you do think that it's both?

Yes.

You do think it's both?

I mean, that's not a trivial thing to understand, because a lot of time we think … When you

think about a search for meaning, you think … It's like you're going through a big

house and you open each door and look if it's there and so on, as if there is going to be

a glowing orb that you discover, but at the same time, I'm somebody that, based on the

chemistry of my brain, have been extremely fortunate to be able to discover beauty in

everything, in the most mundane and boring of things.

I am, as David Foster Wallace said, unboreable.

I could just sit in a room, just like playing with a tennis ball or something and be excited,

basically like a dog, I think, endlessly.

So to me, meaning is created, because I could create meaning out of everything, but of course,

it doesn't require a partner.

It does require dance partners, whatever, it does require the tennis ball.

But honestly, that's what a lot of people that I don't necessarily … We'll talk

about it.

I don't practice meditation, but people who meditate very seriously, like the entire

days for months kind of thing, they talk about being able to discover meaning in just the

wind or something, like they just … The breath and everything, just subtle sensory

experiences give you deep fulfillment.

So that's, again, it's interaction.

Actually, I do want to say, because the interesting difference that you've drawn between nontheism,

theism and atheism, where's the agreement or disagreement between you and Jordan Peterson

on this?

I want to say to Jordan about this, because you're very clear, it's kind of beautiful

in the clarity in which you lay this out.

I wonder if Jordan has arrived at a similar kind of clarity.

Have you been able to draw any kind of lines between the way the two of you see religion?

Yeah.

So there was a video released, I think, like two or three weeks ago with Jordan and myself

and Jonathan Paget.

Oh, I haven't watched that one yet, yeah.

And it's around this question, Lux.

He's basically sort of making, he's putting together an argument for God.

I mean, I think that's a fair way.

I don't think he would object to me saying that.

And Jonathan Paget is also a, well, Jonathan is a Christian, it's unclear what Jordan

is.

And Jonathan's work is on symbolism and different mythologies and Christianity.

Yes, especially Neoplatonic Christianity, which is very important.

I have a lot of respect, well, I have a lot of respect for both of them, but I have a

lot of respect for Jonathan.

But in my participation in that dialogue, you could see me, well, repeatedly, but I

think everybody, including Jordan, thought constructively challenging sort of the attempt

to build a theistic model, and I was challenging it from a nontheistic perspective.

So I think we don't agree on certain sets of propositions.

But there was a lot of, there was also a lot of acknowledgement, and I think genuine appreciation

on his part and Jonathan's part of the arguments I was making.

So they believe in maybe the presupposition of like a supreme being.

Not believe, but they see the power of that particular presupposition in being a source

of meaning.

I think that's relatively clear for me with Jordan.

Jordan's a really complex guy, so it's very hard to just like pin.

To my best sort of understanding, yes, I think that's clearly the case for Jordan.

It's not the case for Jonathan.

Jonathan is, remember I said I was talking about modern atheism and theism?

Jonathan is a guy who somehow went into icon carving and Maximus the Confessor and Eastern

Orthodoxy and has come out of it at the other end as a fifth century church father that

is nevertheless being, rightfully so, found to be increasingly relevant to many people.

So he's deeply old school.

Yeah, I think he has, he and I, especially because Neoplatonism is a nontheistic philosophical

spirituality and it's a big part of Eastern Orthodoxy, he and I, I think, he would say

things like, God doesn't exist.

What?

You're a Christian, right?

And then he's being coy, but he'll say, well, God doesn't exist the way the cup exists or

the table exists, the same kind of move I was making a few minutes ago.

He'll say things like that.

He will emphasize the no thingness of ultimate reality, the no thingness of God, because

he's from that version of Christianity, what you might call classical theism, but classical

theism looks a lot more like nontheism than it looks like modern theism.

That's so interesting.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

What about, is there a line to be drawn between myth and religion in terms of its usefulness

in man's search for meaning?

So here's where Jordan and I are in much more, actually all three of us are in significant

agreement.

I said this in my series, but I want to say it again here.

Myths aren't stories about things that happened in the deep past that are largely irrelevant.

Myths are stories about perennial or pertinent patterns that need to be brought into awareness.

And they need to be brought into an awareness, not just or primarily at the propositional

level, but at those nonpropositional levels.

And I think that is what good mythos does.

I prefer to use the Greek word because we've now turned the English word into a synonym

for a widely believed falsehood.

And I don't think, again, if you go back even to the church fathers, I'm not a Christian,

I'm not advocating for Christianity, but neither am I here to attack it.

But when they talk about reading these stories, they think the literal interpretation is the

weakest and the least important.

You move to the allegorical or the symbolic, to the moral, to the spiritual, the mystical,

and that's where...

So they would say to you, but how is the story of Adam and Eve true for you now?

And I don't mean true for you in that relativistic sense, I mean, how is it pointing to a pattern

in your life right now?

So there is some sense in which the telling of this mythos becomes real in connecting

to the patterns that kind of captivate the public today.

Sure.

So you just keep telling the story.

I mean, there's something about some of these stories that are just really good at being

sticky to the patterns of each generation.

Yes.

And they'll stick to different patterns throughout time, they're just sticky in powerful ways.

Yes.

And so we keep returning back to them again and again and again.

And it's important to see that some of these stories are recursive, they're myths about

one particular set of patterns, they're myths about not just the important pattern.

You get the Jordan stuff about there's heroes and myths are trying to make us understand

the need for being heroic in our own lives.

One of the things I like to put in counterbalance to that is the Greek also have myths of hubris,

that counterbalance the heroic.

But then there are myths that are not about those deeply important patterns, but they're

myths about religio itself, that the way we're—religio means to bind, to connect, the way relevance

realization connects us.

And so the point of the myth is not notice that pattern or notice that pattern or notice