The Meaning Crisis | John Vervaeke

John: [00:00:00] Wisdom isn't about dealing with ignorance, wisdom is about dealing with foolishness, and foolishness has to do with misunderstanding. Understanding is to appropriately grasp the significance or relevance of what you know.

Harpreet: [00:00:29] What's up, everybody, welcome to the artist Data Science Podcast, the only self-development podcast for Data scientists. You're going to learn from and be inspired by the people ideas and conversations that'll encourage creativity and innovation in yourself so that you can do the same for others. I also host open office hours you can register to attend by going to bitly.com/adsoh. I look forward to seeing you all there. Let's ride this beat out into another awesome episode, and don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a five star review. Our guest today is an award winning lecturer in the departments of Psychology, Cognitive Science and Buddhist psychology. Since 1994, he's taught over 8000 students at the University of Toronto, where he's currently an associate professor in cognitive psychology and cognitive science. He's also taught courses in the psychology department on thinking and reasoning, with an emphasis

Harpreet: [00:01:39] On insight, problem solving and higher cognitive processes, with an emphasis on Intelligence, rationality,Mindfulness and the psychology of wisdom. And if all that doesn't sound fascinating enough already. He also teaches a course on Buddhism and cognitive science is uniquely passionate. Style of teaching has earned him nominations [00:02:00] for numerous teaching awards, including being awarded the highly prestigious 2012 Rajini George Excellence in Teaching Award.

Harpreet: [00:02:08] So please help me welcome

Harpreet: [00:02:10] Our guests today, a man with an enduring passion to address the meaning crisis that troubles our Western culture.

Harpreet: [00:02:17] Dr. John Vervaeke,

Harpreet: [00:02:19] Dr. Vervaeke, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be on the show today. I appreciate having you here.

John: [00:02:24] Thank you,

John: [00:02:25] Harpreet. It's good to be here. That's a rather glowing introduction. So thank you very much.

John: [00:02:30] My pleasure.

Harpreet: [00:02:32] Yes, I'm excited to talk a bit about the meaning crisis and the work that you're doing with your with your research and teaching. But before we get into all of that, let's learn a little bit about you. Where did you

Harpreet: [00:02:43] Grow up and what was it like there?

John: [00:02:46] I grew up in

John: [00:02:47] Dundas, in Canada, which is near Hamilton,

John: [00:02:51] Which is in what's called

John: [00:02:53] The Golden Horseshoe.

John: [00:02:54] And Hamilton's about, you know, an hour's

John: [00:02:58] Drive west from Toronto that helps anybody.

John: [00:03:01] So Hamilton is

John: [00:03:03] Basically

John: [00:03:03] Or was as things have

John: [00:03:05] Changed, but it was basically the Pittsburgh

John: [00:03:07] Of Canada. It was the biggest base for the production of steel in Canada, but Dundas was this town right beside it.

John: [00:03:14] Little town, much more

John: [00:03:15] Set in the country. So that's where I grew up. I grew up in fundamentalist Christian

John: [00:03:20] Family and

John: [00:03:20] Extended family, which which

John: [00:03:22] Over time I've come

John: [00:03:23] To have, I guess, what you'd call

John: [00:03:24] A deeply appreciative ambivalence

John: [00:03:26] Towards. I mean, that

John: [00:03:28] Version of religion traumatized me. I think it's the fairest way

Harpreet: [00:03:32] Of putting it. But on the

John: [00:03:34] Other hand, it's like the way English is my

John: [00:03:36] Mother tongue. It gave me

John: [00:03:37] My mother religion. It gave me an

John: [00:03:39] Introduction to a

John: [00:03:40] Way of thinking and being and aspects of human

John: [00:03:43] Psychopathology that I

John: [00:03:46] Think are important

John: [00:03:47] And relevant. So while I reject

John: [00:03:49] A lot of the theology and the

John: [00:03:51] Metaphysics that

John: [00:03:52] Sense of human beings

John: [00:03:53] Trying to do something

John: [00:03:55] Within a religious

John: [00:03:56] Framework that is of

John: [00:03:57] Enduring value stuck

John: [00:03:59] With me. And so

John: [00:03:59] Trying [00:04:00] to reconcile my rejection of that fundamentalist Christianity with my

John: [00:04:03] Appreciation for the sort of psycho,

John: [00:04:06] Spiritual existential dimensions, if

John: [00:04:07] Disclosed to me, is been a big part of my journey. A big part of my journey.

John: [00:04:12] And originally that was pretty much a personal journey. But then in

John: [00:04:16] University, I encountered

John: [00:04:18] The figure of

John: [00:04:18] Socrates, and

John: [00:04:20] The cultivation of wisdom

John: [00:04:21] Became central to my thinking. I took up

John: [00:04:24] A bunch of practices

John: [00:04:26] To draw in from eastern

John: [00:04:27] Traditions that you the

John: [00:04:29] Meta to try and cultivate

John: [00:04:30] Wisdom. And then what's been happening

John: [00:04:33] Is I started noticing that

John: [00:04:35] Cognitive science was now

John: [00:04:36] Shifting and giving me

John: [00:04:38] Tools

Harpreet: [00:04:38] To reflect

John: [00:04:40] On that in a scientifically deep manner. And as I did that and start to work it out, I noticed as I was bringing those elements into my courses, I was teaching my students.

John: [00:04:48] That was the

John: [00:04:48] Material they were most

John: [00:04:49] Attracted to. That was what they

John: [00:04:51] Most and I started to get

John: [00:04:52] A sense of maybe this isn't just me. I mean, egocentrism

John: [00:04:56] Aside, it was maybe there's

John: [00:04:57] Something bigger, you know? And so I opened up the argument with the look and that got

John: [00:05:02] Me into this idea about

John: [00:05:04] There being sort of a more

John: [00:05:05] Comprehensive thing happening in the so-called

John: [00:05:08] West, what I call the

John: [00:05:09] Meeting crisis and that many

John: [00:05:10] People are going

John: [00:05:11] Through something where they're trying to

Harpreet: [00:05:12] Reconcile how to recover

John: [00:05:14] The cultivation of wisdom and self-transcendence

John: [00:05:16] Within

John: [00:05:17] A predominantly scientific

John: [00:05:19] Worldview. So that's sort of

John: [00:05:20] How I got where I am.

Harpreet: [00:05:21] It's absolutely fascinating, and I'm really, really interested to get into the the meaning crisis and this this area where you speak about super fascinating. But before we get there, I'm curious at that young age, what did that rejection of that

Harpreet: [00:05:36] Fundamental Christian

Harpreet: [00:05:38] Kind of upbringing look like? Was it you just researching other religions and getting into other religions? I kind of look like.

John: [00:05:45] So when I was around 15, that's

John: [00:05:47] When that's when the rejection happened for me. And it happened because I read a science

John: [00:05:50] Fiction book by Rogers al-Aswany

John: [00:05:52] Called Lord of Light that exposed me

John: [00:05:53] To Hindu

John: [00:05:54] Mythology and

John: [00:05:55] Buddhist thought. And I read

John: [00:05:57] Siddhartha around the same time by

John: [00:05:59] Hermann Hesse, which [00:06:00] exposed me to a lot. And I also

John: [00:06:02] Was had

John: [00:06:03] Read business by Robertson.

John: [00:06:05] Davies in high school, was reading it at the time, and it exposed

John: [00:06:07] Me to the thought of young. And so all

John: [00:06:09] Of these things really sort of blew

John: [00:06:11] Me open and I started. Thinking about mythology

John: [00:06:14] And spirituality and self transcendence and altered states of consciousness, and

Harpreet: [00:06:19] I found that that

John: [00:06:21] Was opening up my

John: [00:06:22] Imagination and giving me access to

John: [00:06:24] Areas of my own mind and my own

John: [00:06:26] Consciousness that were not

John: [00:06:27] Being

John: [00:06:28] Properly accessed

John: [00:06:29] Or activated by the Christianity

John: [00:06:31] That I've been brought up in. Please be clear. I want to be clear here. I'm not saying

John: [00:06:35] That all of Christianity suffers that famine. I'm just talking about the particular version

John: [00:06:39] I was brought up in. And so

John: [00:06:42] What happened to

John: [00:06:43] Me is more a combination of things.

John: [00:06:46] There was the awakening of a kind of

John: [00:06:47] Hunger to explore these aspects, the mind and reality

John: [00:06:52] That were being disclosed

John: [00:06:53] To me, but there was also an anger. It's the kind of anger you have when you feel

John: [00:06:57] Like a lover has betrayed you, like you've been jilted or betrayed. So I felt very angry

John: [00:07:02] At the way that version

John: [00:07:04] Of Christianity had betrayed

John: [00:07:06] Me. It had not only much later, upon reflection

John: [00:07:09] And

John: [00:07:09] Therapy did I see that that that was

John: [00:07:12] Deeper than just the betrayal.

John: [00:07:13] That was very much kind of a trauma.

John: [00:07:16] Not kind of. It was a traumatizing experience for me. So it was a mixture of things for me. And as you can imagine for, you know, 50 to 70

John: [00:07:24] People trying to process that, that combination of this, it's

John: [00:07:27] Like it's like I've been living in a cabin on top of

Harpreet: [00:07:30] A mountain and the

John: [00:07:31] Walls blew away and then I could see in all

John: [00:07:33] Directions. And then I was

John: [00:07:34] Like, Why didn't anybody ever tell me the world

John: [00:07:37] Was like this? And of course, I'm

John: [00:07:38] Also scared because I'm alone on top of a mountain,

John: [00:07:41] Right? And so that was a

John: [00:07:43] Pretty devastating experience for somebody of

John: [00:07:46] That age.

John: [00:07:47] So going through that process was also very challenging. It took a long time for and a lot of education and some therapy and some other stuff to give me the tools to start

Harpreet: [00:07:58] To get it into [00:08:00]

John: [00:08:00] A shape in which it was a vector and an offense for growth, rather than just being pulled in multiple directions at different times.

Harpreet: [00:08:08] That's really, really fascinating. I grew up in a in the eastern tradition. My my family is that sick.

Harpreet: [00:08:14] I still think

Harpreet: [00:08:15] I consider myself sick like not sick as in physically sick, but sick is the religion.

Harpreet: [00:08:20] And for a

Harpreet: [00:08:21] Period of

Harpreet: [00:08:21] My like early

Harpreet: [00:08:22] Twenties, for some reason, I don't understand why I started getting deep into just researching about Christianity. I just found it fascinating, like the history of

Harpreet: [00:08:29] It and and

Harpreet: [00:08:31] Everything related to. I just found it super fascinating. But for me, when I was growing up, Sikhism

Harpreet: [00:08:36] Was that is almost

Harpreet: [00:08:37] Presented like a

Harpreet: [00:08:38] Western or Christian lens, like, there's this God up top. Just, you

Harpreet: [00:08:43] Know, they personified it like it was the Christian God, which, you know, as I got older and started to understand the religion a bit more was like, Oh, that's really not what it is about,

Harpreet: [00:08:52] Right? I kind of,

Harpreet: [00:08:53] In a sense, kind of understand that that betrayal that you're feeling, but it definitely want to get into more of the meaning crisis and things like that. But there's one one thing

Harpreet: [00:09:01] That you're talking about in some of your

Harpreet: [00:09:02] Lectures that I found really fascinating. I think the audience would enjoy this, too. It's this insight, problem solving and my audience is mostly Data scientists. I figured they'd love to to hear about this.

Harpreet: [00:09:13] So talk to us about what insight problem solving is.

John: [00:09:15] Oh, so

John: [00:09:17] That takes a little bit of work, but it's based

John: [00:09:19] On

John: [00:09:20] The seminal work of

John: [00:09:21] Newell and Simon, and so

John: [00:09:23] They analyze intelligence is the capacity to be a general problem

John: [00:09:26] Solver to be able

John: [00:09:27] To solve problems

John: [00:09:28] In a wide, a wide variety

John: [00:09:30] Of problems and a wide variety of domains. That's how you're an intelligent system, and something like a vending machine is not an intelligent system, right? Because it basically can handle one or two problems in a very limited way.

Harpreet: [00:09:40] Right. And then the idea

John: [00:09:41] Is, well, what's what it is? What is it to solve a problem? And then they analyze a problem into components representation of your initial

John: [00:09:47] State and

John: [00:09:48] Of your goal state? And you have a problem where there's a significant difference, for example, where I'm

John: [00:09:52] Thirsty, my initial

John: [00:09:53] State is I

John: [00:09:53] Lack water, my gold status,

John: [00:09:55] There's water

John: [00:09:55] Inside of me. And when there's a significant

John: [00:09:57] Enough difference between them, then

John: [00:09:58] I have a problem. And then the idea [00:10:00]

John: [00:10:00] Is there are operators. These are things I can do, actions I can perform that will change

John: [00:10:04] My my, my state.

John: [00:10:05] I can raise my right arm, raise my left arm, I can

John: [00:10:07] Sing, I can talk, I can smell, the can taste. And then the idea is by putting

John: [00:10:11] Together various combinations of sequence of operations, I lay out potential

John: [00:10:15] Pathways that might

John: [00:10:16] Possibly take me from my initial state to my goal state.

John: [00:10:19] And what and Simon, what why their work was so profound is revealed, something we didn't realize that sort of mathematical representation of all the pathways, but all the potential, all the potential pathways between the initial state and goal states. It's often combinatorial explosive. It's vast. So Keith Holyoake gives the example from a game of chess, which is, you know, you calculate the state space, not the state space. Sorry, the search space after the D where F is the number of options at any Turn D is a number of turns. So for an average chess

Harpreet: [00:10:49] Game, you usually have about

John: [00:10:51] 30 legal moves on average available to you. There's 60 turns, so that's 30 to the power of 60, which is more than the number of atomic particles in the universe. So you can't search the whole

Harpreet: [00:11:01] Space, you can't search

John: [00:11:02] The whole space. Now what Newell and Simon talked about was heuristics versus algorithms. Those terms have slipped around a lot,

Harpreet: [00:11:09] But the original meaning was, you know.

John: [00:11:12] Pretty much does something like an exhaustive

Harpreet: [00:11:14] Search, you can do

John: [00:11:15] Some Harp priority things to shave it down, but it's it's still approximately exhaustive, whereas a heuristic really tries to limit your search by specifying what you should pay attention to. And that's important. All the work on heuristic and bias is forms a big part of the work I do on intelligence and rationality. But what Newell and Simon didn't see is the difference that your problem formulation makes. The problem formulation is the way you represent your initial

Harpreet: [00:11:41] State, your goal state, your operators

John: [00:11:43] And what are also called path constraints. Path constraints are you only choose solutions that don't aren't detrimental to your ability to solve other problems like, for example, don't don't choose a solution that will take seventeen thousand lifetimes to do, because then you're not going to solve the problem and you're going to not solve your other [00:12:00] problems. And what happened, what they realized,

Harpreet: [00:12:03] What we've I think, what a

John: [00:12:04] Lot of people have come to realize is that problem formulation. When you change problem formulation, you really change the shape and size of that

Harpreet: [00:12:12] Space in a dramatic fashion.

John: [00:12:14] So we tend to concentrate on the solution, but most of the heavy lifting is actually done in the problem formulation. And not only does the problem formulation sort of constrain and limit your space, it also helps you select which heuristics you might apply. So problem formulation is doing a lot of the heavy work.

Harpreet: [00:12:33] So what?

John: [00:12:34] What an insight. I'm going to give you three components of it. So this is the first the first component of it insight is when I replace a problem formulation that will put me into a combinatorial explosive search space with one that doesn't. And I give various examples of that, like the mutilated chessboard, if you formulate it one way, it's a combinatorial explosive search. But if you just noticed something else and make that the relevant

Harpreet: [00:12:57] Feature, then it

John: [00:12:58] Becomes a very small search space and you can formulate it like that. So that's one thing, and insight is you

Harpreet: [00:13:03] Replace a bad problem

John: [00:13:05] Formulation that will put you into combinatorial explosion

Harpreet: [00:13:07] With a good one that

John: [00:13:09] Will help you avoid combinatorial explosion. That's one thing you do, but you also need insight in another way. So let's go back to problem formulation. There's an important distinction. Again, Noel and Simon didn't have this

Harpreet: [00:13:19] Distinction between,

John: [00:13:21] Well, well-defined or well formulated problems and ill defined problems. You know, problems don't exist objectively. They exist relative to a person. But I would assume relative like relative to you that twenty four times three is a well-defined problem. You know what? You know what the initial state is. It's a multiplication problem that gives you a tremendous amount of useful evidence. You know what the answer should look like? It should be a higher number. It's not a drawing of a platypus or

Harpreet: [00:13:44] Anything like that. You know the things

John: [00:13:46] You can do in between, you know, everything that's irrelevant,

Harpreet: [00:13:49] Right? So that's a well-defined problem.

John: [00:13:51] Now compare that to what we're trying to

Harpreet: [00:13:54] Do here, which is have

John: [00:13:55] A good conversation. What's the initial state?

Harpreet: [00:13:57] Well, silence, that's not particularly helpful.

John: [00:13:59] What's [00:14:00] the end state look like? Well, we're sort of satisfied that we had a good conversation, but what does that look like? What are the properties of it? What, what, what? Well, I should say things well, what things and what the ill defined problem going on a successful first date is an ill defined problem, telling a joke at the right time. Like most real world problems are ill defined problems. What's lacking in an ill defined problem is a good problem formulation. So another kind of insight is when you have an insight that turns an ill defined problem

Harpreet: [00:14:29] Into a well-defined

John: [00:14:30] Problem for you. Then there's the third, the third dimension. I'm presenting them analytically as distinct, but very often inside problems have all of these elements together. Ok. The third is right. You've probably seen this. It's a famous example of the nine dot problem. You give people nine dots and they have to. You say join it with four straight lines, and the next line has to begin from the terminus of the previous line. And people think it's easy and they draw the square and then, oh, and then they can't solve it. And the solution is you. You join the all nine dots by going outside the square. There's no square there at all. And people get pissed off because they say, you cheated. You went outside the square and you say, I never said Square, you are seeing that as a square.

Harpreet: [00:15:11] You're thinking this

John: [00:15:12] Is a regular connect the dot problem where you don't make non turns, et cetera, et cetera. So the insight there isn't

Harpreet: [00:15:18] Right isn't so much.

John: [00:15:20] It's an ill defined problem or combinatorial explosive. It's that the way you have framed

Harpreet: [00:15:25] The problem has made the

John: [00:15:26] Wrong information salient to you. And so what you need in an insight is to restructure it so that the relevant information is salient to you and and you correct for the mistake of information that you have appropriate, inappropriately deemed like perceptually or cognitively relevant.

Harpreet: [00:15:44] And so typically, what happens

John: [00:15:46] In an insight is you're manipulating your restructuring your problem formulation so that

Harpreet: [00:15:53] And it's either and or right,

John: [00:15:55] You're avoiding combinatorial explosion, you're replacing an ill defined problem [00:16:00] formulation with a well-defined problem formulation. You're coming up with a problem formulation that corrects for the way in which your salience is.

Harpreet: [00:16:08] What you're finding

John: [00:16:08] Salient is misleading you from solving a problem. The insight is that sort of structuring a problem formulation that does one or all of one or two or all three of those. And the most powerful

Harpreet: [00:16:20] Insights are ones typically

John: [00:16:22] That have all three elements and also are higher order insights. One more point that I'll let you talk,

Harpreet: [00:16:28] Which is some insights

John: [00:16:30] Are just of

Harpreet: [00:16:31] Themself of

John: [00:16:32] A particular problem. But and this is something that PC pointed to in child development. Some insights are higher order in that they're not an insight just into this problem. They're an insight into a kind of problem. They're a realization, a weight.

Harpreet: [00:16:46] All of these share

John: [00:16:48] This same bad problem formulation, and all of these can be restructured. And so those are some of our most powerful insights when we do all three changes and we do it for a higher order kind of insight problem.

Harpreet: [00:17:01] I hope that was helpful. I absolutely love that.

Harpreet: [00:17:04] Absolutely love that. It's so fascinating.

Harpreet: [00:17:06] Like you kind of start by.

Harpreet: [00:17:08] If I'm understanding this, you think of the future as if it was a probability distribution, right? You think of the state you are now to state you want to be. Everything in between is a probability distribution, which is way too

Harpreet: [00:17:20] Common, a terrifically expensive to

Harpreet: [00:17:22] Compute. So you use sort of heuristics to then say, All right, let's search in this space for an optimal solution. But it could be that we might just attain like a local optimum. But the global optimism out here?

John: [00:17:33] Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

Harpreet: [00:17:35] So how do we how do we know if we're stuck in like a local optimum?

John: [00:17:40] So you really don't know you were stuck until you've had the insight. So it's not a foresight thing. You don't say, Hey, I'm stuck and I need an insight. It's only retrospectively when the insight occurs that you realize that how you were limited in some way. And then the the interesting question for me is, well, what's the process [00:18:00] that brings about that restructuring of the problem formulation? So you get you get that aha moment where you realize, Oh, this is how I can solve it. Now there's a long story there and one that I think you can. I mean, I teach an entire course on it, you know, but so I can't give something that I could really quickly epistemic justify here. But the gist of it is it's not something you sort of infer

Harpreet: [00:18:22] Your way through.

John: [00:18:23] Basically, what it looks like

Harpreet: [00:18:25] And this is

John: [00:18:25] Convergent from work with machine learning is basically you. You basically throw some noise into the system because you're relying on your your, you're relying on the dynamical

Harpreet: [00:18:36] System of your cognition.

John: [00:18:37] You're relying on its potential to dynamically self-organize. So you basically you throw some noise into it the right way, right? And you're relying on the capacity for the system to self-organize in order to restructure. It looks like, again, we have to take all of this like this is all still being researched.

Harpreet: [00:18:55] So I want

John: [00:18:56] Everybody to understand that. But it looks like the way what the sort of triggering event for that throwing noise in and restructuring is a sudden shift from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere and then a shift back

Harpreet: [00:19:10] From the right

John: [00:19:11] Hemisphere to the left hemisphere. And that is that's the way in which you sort of break out an inappropriate framing and then the right hemisphere is way more willing to explore problem, different problem

Harpreet: [00:19:22] Formulations, and then you bring that

John: [00:19:24] Back into the left hemisphere. So it's basically kind of this this self disruption opponent processing,

Harpreet: [00:19:31] I would suggest,

John: [00:19:32] Between the left and right hemisphere that affords

Harpreet: [00:19:35] That that capacity for insight.

Harpreet: [00:19:38] That's super, super fascinating.

Harpreet: [00:19:40] I think I might

Harpreet: [00:19:41] Have to go back to school and register in your class on this topic because it sounds like something I would really enjoy it. So like problem formulation, I think is super important, especially as, as you know, for data scientists, machine learning practitioners, because if we don't formulate the right

Harpreet: [00:19:54] Problem, we'll end up

Harpreet: [00:19:55] Solving something completely unrelated to our initial. Yeah, what we're initially trying to do, [00:20:00] though, when it comes to formulating a problem, is that is there a cookie cutter recipe to make that happen or is is there?

John: [00:20:08] Well, there are things that there are things you can do to improve it and they tap into sort of that stuff. I was talking about the hemisphere shifting. So the experimental evidence is that if you enhance your cognitive flexibility, you will enhance your ability to go through that restructuring process of your problem formulation. And so if you're

Harpreet: [00:20:25] Asking what sounds like sort of

John: [00:20:27] A pedagogical thing, how can I learn to do this better? You can't sort of learn like an algorithm for insight, but what you can do is you can engage in practices that will increase the cognitive flexibility.

Harpreet: [00:20:40] And because, like I said,

John: [00:20:41] I have an argument for this, but I don't have time to give it because it's not primarily an inferential thing you're doing. It's an intentional thing. What you're doing is learning how to redirect your attention. You can even notice that that you can notice that, that I want to show you what I mean. Notice how you have to. You have a tension right now

Harpreet: [00:20:58] Right now between focusing on me and zeroing

John: [00:21:02] Your attention in on me. And then there's a part of your mind that's saying, No, no, let's drift away. Let's think about other stuff. Let's daydream. Let's go out and what you're doing here and what you're doing is you're constantly moving between those and a way of thinking about that that's a little bit stronger than just an analogy is it's very much like what happens in evolution, where you're getting a process that's introducing variation and then a process that's inducing killing off most of the options. And then you zero back and you're constantly like an accordion going back and before the back between them and you're constantly evolving. And then what can happen is you can do things that sort of increase the range at which that cognitive flexibility occurs by increasing the range at which you can pay attention to things. So mindfulness practices are very conducive to enhancing insight. I recommend given that argument and given quite a bit of empirical [00:22:00] evidence about what insight is. You want you want two kinds of mindfulness practices. You want mindfulness practices that get you to step back and sort of really look very closely at the mind, right? Really, sort of zoom in on the mind. Those are meditative practices. And then

Harpreet: [00:22:15] You want right

John: [00:22:17] Practices that you just sort of zoom out and look more deeply into the world. The metaphor I use for people is like this. So I wear glasses right now. Right. Meditation is what I step back. And this is like looking at your problem, framing your problem formulation.

Harpreet: [00:22:30] I step back and look at it, right? That's meditation,

John: [00:22:33] Because maybe I can see something on it, but I didn't see before, and then I can clean it. And then when I put it back on, that's contemplation. And I look now, how do I know if I've cleaned it? Well, when I look again? Do I do I see better than I did before?

Harpreet: [00:22:44] Right?

John: [00:22:45] But how do I? But it might be that I am not quite seeing as well as they do. So I step back. I take it off and I go. I cycle back and forth between meditative and contemplative practices that significantly

Harpreet: [00:22:57] Increase my cognitive flexibility and then

John: [00:22:59] Give another argument that published in Twenty Eighteen. This also helps explain why mindfulness practices enhance people's ability to get into the flow state, because I think there's a deep connection between that cognitive flexibility, the capacity for insight and the ability to get into the flow state.

Harpreet: [00:23:15] That's super

Harpreet: [00:23:16] Fascinating. And when it comes to like mindfulness, practicing, practicing, as you mentioned, meditation as one

Harpreet: [00:23:22] Can can just

Harpreet: [00:23:24] Go in out for a walk or just journaling. Can these be considered mindfulness practices as well?

John: [00:23:29] It depends. It depends what you're

John: [00:23:31] Doing with them, right?

John: [00:23:32] I think there are what I call. There are many cycle

John: [00:23:35] Technologies to a second.

John: [00:23:37] Technology is a standardized

John: [00:23:38] Way of formulating formatting, communicating information that sort of is designed to fit

John: [00:23:44] How our cognition works and enhance it and

John: [00:23:46] Reliable and systematic

John: [00:23:47] Fashion like literacy, for example. Right. And so there are Typekit technologies like mindfulness practices. They can do that. There are other

John: [00:23:53] Ones. So journaling

John: [00:23:54] Is

John: [00:23:54] Particularly good for another

John: [00:23:56] Kind of

John: [00:23:56] Move that

John: [00:23:58] Helps insight. And this is particularly [00:24:00] why

John: [00:24:00] Journaling is used in therapeutic context when you're trying to get people to have insight. So this is work that my colleague and

Harpreet: [00:24:07] Coauthor we've we've

John: [00:24:08] Coauthored on a paper. Together you go. Grossman talks about

Harpreet: [00:24:11] Tells it the Solomon effect, and let me describe it to you,

John: [00:24:14] And then you'll see its relevance to journaling right away. Did you get somebody to describe a really hard problem that they have? The people inevitably described the problem from a first person perspective, especially if it's complex, messy, ill defined personal situation, the kinds that really perplexed us and

Harpreet: [00:24:30] Really wear us down and cut us

John: [00:24:32] Up. So people describe it and they'll describe it from the first person perspective. Then you ask them to do the following you say, Could you please re describe that

Harpreet: [00:24:40] Problem from the third person

John: [00:24:42] Perspective as how your friend might describe the problem? And now and then what happens is when people describe the same problem with the third

Harpreet: [00:24:49] Person perspective, they often

John: [00:24:50] Get an insight into their

Harpreet: [00:24:51] Problem that's called the

John: [00:24:52] Solomon effect. So when you write things down in your journaling, if you make it and you have the opportunity, right, if you have the opportunity to make the what you're writing down to be more of a third person perspective that can inform insight, especially also because you're externalizing

Harpreet: [00:25:10] Your cognition, you're putting it on the page, you're not. So this is why journaling

John: [00:25:15] Is better than

Harpreet: [00:25:16] Rumination. Problem with rumination

John: [00:25:17] Is you're holding everything and working memory, and that's too ephemeral. You won't see it. It's like trying to see evolution

Harpreet: [00:25:23] By by looking

John: [00:25:25] At like, you know, a speck of like one little piece of a fossil or something you don't have. You can't. It's not you don't have a big enough scale to see larger term patterns.

Harpreet: [00:25:35] But when you write

John: [00:25:36] Things down, you externalized. You can see those bigger patterns. And if you do it from the third person perspective, you can also get insight into them. And that can be a very effective practice.

Harpreet: [00:25:45] Or for all the programmers and coders in the audience, they might recognize this as rubber ducky, where you're just

Harpreet: [00:25:51] Kind of have a pretend

Harpreet: [00:25:52] Rubber ducky that you're

Harpreet: [00:25:53] Explaining this piece of code that

Harpreet: [00:25:55] You're stuck on. And all of a sudden, Oh wait, I don't know what I have to do.

John: [00:25:58] Right, right, right.

John: [00:26:00] So [00:26:00] there's been similar work done with Berlin what's called the Berlin paradigm by Maltese

John: [00:26:04] And starting her people

John: [00:26:05] In a situation. So what you've done is you've done about a lot of pre-testing. You find the kind of problems that sort of.

John: [00:26:11] You help

John: [00:26:12] You distinguish between people, we would more readily call wise from people that are just sort of

John: [00:26:16] Normal and what

John: [00:26:18] So you get a sort of way of measuring that

John: [00:26:20] And then what you do is when people are in this situation, if you allow them to imagine talking to another person, they will inevitably do better on the test than if they don't. So there is an inherently dialogical nature to

Harpreet: [00:26:33] All of this, which is also why I'm

John: [00:26:34] So fascinated by dialog.

Harpreet: [00:26:36] Yeah, that's super, super interesting. So it reminds me I was reading this book recently. It was called the hare harebrained tortoise mind

Harpreet: [00:26:44] By Guy

Harpreet: [00:26:45] Claxton, and he's talking about. Oh yeah, yeah. Two modes in the in the brain. One of them, he calls. I believe it was demoed where you just kind of letting your mind wander and not focus, right? So kind of like that that analogy to get glasses on and off. And in those states when we kind of let our mind

Harpreet: [00:27:01] Wander, it's where we get

Harpreet: [00:27:03] Most of our creative ideas. And, you know, we're stuck in a problem all of a sudden will get the the answer to the solution. By doing that. So I'm curious. Like, do you think creativity is something that can be taught, that can be learned or is it just a personality trait?

John: [00:27:19] So it depends what you mean by that, because the central question, I would

John: [00:27:22] Argue, that faces us when we talk about creativity and and we want to get beyond sort of decadent pop culture romanticism about creativity, which we just blather and say nothing of importance. Creativity is the is the blah blah blah blah like that that's useless. So the central question, if you want to try and get this into a tractable problem is you want to ask yourself, is there anything to creativity above and beyond insight, problem solving, right? And so I've already told you we seem to have increasing evidence for things that reliably increase our capacity for insight. And then you might say, but insight isn't enough for creativity. There's other things that are going on, and [00:28:00] there's some candidates you should consider. Maybe creativity isn't just insight. Perhaps it's the ability to enter into the flow state. Perhaps it's an ability to shift between modes right between what's called the metallic or the parabolic mode, because maybe there's a motivational arousal affective aspect of creativity that's not being properly captured by the more cognitive aspects of insight. And so I can't answer your question in a simple way because we are, I would argue, and this is where we are. So I'm trying to be intellectually honest, trying to figure out what it is

Harpreet: [00:28:33] Like, what's to

John: [00:28:34] Create, what is creativity above and beyond. Insight, I think, is the central question. Now here's what I would know not speaking just as a representative of the field, but my own particular my what.

Harpreet: [00:28:42] My own particular

John: [00:28:43] Argument is is I think there is some things to creativity above and beyond insight. And then we can ask what those are

Harpreet: [00:28:51] And what kinds of practices help

John: [00:28:53] To train those additional elements. I think insight is an important component of creativity. So you want to do things that train that. But then there are things there are things above and beyond insight that are essential to the creativity, motivation, motivation, better motivational states, things like that that need to be taken into account also. Even your what you might call your and this maps on to that matter, motivational stuff, usually in what we when we call it insight. What we're doing is we're using the insight machinery to solve a problem. When we call it creativity, we're using the same machinery to find a problem, to find a really good problem, right? And so one of the ways of thinking about that, I'm not claiming it's exhaustive is what we do often. What creativity is this? Here's a problem, and here's a problem. And here's a problem. And here's a problem. And we think they're independent and they are until somebody comes along and sits. But wait, if I were to solve this problem, that would solve all those other problems, you get that side of higher order. And so they find a crucial or central thing. And you can see, you know, Einstein doing that where he's taking things like, you know, he's taking the speed of light and he's taking acceleration [00:30:00] and gravity, and they're being treated as separate things. And then he realizes, Wait, there's a problem here. And if we solve that problem, it'll solve all those other ones that we go, Wow, what a creative mind.

Harpreet: [00:30:09] So I think what we need

John: [00:30:10] To ask is if we're trying to increase creativity,

Harpreet: [00:30:13] How do we increase insight? How do we

John: [00:30:15] How do we increase these other factors? And how do we get people to use the Insight mission not to solve

Harpreet: [00:30:21] Problems, but to find

John: [00:30:23] Problems? And what I can point to you about that that connects to some of this other motivational stuff is the distinction that Fuller makes between wandering curiosity. We tend to treat them as synonyms, but they're not. So curiosity is very much where I feel like there's a gap in my knowledge. I'm ignorant and I'm trying to find something that will fill it right. So solving the problem is the key issue for me. That's why if I prolong your curiosity, it's aversive to you. Like, are you reading the whodunit novel? Then you never get to the end. Like, you get pissed off and angry and frustrated, right? But wonder is different. Wonder is not where you're trying to find an answer. Wonder is what you're trying to call more and more into question.

Harpreet: [00:31:03] And that's

John: [00:31:04] Why if I expand wonder, you find it as a more positive state, you find it as the state of awe,

Harpreet: [00:31:09] And so learn.

John: [00:31:11] Turning to reliably distinguish between them and curiosity is a good thing. You understand I'm not criticizing it,

Harpreet: [00:31:18] But if we're talking

John: [00:31:19] About the importance of creativity, learning how to wonder, learning how to get into or learning how to get into the flow state. Learning how to get

Harpreet: [00:31:27] Into the parallel

John: [00:31:29] State rather than state. The pyrotechnic means doing something for its own sake, where the telex means doing it for

Harpreet: [00:31:35] The external goal. All of those things,

John: [00:31:37] If done in conjunction with you training the insight machinery, will. I would predict, make you more creative.

Harpreet: [00:31:44] Never really thought about that distinction between curiosity and wonder in the way

Harpreet: [00:31:47] You put it. Just it makes so much sense.

Harpreet: [00:31:49] Yeah, that's

Harpreet: [00:31:50] Wow. It's really, really,

Harpreet: [00:31:51] Really insightful, insightful insight. So I like what you're talking about when going back to creativity, talking about Einstein, how he's [00:32:00] combining these things. It's like we can say that creativity is kind of like the union of

Harpreet: [00:32:04] Sets in a way.

John: [00:32:05] Yes, it's seeing a potential union

John: [00:32:08] That hasn't been

John: [00:32:09] Seen before, and you can see that's why that's like the problem for emulation

John: [00:32:13] Machinery, right? But now you're not so much trying to solve the problem.

John: [00:32:16] I mean,

John: [00:32:16] Einstein did both. He both found

John: [00:32:18] A great problem and then

John: [00:32:19] Solved it, which is like,

John: [00:32:20] Whoa, that's the

John: [00:32:21] Best, right? Yeah.

Harpreet: [00:32:23] So when I start getting into the meeting crisis and I think before we do that, maybe

Harpreet: [00:32:27] Correct me if I'm wrong, you might might be a good

Harpreet: [00:32:29] Place to kind of start by talking about this concept of the

Harpreet: [00:32:33] The axial age. Sure.

Harpreet: [00:32:35] So can you help us understand this? What is the axial age? When did the first one start? Why do you think it started?

Harpreet: [00:32:44] So I mean,

John: [00:32:45] There's a good book on this is Karen Armstrong's book The Great

John: [00:32:48] Transformation. Some there's a lot of there's a lot of well, of course,

John: [00:32:52] There's a lot of academic controversy around it because it's a historical claim and there's no historical

John: [00:32:56] Claim that doesn't have controversy

John: [00:32:58] Surrounding it. So some people want to talk about an actual stage rather than

John: [00:33:02] An axial age, meaning that

John: [00:33:03] Different civilizations at different times go through something

John: [00:33:06] Like this.

John: [00:33:07] The original idea was Karl Jaspers

John: [00:33:08] Idea that several civilizations went through

John: [00:33:11] Similar kinds of changes or at around the same time. And the basic idea is this and this is why I think there is some credence

John: [00:33:18] To the idea of the axial age. So we we had an extended human being, sorry, had an extended

John: [00:33:26] Period of advanced civilization known as the Bronze Age, and

John: [00:33:29] It starts roughly

John: [00:33:30] Around three thousand BCE. And it goes and you get you get huge

John: [00:33:34] Complex civilizations

John: [00:33:36] With

John: [00:33:37] Babylonian, the Hittite Empire, Egypt, of

John: [00:33:40] Course. You know, my no

John: [00:33:42] One's the Mycenaean on and on and

John: [00:33:43] On. You know, all these all these great, all these great kingdoms, all these great empires and an analogy I picked up and I can't remember where I picked it up is think of these like the dinosaurs, right? And they're just dominating the the sociocultural environment, [00:34:00] right? And then for reasons that are also in dispute, although the the event is not in

Harpreet: [00:34:05] Dispute, but what the cause of it

John: [00:34:07] Is in dispute, what's what's called the Bronze Age

Harpreet: [00:34:10] Collapse, that civilization

John: [00:34:11] Around twelve hundred, not that civilization, all of those civilizations and it was a massively interconnected world collapses. It's the biggest collapse of civilization the world's ever seen. It dwarfs the fall of the Western Roman Empire, et cetera, et cetera. It's just a huge and one way of thinking about it on the analogy is the dinosaurs are wiped out by some asteroid event, some extinction event. What happens is all the mammals start to speciation. And what happens is you get a lot of little kingdoms that all species in that gap. Well, first of all, there's just like a crushing period where everybody's just trying to recover. But as they start to recover and there's the loss of literacy, there's the loss of commerce, there's the loss of everything, right? But what you see is a lot of little kingdoms start to emerge and there's a lot of social experimentation. And there's also a lot more sort of, you know, sea travel and other things are going on. Again, it's it's unclear.

Harpreet: [00:35:04] But what's

John: [00:35:04] Happening in all that speciation is a lot of experimentation,

Harpreet: [00:35:08] Right?

John: [00:35:08] A lot of social experimentation, a lot of cognitive experimentation. And what happens is you get the event, you get the invention of some really interesting things psycho technologies. You get the you get the invention in Canaan, one of the places hit hardest, by the way, by the Bronze Age collapse of alphabetic literacy. And then the Phoenicians. Take it up and they're doing this weird thing where they're sailing all around the world and creating colonies, right? And then that alphabet gets taken by the Greeks, and they standardize the reading and they add in vowels and this like, just think about what literacy does to your your power to. If I imagine do the reverse, I take literacy from you, not language literacy. Imagine now how shrunk your capacity for solving your problems, even your self-awareness, because you can't journal anymore, for example. So what happens is literacy. Alphabetic literacy makes literacy available [00:36:00] to many more people. This is a tremendous empowerment of your cognition. The same thing with numeracy.

Harpreet: [00:36:07] Numeracy comes back,

John: [00:36:08] Coinage is invented and coinage is an. Abstract symbol system that follows arithmetic rules that you have to calculate. So people are thinking in all of these new ways and it's just permeating their cognition

Harpreet: [00:36:19] And their consciousness, and it's

John: [00:36:20] Empowering them in ways they're not foreseeing. They're not even trying to make it happen.

Harpreet: [00:36:24] But what

John: [00:36:24] Happens is they get the ability

Harpreet: [00:36:27] To reflect

John: [00:36:28] Critically and more rigorously

Harpreet: [00:36:31] Right on their own cognition, and they

John: [00:36:34] Become more critically aware of the way in which the mind is the source of suffering

Harpreet: [00:36:40] And disaster. That's why you all a

John: [00:36:42] Lot of the literature from this period is about how, you know, the mind is the the beginning of things and how everything might be an illusion or everything's decadent.

Harpreet: [00:36:51] And the axial age was

John: [00:36:53] The creation of a new world view to try and accommodate all those changes that were happening in human cognition.

Harpreet: [00:37:00] So the previous

John: [00:37:01] In the Bronze Age, you have a continuous cosmos. There's no hard line divisions between animals and human beings and the gods. You can become a god just by becoming extremely powerful. It's right. It's but what happens with the actual ages? People are trying to make sense of this. They're becoming so aware of the mind's capacity

Harpreet: [00:37:21] For self-deception

John: [00:37:23] That they come up with, like basically a

Harpreet: [00:37:25] Two world model. There's the everyday world. It's the world

John: [00:37:28] We live in that's beset by all this self-deception. And then there is a higher world. It can either be above us or it can be in the future. The Promised Land, it can be in heaven. It can be the world that's not decadent. It could be the world behind the

Harpreet: [00:37:40] World of illusion that can be

John: [00:37:41] Nirvana behind samsara. But you get these two world idea of the real

Harpreet: [00:37:45] World, which is

John: [00:37:46] Different from the everyday world, which is a world of illusion and suffering and violence. And you get this idea that our primary we are, we don't belong here.

Harpreet: [00:37:55] We're pilgrims, we're travelers.

John: [00:37:58] Our goal is to get [00:38:00] and

Harpreet: [00:38:00] You know, and you say, Oh, I

John: [00:38:01] Don't believe that you believe it temporally, I bet you, do you carry this idea? Well, we have to progress. There's a better world ahead of us, right? So you can lay it out in time, you can lay it out and struck in space with structure. But the idea is

Harpreet: [00:38:15] That we don't fundamentally

John: [00:38:17] Belong, and we have to figure out how to transcend

Harpreet: [00:38:20] Ourselves into a state

John: [00:38:22] In which

Harpreet: [00:38:22] We realize

John: [00:38:24] The real world and we come into a more

Harpreet: [00:38:26] Fuller realization of

John: [00:38:28] Our true humanity, our true

Harpreet: [00:38:30] Nature. And this is. And so you get all of these

John: [00:38:33] Axial age wisdom, philosophies that are born at that time, trying

Harpreet: [00:38:39] To give a mythological image to try to

John: [00:38:43] Express and articulate

Harpreet: [00:38:45] The way the human

John: [00:38:46] Cognition was being fundamentally changed and to try and harness it

Harpreet: [00:38:51] To give people

John: [00:38:52] A way of dealing with

Harpreet: [00:38:54] Self-deception in a

John: [00:38:55] Comprehensive manner. Sorry, that was a bit long, but there's a lot there.

Harpreet: [00:38:58] No, I absolutely love that. That's so, so deep and fascinating. And I mean, I encourage everyone. I will link to the show notes to check out your series on this because you go really, really in-depth on on all these topics.

Harpreet: [00:39:09] Absolutely. Love it. So are we now in

Harpreet: [00:39:12] Another axial

Harpreet: [00:39:13] Age? Is that where we

Harpreet: [00:39:15] Are in our modern?

John: [00:39:16] Well, the thing about it is is let's compare something like the axial age worldview, which is historically created

Harpreet: [00:39:24] With something that's more perennial.

John: [00:39:26] So for reasons that we

Harpreet: [00:39:27] Can sort of see what we were

John: [00:39:28] Previously talking about, the very processes

Harpreet: [00:39:30] That make us intelligent,

John: [00:39:32] Adaptively intelligent, right, that sort of ongoing

Harpreet: [00:39:35] Evolution, we formulate a

John: [00:39:37] Problem, but notice that we need insight because the very processes that help us zero in on the relevant

Harpreet: [00:39:43] Information can also mislead us or make us miss,

John: [00:39:46] Formulate or we can use a heuristic to avoid combinatorial explosion. But the problem is, every heuristic also commits you to, you know, there's no free lunch theorem.

Harpreet: [00:39:54] It commits you

John: [00:39:54] To a certain amount of inevitable bias that is going to be self deceptive and self self-destructive. So [00:40:00] in my work, we talk about the heuristic and bias approach. The two are always linked together, but the very processes that make you adaptively intelligent make you perpetually vulnerable to self-deception in that very key ability of having an or having an ongoing evolving capacity for problem formulation. Ok, so what you need is you need to learn things, you need to learn cyclic technology that will help you ameliorate the self-deception that arises when you're trying to use your intelligence as a general problem solver. So this is a perennial problem across cultures, across historical periods. Human beings have looked for sets of practices

Harpreet: [00:40:39] That will help them ameliorate

John: [00:40:42] Self-deception and will also help them to enhance. We haven't talked about this very much

Harpreet: [00:40:47] Enhanced meaning in life enhance that,

John: [00:40:49] That really fundamental sense of connectedness to yourself, to other people in the world that makes life worth living. I and many people would agree with me on this many reasons I call that that set of practices that helps us reliably and systematically deal with self-deception and increase our sense of meaning in life. Those are wisdom practices. Now the thing about practices is. You have to they have to be homed.

Harpreet: [00:41:13] They have to be situated, right they

John: [00:41:15] They have to have a place that makes them intelligible, makes them fit in with other aspects of your life. And so we create we typically create places

Harpreet: [00:41:25] Where we engage in particular

John: [00:41:26] Practices. But your worldview is your ultimate home.

Harpreet: [00:41:29] It's the home of all homes, right? And so we had a bunch of

John: [00:41:33] Practices that arose within the axial age worldview,

Harpreet: [00:41:39] The two, the two

John: [00:41:40] Worlds worldview. You could see Buddhism and Daoism and the prophetic aspects of Judaism and blah blah blah blah Neal, the beginnings of Satanism and the whole Socratic tradition and the Hellenistic. All of these things are are merging

Harpreet: [00:41:55] At that time, and they all

John: [00:41:57] Emerge and they're powerful and they find a wonderful home [00:42:00] in this two worlds mythology. And they give us a sustained set of traditions for how to cultivate

Harpreet: [00:42:05] Wisdom as opposed to knowledge. What's happened is,

John: [00:42:09] You know, because of the, well, there's a lot I won't pick a particular villain. What happens is we have completely undermined that two worlds mythology. We have completely undermined it. We've undermined it in so many different ways for a whole bunch of historical reasons. And we've undermined

Harpreet: [00:42:24] The for many people, the world

John: [00:42:27] Religions, world philosophies

Harpreet: [00:42:28] That emerged are no longer

John: [00:42:30] Viable for us. And I'm not insulting anybody. I'm just pointing to statistics, the demographic statistics.

Harpreet: [00:42:36] So is this the the essence of the meaning crisis? Then this

Harpreet: [00:42:39] Self does.

John: [00:42:40] This is it.

John: [00:42:40] We don't have to notice.

John: [00:42:42] If I ask you this,

Harpreet: [00:42:43] You know, where do you go for

John: [00:42:44] Knowledge? Well, science in the university. Ok, where do you go for information? Well, the internet, you

Harpreet: [00:42:49] Know, social media, where you go for wisdom. Yeah. The question that yeah, yeah. Where do you go? Where do you go?

John: [00:42:55] There used to be ready answers for that.

Harpreet: [00:42:57] People used to are called.

John: [00:42:59] Most cultures will have an answer for you.

Harpreet: [00:43:00] Like that? Our culture used to have an answer, and it doesn't anymore.

John: [00:43:04] Notice notice this weird thing about the scientific world view. The scientific world view gives me all of these explanations. But you know what it doesn't do. It doesn't give me an explanation of how I generate scientific explanations. I and

Harpreet: [00:43:18] You, as

John: [00:43:19] The users of meaning and the pursuers of truth, don't fit into the scientific worldview. We're presupposed by it,

Harpreet: [00:43:26] But we don't belong within it and we don't

John: [00:43:28] Know how these, you know, when we talked about mindfulness, I'm sure some of your

Harpreet: [00:43:33] Listeners are like mindfulness.

John: [00:43:35] So that's so granola. How is this going to help me?

Harpreet: [00:43:38] Well, right. It's because you and I have become orphaned from wisdom

John: [00:43:44] Institutions and wisdom traditions for historical reasons. And, you know, and some of them are

Harpreet: [00:43:49] Like, you know, are

John: [00:43:50] Justifiable things.

Harpreet: [00:43:51] I myself was hurt by an existing religion. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I am not.

John: [00:43:57] Not, not not. Let's turn back the clock. That [00:44:00] is not what I'm saying.

Harpreet: [00:44:01] What I'm saying is we need an

John: [00:44:03] Ecology of

Harpreet: [00:44:03] Practices everybody does to deal with

John: [00:44:06] Pervasive

Harpreet: [00:44:07] Self-deception, go

John: [00:44:08] Forward, enhance meaning in life. We need in that sense to be cultivating wisdom and self-transcendence. But we don't have a

Harpreet: [00:44:15] Worldview that tells us

John: [00:44:17] How to do that in a way

Harpreet: [00:44:18] That is legitimate, that is homed

John: [00:44:21] That we can.

Harpreet: [00:44:22] We like we don't have a basis for saying that's a

John: [00:44:24] Good person I should look to for wisdom. We, our worldview says that's a good person where I should look to for medicine, but that's a good person I should look for for building a

Harpreet: [00:44:33] Bridge or that's

John: [00:44:34] A good person that I should look for for finding out the structure of the atom. But how do I decide what's a good person to go forward to cultivate wisdom?

Harpreet: [00:44:41] Culture doesn't give

John: [00:44:42] You any help whatsoever. That's the meaning crisis.

Harpreet: [00:44:45] So before we dig deeper on this, on cultivating wisdom and all that help us understand this distinction or difference between wisdom, information and knowledge.

John: [00:44:55] Well, I mean, I'm using information, as you know, as sort of as not quite in the, you know, the Shannon sense of information theoretic.

Harpreet: [00:45:04] I'm talking more about how that information

John: [00:45:07] Sensitive information theoretic becomes something that has

Harpreet: [00:45:10] Some semantic and or

John: [00:45:13] Procedural or and or existential meaning for you. Right? So that's just what information is. It's the translation of a technical theoretical sense of information

Harpreet: [00:45:22] Into what's often called cognitive

John: [00:45:24] Information and cognition. So that's all I mean by information there. And that's fine, because that helps me understand a lot of processing, like how your working memory works and stuff like that. So what knowledge?

Harpreet: [00:45:35] Well, first of all, I think there's

John: [00:45:37] More than one kind of knowing that something we could also talk about.

Harpreet: [00:45:40] But knowledge is basically, you know,

John: [00:45:43] I'm really hesitant here because I've, you know, I've got degrees in philosophy. So I know epistemology is the most controversial thing, but we have a sense of knowledge as something right that helps us track reality in a reliable and repeatable way that affords us justifying [00:46:00] the use of those certain sets of practices or techniques, et cetera, et cetera, that can be

Harpreet: [00:46:06] At a theoretical level. It can be at the

John: [00:46:08] Level of our skills, it can be at the level of certain perspectives. We can talk about that later if you want.

Harpreet: [00:46:12] So with knowledge basically, and

John: [00:46:15] This goes back to like curiosity and wonder. And Socrates famously said that wisdom begins in wonder.

Harpreet: [00:46:19] Knowledge deals with the

John: [00:46:21] Problem of

Harpreet: [00:46:21] Ignorance. You don't know,

John: [00:46:23] And what it's really concerned with is and you'll if you'll allow me to use this very broadly, it's concerned with

Harpreet: [00:46:28] Evidence that helps us come

John: [00:46:31] To good conclusions about how to fill those holes in what we know. How to deal with our ignorance wisdom isn't about dealing with ignorance. Wisdom is about dealing with

Harpreet: [00:46:40] Foolishness, and foolishness

John: [00:46:41] Has to do with misunderstanding. Understanding is to appropriately grasp the significance or relevance of what you know. There's a famous line in full story the Dauphin Island village, where you know and Ivy

Harpreet: [00:46:54] Village Banks

John: [00:46:55] Is side and it doesn't get better and it doesn't get better. And I'm paraphrasing, but it goes something like this. Ivan Ilitch always knew that he was going to die the way he knew that two plus two equals four.

Harpreet: [00:47:05] But now he knew he was going to die. And you go,

John: [00:47:10] Oh, right, I get the difference. He's grasping the existential significance of his mortality. He hasn't got new evidence for it, and that's very much a kind of insight and insight. You're not changing the evidence, you're changing the relevance of the Data, you're changing the relevance of the information.

Harpreet: [00:47:27] And so wisdom is about not so much about

John: [00:47:29] Evidence, it's about relevance and about it's about relevance to overcoming foolishness and enhancing and affording meaning in life. And so I mean, the crucial thing there is to think about in what ways? Well, let me let me do it another way. Notice how we even within science, we tolerate this distinction in a powerful way. Let me give you a clear example. This goes towards, I think, the I think the name of the author is elegant. Your book true [00:48:00] enough, but other word open up, you know, an introductory textbook and physics and go to the section on atomic theory.

Harpreet: [00:48:06] And there you'll

John: [00:48:07] Find the Bohr model of the atom. It's mostly

Harpreet: [00:48:09] False.

John: [00:48:09] It's mostly

Harpreet: [00:48:11] False. Why do we

John: [00:48:12] Teach it to people? Because we still teach it? Why do we teach the Newtonian stuff right? But let's stick with the Baum. Why do we teach it? It's mostly false because it helps us to understand.

Harpreet: [00:48:23] It helps us to get trained in looking

John: [00:48:26] For the relevant kind of information, asking the relevant kinds of questions. It helps us to think, Oh, maybe I can understand chemistry as moving between valence shells. It transfers, it affords insight, it changes the relevance. We see things in sight. We see things

Harpreet: [00:48:44] Better.

John: [00:48:45] Now, if somebody wants to say to you, why do you have that in there?

Harpreet: [00:48:48] That's so

John: [00:48:48] False. It's static. Like the atom isn't organized like that is no, not little round particles and like this all false, you go, you don't. It's almost

Harpreet: [00:48:59] Ironic. You don't understand. We're putting it in here

John: [00:49:02] To help people understand we're not making claims. Well, why? Because in addition to trying to give people the correct true beliefs, we want to give them the correct abilities and capacity to understand, to ask questions, to wonder, to reflect, to come to a place, in fact, where they could think, Oh, the poor Adam Bohr model of the atom isn't true, et etc. See. So wisdom is more about insight and understanding and relevance and wonder

Harpreet: [00:49:33] Than it is about evidence

John: [00:49:35] And knowledge

Harpreet: [00:49:36] And the

John: [00:49:37] Satisfaction of curiosity and

Harpreet: [00:49:38] Is so, so relevant to the machine learning practitioners in the

Harpreet: [00:49:43] Audience.

Harpreet: [00:49:43] Because we're building models, it's not like there is a random forest out there that governs the way that this particular Data generating process behaves. This is just what we're using to kind of understand it.

Harpreet: [00:49:55] Yes. Yes, yes.

Harpreet: [00:49:56] So let's get back into it to

Harpreet: [00:49:59] Wisdom, then how [00:50:00] do we

Harpreet: [00:50:00] Cultivate that within ourselves if there's kind of a scarcity of a wisdom institution and the kind of help us understand where the wisdom institution is as well?

John: [00:50:09] Well, that's you know, that's part of the problem because the problem is if you look for example, at the nones, no. And yes, these are people who have

John: [00:50:15] No religious

John: [00:50:16] Affiliation and they are the fastest growing, one of the fastest growing demographic groups,

Harpreet: [00:50:21] Right? They're not all

John: [00:50:22] Sort of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins atheist.

John: [00:50:24] That's just not what's going on. Many of them, in fact, the most

Harpreet: [00:50:29] Common way they describe

John: [00:50:30] Themselves as spiritual but not religious, which is a very, very oxymoronic thing to kind to say, although I understand what people are trying to convey with that. What that basically means is they have the religion of

Harpreet: [00:50:41] Me and I

John: [00:50:42] Put it together autodidact, which means I put it together in a rather fragmentary fashion, a rather ahistorical fashion. And I put it together in a way that I haven't really checked all the ways in which my

Harpreet: [00:50:54] All the biases that I'm

John: [00:50:56] Engaged in are actually reinforced by being an autodidact. That's why autodidact ism is such a dangerous thing, because all you do is it's like.

Harpreet: [00:51:04] And notice how

John: [00:51:05] Social media makes that worse, because everybody is an autodidact

Harpreet: [00:51:08] With respect to social media. They just select

John: [00:51:11] And what they do is just it, just confirmation porn. They just confirm it's just confirmation bias all over the place and representative bias and all kinds of equivocation. And it's horrible. It's a horrible mess. So the social media actually makes it affords it

Harpreet: [00:51:25] In one way and giving people

John: [00:51:27] Access, but it exacerbates it in another way. And so my concern is precisely that people are doing this in an auto didactic, a historical,

Harpreet: [00:51:35] Fragmented way, which

John: [00:51:37] Is often a cure that is plausibly as bad as the disease

Harpreet: [00:51:43] For many people. So let me give

John: [00:51:44] You one example of this. It's not. It's not exhaustive. I'm just giving one example. Many people go into this and engage in a kind of what's called spiritual bypassing. This is the psychological phenomena where you get interested in spiritual things and you do these practices as a way [00:52:00] of actually not confronting how you're being self deceptive and self-destructive in your life. It's foolishness. It's spiritual foolishness. But who's there to

Harpreet: [00:52:10] Tell them this? Who is there

John: [00:52:11] To correct them? Who's there to challenge

Harpreet: [00:52:14] Them on this? So, you

John: [00:52:15] Know, I precisely worry about the fact that

John: [00:52:19] We are

John: [00:52:20] Trying to do this in this individualistic, fragmented auto didactic fashion. So I mean, what you need is you need an ecology of practices. Like I said earlier, you need both meditation and contemplation, for example, because they train you in different directions. You need a college of practice sets of practices that are dynamically related to each other that are acting as checks and balances on each other are complex and self-organizing to deal with the way that your cognition is multilevel, recursive, complex and self-organizing. That's why you know, Buddhism has the Eightfold Path and other. It's represented by wheel that rolls and all kinds of stuff like this, right? You needed a college, your practices, but you need to set it into

Harpreet: [00:53:01] A community, a community that's

John: [00:53:02] Been put together by what I call the logos, the kinds of conversations we have where we are conversing, not to convince we are conversing in order to connect, not just to communicate, but to commune, so that we can be sharing a process like we could get. So collectively, we could get into the flow state. We can get into collective insight. We can get in collective restructuring so that we can use the tremendous power of distributed cognition and collective intelligence to give us some community of guidance for how we cultivate, curate and vet our ecology and practices. And I understand why that's problematic, because the two things that want to tell us how

Harpreet: [00:53:43] To do that the state and

John: [00:53:45] The market are two things that we rightfully do not trust us because they're not interested. They're deeply not interested in wisdom, and they're not interested in you becoming wise. So I understand why what I'm saying is problematic, but I do not. That's why I talk [00:54:00] about stealing the culture. That's why I do not see any good alternative other than to

Harpreet: [00:54:05] Bottom up, create

John: [00:54:06] Communities of practices and then communities of communities. And this has already happened. Happening. This is not a pipe dream.

Harpreet: [00:54:12] I'm talking to all

John: [00:54:13] These emerging communities and the communities of communities. This is happening and I'm trying to help afford it happening. That's how we can build the

Harpreet: [00:54:21] Place where we can

John: [00:54:23] Cultivate

Harpreet: [00:54:24] Wisdom in a way

John: [00:54:25] That has a chance of helping us

Harpreet: [00:54:28] Ameliorate the meeting crisis. It's not easy because people want to connect. Let's just meet up with my

Harpreet: [00:54:33] Buddy at the brewery, grab a couple of pints.

Harpreet: [00:54:35] But that's not really. That's how we talk about here.

Harpreet: [00:54:38] So let's get into the stealing the culture. Talk to us about what you mean by that. I guess if you can just give us that idea of what this culture is that you're

Harpreet: [00:54:47] You're trying to

Harpreet: [00:54:48] Steal away and bottom up.

John: [00:54:50] Well, I'm trying to steal away from a culture

John: [00:54:52] That is

John: [00:54:53] Organized around. I mean, we'd like to think we're we're not religious, but we have gods. There's the state and there's the market and right. And and I'm not an anarchist. I don't know some sort of crypto Marxist.

John: [00:55:06] I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is they're like all

John: [00:55:09] Complex dynamical systems.

John: [00:55:11] They self-organized and they can

John: [00:55:13] Evolve in ways that were not

John: [00:55:15] Anticipated by, you know, at their origins, just the way we couldn't

John: [00:55:18] Predict human beings

John: [00:55:19] Emerging in the center

John: [00:55:21] Of the

John: [00:55:21] Cretaceous period, right? You can't. That's not how it works. These things have evolved

John: [00:55:25] In ways, and they've taken on a

John: [00:55:26] Life of their own and far from us.

John: [00:55:29] So much serving us more and more or

John: [00:55:31] Serving them and the service

John: [00:55:33] That they do for us and the service we give for

John: [00:55:36] Them is not organized around these

John: [00:55:38] Topics we've been talking about because there used to be three things

Harpreet: [00:55:41] Used to be the state, the market and

John: [00:55:43] The sacred center, the church, the temple, the mosque, the synagogue. And that's fallen away.

Harpreet: [00:55:47] And what's happened is right and then the market. And so we used

John: [00:55:51] To be able to pit the three against each other. We could always get any

Harpreet: [00:55:54] Two to gang up on the other

John: [00:55:56] One if it was getting too big for its britches. But we've lost that and what's [00:56:00] happened is we've lost that. We've lost the wisdom center. And then the state

Harpreet: [00:56:05] And the market have become deeply, deeply interwoven

John: [00:56:09] For various historical reasons. And that evolution has precisely got to a place where that machinery is not the machinery that is designed to help

Harpreet: [00:56:20] Cultivate wisdom, it's just not

John: [00:56:22] Designed to do that.

Harpreet: [00:56:23] And so

John: [00:56:24] When I talk about stealing

Harpreet: [00:56:25] The culture, I'm talking about

John: [00:56:27] Trying to create again a community of community. So my model here is like the early Christian church. They didn't try a revolution against the Roman Empire, and they didn't try some, you know, inventing some new product. That's not what they did. They built small communities and then they network the communities together.

Harpreet: [00:56:45] And what they

John: [00:56:46] Invented was a new way of life, a new way of seeing, a new way of being

Harpreet: [00:56:51] A life of agape. And then that

John: [00:56:53] Basically captured

Harpreet: [00:56:54] The culture bottom up.

John: [00:56:56] And that

Harpreet: [00:56:57] Led to this, the change of

John: [00:56:59] The state, the change of the socioeconomic system. That's the model I'm talking about. I'm not I'm not

Harpreet: [00:57:04] Talking about a political

John: [00:57:05] Revolution. I think politics is exactly the wrong place to try and resolve the meaning crisis. It's at the wrong level. It's a it's got the wrong formulation, and I think the market is the wrong place to look for

Harpreet: [00:57:18] A solution to the meeting crisis. I think it

John: [00:57:20] Is. It is

Harpreet: [00:57:21] Properly a cultural problem that has

John: [00:57:24] To be solved in a culturally creative fashion. That's what I mean by still the culture that we do something and it's already happening.

Harpreet: [00:57:31] It's already happening. It's already happening.

John: [00:57:33] Here's the thing that we we let me just like.

Harpreet: [00:57:36] For example, again,

John: [00:57:37] I'm not some crypto markets. I just want to point out the cognitive science here. There's some profound confusions.

Harpreet: [00:57:44] So for one thing, we think

John: [00:57:46] There's a direct relationship between wealth and subjective well-being. Subjective well-being is your sense of I'm really. Things are going really well for me, right? Initially, wealth is very predictive of subjective well-being, i.e. the wealth gets you out of poverty and a scarcity mentality. [00:58:00] It predicts subjective well-being.

Harpreet: [00:58:02] But once you're out of there, you have to do

John: [00:58:04] Vast increases in wealth to make small difference in subjective well-being. It becomes irrational to pursue wealth. That's just the way it is. The second thing we do is we confuse subjective well-being with

Harpreet: [00:58:14] Meaning in life. We think that, well,

John: [00:58:17] The more contented I am, the more meaningful our lives is. That's kind

Harpreet: [00:58:20] Of bullshit. We've been sold because here's a

John: [00:58:22] Situation in which the two radically come apart.

Harpreet: [00:58:25] Have a kid. If you have a kid, you're subjective.

John: [00:58:27] Well-being collapses, your health goes down, your finances go down, your social life goes down.

Harpreet: [00:58:31] You're hungry, you're

John: [00:58:32] Tired, you're

Harpreet: [00:58:33] Always wet. There's alarm bells.

John: [00:58:34] That's the kid crying

Harpreet: [00:58:35] Constant going off.

John: [00:58:36] Cortisol is flooding your system reliably. People report their subjective well-being crashes and you say, Well, why are you doing it? And you know what they say. It makes my life more meaningful because I am connected to something bigger than. Myself, something beyond

Harpreet: [00:58:52] Myself, we have a culture in which the market

John: [00:58:55] Tends to make us confuse and conflate together

Harpreet: [00:58:58] Wealth, subjective

John: [00:59:00] Well-being and meaning in life, and they should all be radically distinguished from each other. That's just one example of what I'm talking about. And that's not an ideological claim. That's not me saying capitalism is bad or Marxism is good. That's me saying, Does this do what we claim it does?

Harpreet: [00:59:16] And let's look at

John: [00:59:16] The empirical evidence. That's what I'm saying.

Harpreet: [00:59:20] Yes, absolutely.

Harpreet: [00:59:21] And as a father to an 11 month old

Harpreet: [00:59:24] Baby, yeah, and

Harpreet: [00:59:25] I can resonate with that subjective

Harpreet: [00:59:28] Well-being and being a father

Harpreet: [00:59:30] Thing. Yeah, it's not easy. Oh man, there's something so

Harpreet: [00:59:34] Much more

Harpreet: [00:59:35] That I wanted to ask, and I know we're running up on time here, so I guess we'll begin to to to wrap it up here. I'm curious, do you think this pandemic age and all of us being virtual now? And, you know, apps like Clubhouse, for instance, do you think this is kind of helping to facilitate these wisdom institutions or does something need to kind of be more formal in place to make that happen?

John: [00:59:56] It's it's happening. So I get to go on [01:00:00] rebel wisdom and the stoer and other things like that in my own, my own stuff voices with privacy.

John: [01:00:05] It's definitely

John: [01:00:05] Helping to build

John: [01:00:07] Logos and not just information dissemination, right? Not just broadcasting or not just

Harpreet: [01:00:12] Propaganda and propaganda means it propagates, right? So, yeah, but

John: [01:00:17] There's a lot more that needs to happen. I mean, getting into this is really important, but it has to situate within, you know, a whole bunch of practices journaling, mindfulness practices, active open mindedness practices, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we need to be doing

Harpreet: [01:00:34] This, and I think the

John: [01:00:36] Pandemic has helped afford this.

Harpreet: [01:00:38] But it's while necessary,

John: [01:00:40] It's far from sufficient.

Harpreet: [01:00:42] Definitely encourage everyone to check out the stoer.

Harpreet: [01:00:44] They do these

Harpreet: [01:00:45] What they called wisdom, gymnastic wisdom.

Harpreet: [01:00:48] Yep, yeah. Definitely check. Check that out.

Harpreet: [01:00:51] It just I think it's just the Stoer dot com or something like that we're just hyping to stow. It will pop up

Harpreet: [01:00:55] On on Google.

Harpreet: [01:00:56] So last formal question before we jump into a real quick lightning round. And that is it is one hundred years in the future. What do you want to be remembered for

John: [01:01:05] Bringing back a Socratic voice to the public domain?

Harpreet: [01:01:09] Absolutely. Love it, and I think you are with your with your series of videos, which I will definitely link to in the show notes as well. The Meaning Crisis Series is amazing, and you guys check out what a cure the Don has done with Dr. Dr. Provoqués lecture on stealing the

Harpreet: [01:01:26] Culture it is absolutely

Harpreet: [01:01:28] Amazing made it into such a hot fire track.

John: [01:01:31] Oh yeah, I just love the wet work

John: [01:01:34] Here is done.

Harpreet: [01:01:35] Yeah, it is. Is phenomenal. So let's jump into a real quick lightning round here. First question is going to be a little bit heavy, but I'd love to get your response to this one. Do you think you have to achieve something in order to be worth something?

John: [01:01:48] No, no, if we take

Harpreet: [01:01:50] It depends, I mean, I think the moral

John: [01:01:52] Worth of a person is not based on their achievements.

Harpreet: [01:01:55] Yeah, absolutely. I like

Harpreet: [01:01:56] That. What are you currently reading?

John: [01:01:59] I'm [01:02:00] currently reading Hyper Objects

John: [01:02:02] By Timothy Morton,

John: [01:02:04] Satanism and the Object of

John: [01:02:05] Science by Scott Berman. I'm currently also reading some books

John: [01:02:10] On internal family systems therapy,

John: [01:02:12] A book called Self Therapy. So there

Harpreet: [01:02:14] You go. Nice. Much like me, I read like three or four books like at the same time kind of gets to let the ideas bounce down to the head and and have ideas, sex and come up with idea children.

John: [01:02:25] Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. That's exactly the right thing to do.

Harpreet: [01:02:28] What song do you currently have on repeat?

John: [01:02:31] I don't know if I do I on Spotify, I actually have a playlist called What I called mystical, and it has a wide range of things like Strawberry Fields by the Beatles or various tentacles from the Middle Ages. So that's what I'm that's what I'm constantly playing right now. That playlist over and over again.

Harpreet: [01:02:49] I have to have to get the link from to that from you. So let's go ahead and open up the random question generator. This will be a lot of a lot of fun here. First question we got here. What if something you can never seem to finish?

John: [01:03:03] Something I can never seem to finish? Well, that's a good one. I'm trying to think

John: [01:03:09] I never seem to be able to finish certain articles. I've been writing some of them. I've been writing for a very long time and rewriting and rewriting them.

Harpreet: [01:03:18] Yeah, what makes me cry

John: [01:03:20] When I've heard somebody or when I come across something that is starkly beautiful?

Harpreet: [01:03:25] What have you created that you are most proud of my children? You as a father, I can I can attest to that, that it's it's crazy how they change your life, man, like

John: [01:03:36] In ways you can't predict. Oh yeah.

Harpreet: [01:03:38] Oh yeah. What is an unpopular opinion that you have

John: [01:03:42] That I think the political domain and ideological conflict

John: [01:03:46] Is is not not where we will be able to solve the problems that are besetting

John: [01:03:52] Us, the meaning

John: [01:03:52] Crisis and the crisis

John: [01:03:54] That is exactly the wrong place to try and solve these problems.

Harpreet: [01:03:57] We'll do one more from here. Pet peeves

John: [01:04:02] Pet [01:04:00] peeves When

Harpreet: [01:04:03] People make pronouncements without reflecting

John: [01:04:08] On the appropriate philosophical and historical background,

Harpreet: [01:04:12] That really bothers me. That is deep, but

Harpreet: [01:04:14] I'm going to have to listen to that one a few times. I like that like that. So how can people connect with you? Where could they find you online?

John: [01:04:21] I have a channel on YouTube where they can find my, my series, my

John: [01:04:25] My biggest

John: [01:04:26] Series, awakening

John: [01:04:27] From the Meaning

John: [01:04:27] Crisis, which is about a lot of

John: [01:04:29] Stuff you're talking about. And then you'll find

John: [01:04:30] Some smaller series.

John: [01:04:31] There's Untangling the world not which I did with

John: [01:04:33] Greg Enriquez on consciousness. There's one that I

John: [01:04:36] Do with Greg and with Christopher M. Pietro

John: [01:04:38] Called the elusive

John: [01:04:39] I capital I on the nature and

John: [01:04:41] Function of the self going to start

John: [01:04:42] Releasing that

John: [01:04:43] Next week. And then you have my

John: [01:04:44] Ongoing dialog

John: [01:04:46] Series where I try

John: [01:04:47] To practice, exemplify

John: [01:04:49] And enhance this

John: [01:04:50] Dialectic into the locus that I call voices with Vervaeke.

Harpreet: [01:04:54] I love it. I encourage everyone to check that out, and I will definitely include links to those in the show, notes Dr. Vervaeke. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to come on the show today. Appreciate you being here.

John: [01:05:04] Thank you so much. I really enjoyed myself a lot. It has been great. A lot of fun. Thank you for you.