Welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis. Last time we were discussing the Axial age within ancient India. We were focusing in on a pivotal figure of Siddhārtha Gautama; The Buddha. And we had been talking about his particular story. We talked about the two modes of being that were being represented in his story of leaving the palace. The having mode and the Being mode. And we talked about modal confusion and about overcoming it. We followed him to where he's sitting under the Bodie tree and he achieves a deep kind of realization, a deep state of enlightenment. Along the way we had discussed what mindfulness is, how mindfulness operates through attentional scaling and how it can increase your cognitive flexibility, your capacity for insight. And then we were trying to draw this all together with some cognitive science - a discussion of "what is it to experience enlightenment?" Now I'm not offering, right now, a complete account or anything like a comprehensive theory of enlightenment. We're gonna be slowly working towards that as we move through this lecture series. But I do want to get into and continue the discussion of these higher states of consciousness.

So if you remember, they are very problematic but they're at the core of many of the Axial Age world religions and foundational philosophies. This is the idea that people have an alternative state of consciousness that they regard as somehow more real than their everyday state of consciousness. And that's problematic precisely because we tend to judge realness by how well we get an overall coherence in our intelligibility, how we're making sense of things. But in these altered states that are very different from our everyday consciousness and therefore do not cohere with it, people do the alternative. Instead of rejecting it the way we reject dreaming, for example, because it doesn't cohere with our everyday experience, people reject the everyday experience as illusory and they say that this state of consciousness somehow gives them an improved access to reality.

And as you remember, as we've been going through the Axial Age Revolution and the sense of wisdom and meaning that is attended upon it, this ability to transcend through illusion and get connected to what is more real is central to what wisdom means. And having some deep sense of connectedness to reality is also central to what it is to regard one's life as authentically meaningful in some fashion.

So that was the problem we had set up: the problem of higher states of consciousness. Now I want to start by talking about what it's like to give a theory that - we talked about this also last time - we want a theory that's both descriptively adequate and prescriptivly adequate. A descriptive theory should tell me... give me a good explanation for why these higher states of consciousness have the experiential feel that they have and why they're able to produce these deep kinds of transformations because if you remember, what typically happens is, because people have sensed this deep connectedness to reality, and because being connected to reality is one of the fundamental ways in which we makes our lives meaningful, people will radically transform their whole lives, their sense of self, their interpersonal relationship in order to maintain and enhance that connectedness to this deepened reality.

So we need to explain... give a descriptively adequate explanation and this has to work at multiple levels and this is where cognitive science is so important because of the way it tries to bridge between these various levels and disciplines. We need to give an account of the psychological processes, of the information processes, and ultimately the brain processes that are at work. Then we need a prescriptivly adequate theory of higher states of consciousness. We need an account that explains why it might be considered rationally justifiable that these states authorize and legitimate such transformations. Can we see why these states should be listened to when they claim to give us access to a deeper reality?

Now, in order to carry out the first one, seeing what Siddhārtha was going through when he's achieving this higher state of consciousness, this awakened state. And if you remember last time we talked about how comprehensively extended this is, not only qualitatively through the world religions, but just quantitatively through the population. A 30 to 40 percent of people report these awakening experiences and the resulting deep transformation. So in order to get to that let's talk about "what does it feel like to be in such a state?". And because we have these surveys and we have the work of Newberg and Taylor and we have lots of first person accounts, we can draw some general pictures of what's going on.

Breaking it Down Into Three

So there's three components we want to look at. We want to look at "how is the world being experienced?", "How is the self being experienced?" and "how is the relationship between the world and the self being experienced?". So let's start on the World side. So people report the following things: they report a tremendous sense of clarity. And this is both perceptual and cognitive. So the world seems extremely clear to them and makes sense to them in a way that it hasn't before. The perceptual part of that clarity is often experienced as bright. Things are shining. And that's the original meaning of glory for example. To go back to the Bible for example the term that is most often used to describe God is Glory which is not a moral term. It's a term about how 'shining' God is, how bright it is. Now you remember that's a feature that people also reliably report in the flow experience - that everything seems very vivid and bright and intense.

Clarity

Now what's interesting is that while people describe this clarity - and notice how this is gonna pick up on what we talked about when we talked about mindfulness - they talk about both an expansion of vision (so it's very comprehensive. They get almost like they're somehow aware of the whole of the world), but they also are aware of finite details. So this is captured for example in Blake's famous poem "To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower. To Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and to spend eternity in an hour". So you get this deep inter-penetration of sort of everything and the finite details. So you can see that, so, what you're getting is this massive expansion of that attentional scaling that we talked about, mindfulness enhancing, and thereby enhancing our capacity to break frame and make frame and get fundamental insight - and pay attention to the word insight - seeing into reality. So, overall there's an increased sense of making sense of things. Making sense of things. So the world is both intricate and interesting in this extended and enhanced and shining way.

Beauty

So almost universally people describe this experience as "the world is beautiful". It's deeply beautiful to them and we'll come back at some point to talk about the connections between beauty and truth, particularly the work of Scarry about this. The world is very alive. It seems very alive during these experience because it's so pregnant with energy and significance. And all of "this", all of this comprehensiveness, we've got intricate detail, the shining, the beauty, the making sense all of this comes together in the notion of oneness. There is somehow an underlying oneness to everything. There's deep and profound integration which of course makes sense given that very often when we are explaining something we are finding what unifies and integrates them together.

Peace

What's happening on the side of the self? What's happening on the side of the self is people report a profound sense of peace, and this is not peace in an empty, just lack of conflict. It's very similar to what we talked about in Plato and you're probably seeing Plato's ideas about anagoge resonating with this. I hope you're seeing that. But remember in Plato that inter state of peace is one of inner harmony when all of the various components of your personality and your cognition are mutually, optimally, working together in concert. And this is the kind/ what people report. They often report that this is the greatest sense of peace they've ever experienced in their life. And if you remember in Plato this sense of peace is connected to and resonates with this enhanced sense of connectedness to reality. And interestingly enough that's what we're seeing in these descriptions.

Joy

People also describe experiencing profound joy. Now of course we've lost the sense of what this word means. And we've lost it precisely in words like "enjoyment" where enjoyment means having fun or pleasure. But Joy is not the experience of fun or pleasure, joy is the positive emotion you have when you experience a deep connection to what is good. So Joy is the experience you have of this is really really good. Interestingly people often report a fundamental change in their sense of self and we're going to come back to this. They report two things: they'll often report that their normal sense of self has disappeared. They're egocentric, autobiographical sense of self has disappeared. And if you remember that's continuous with what we saw when people are in the flow state: they report that self-consciousness, that autobiographical narrative self is disappearing.

They often also report remembering, in the sense we talked about when we talked about Sati and remembering the being mode. They remember they say "I remember my true self; I remember who I really am!". So there is a profound connection inward to the core machinery of the self that is at one with a profound sense of connecting to the underlying pattern that governs, and makes intelligible, reality. People report that in this state they have a tremendous sense of energy and vitality. Again analogous to the flow state. And finally they report that they are going through - they often use this term - there is a tremendous sense of insight and understanding. Again, continuous with the flow state.

Now what about the relation (World <-> Self)? So this is deep connection. Profound connectedness. Deep at-onement. Again like the flow state, but even more. People feel so at-one that they start to feel that they are participating in the reality that they're connected to. They start to feel like they're sharing identity to it. And this way of thinking about this is when we talked about Aristotle's notion of the conformity theory of knowing. They feel so deeply conformed to this underlying reality, from the very core of their being, that they are experiencing an identification with it. But, this participatory knowing is so superlative and it's so profound and so transformative that, inevitably, people just say that the experience, that this connection, is ineffable. And we noted this well last time we were talking about [it]. How is it that these experiences that have no articulable, declarative content - because they're ineffable! You can't put them into words, you can't put them into propositional thought - nevertheless are considered so loaded with, so capable of bearing this signature of ultimate reality or realness for people?

So we need a descriptive theory that can account for all of these features. The features of how the world is experienced, how the self is experienced and the relation. Now what I've been showing you already of course is deep continuity with the flow experience. I'm not claiming it's a flow experience - it's more than that - but I'm showing you that there's continuity. Just like I showed you that there's continuity between the flow experience and the insight experience and that's why when people are having these higher states of consciousness they are also proposing a very profound insight. And notice how often when you have an insight it's also ineffable to you. You don't know how the insight arose or how it came to be, you just like aaah! I just see it.

Disruptive Strategies

Now, some other important things we should know about these states: These states are often preceded by "Disruptive Strategies". Disruptive strategies. These are strategies that are designed to disrupt your normal cognitive functioning and to alter your state of consciousness. So they can range from very long term strategies to very short term strategies. Long term strategies can be the ones we've already described, like Siddhārtha. Siddhārtha was engaged for six years [in] these practices, these mindfulness practices of meditation and contemplation and they bring about a very long term, incremental, but nevertheless also profound disruption in your normal state of consciousness and cognition. People also can pursue very short term disruptive strategies. These include things like fasting, sexual and sleep deprivation. If you remember we talked about how shamans will make use of these strategies in order to induce the shamanic state. They will expose themselves to drumming, chanting... All of these things disrupt your normal level of cognition and, of course, when we talked about this as well, people will make use of psychedelics precisely because of the way they are so deeply disruptive of your normal cognition and your normal state of consciousness.

(So what we know is that combinations. Wow. Sorry that's a little too strong... What we have, good... ) Some initial good evidence is that combinations of these strategies can be very good. There was a recent experiment coming out of the Griffiths lab in 2018 in which people who were practicing mindfulness and then took psychedelics tended to have a more enhanced experience than people who were just taking the psychedelics, for example. So you can combine the strategies together; they can be mutually supportive. Now what's important for this, as we'll come back and take a look at more carefully in a few minutes, is disruptive strategies are also central to setting up insight. And that should make sense to you given what we've talked about. You have to do a lot of breaking a frame, before you can open up the possibility of making an entirely new frame.

There was a recent experiment run by Yaden et al. 2017. They had 701 participants. 69% of them reported this, what I called "Ontonormativity"; this sense of the enhanced realness of their higher states of consciousness. And this was actually predictive of significant improvement across many dimensions of their life. There was significant improvement in family life, health, sense of purpose, spirituality and a release from the anxiety and fear of death. So the claim that these states do guide transformation has received empirical backing. Now Yaden also brings out something important in that study that you don't see very well articulated in Newberg and in Taylor, and this is one of the disruptive strategies that people are often using and it bleeds into the phenomenology. By that I mean the experiential feel and structure of these experience. And this is the notion of De-centering.

De-Centering

So when people describe these experiences they shift from a very sort of first-person orientation and egocentric, to an allocentric. So they are not so egocentric. This is why this is called de-centering; they're speaking more from a third person perspective and allo-centric. So let me just give you a quick understanding of the difference between these terms. I can describe my motion egocentrically. Things that are in front of me, behind me, to the right of me, to the left of me. And that of course varies by how I am oriented because it is relative to me. But I can also describe my position allocentrically; I can say where I am relative to the North Pole for example right. So the first is a first-person, egocentric way of moving through the world. The second is an allocentric third person. Now extend that out. People are much less egocentrically oriented when they're describing the experience of this state than they are normally. They're much more allocentrically oriented and that makes sense given how intensified the experience of reality is to them. It's like the salience of reality is finally capable of eclipsing the narcissistic glow of our own ego. And for a moment, at least, or for several moments, we get release! And this is an important idea: Nirvana means to blow out, to extinguish or the Vedanta term Moksha is release. We get a release from the imprisonment, the self idealization by the super salience and therefore the bullshitting of our own egocentric perspective. I mean do you not sometimes wish to be free from the prison cell of the super-salience of your own ego?

So, as I've been suggesting to you, these higher states of consciousness have a lot of features of insight. We've already talked about the insight. Remember we did the 9 Dot problem for example. Those "aha" moments because you get, in that moment of insight, you get a flash of insight. You get sort of super-salience; things are making sense to you; you get insight; it's almost visual, into an underlying pattern; a unity a oneness that wasn't there before; your sense of what's relevant and important has been altered. And this ability to radically make sense, to find coherence, an underlying, intelligible integrative pattern... This, we now know from current work, is directly predictive of the experience of meaning in life. So Samantha Heintzelman, whose work I recommend to you. I also got to meet Samantha in person and got to talk to her about this. But what she has is good experimental evidence of the following: If you give people a bunch of scenes that make sense to them, that they can sort of determine an underlying pattern to, and then ask them how meaningful their lives are, they will rate their lives as more meaningful. The act - do you understand? - the act of making sense, of finding coherence, actually makes people experience their lives as more meaningful.

They're not being shown profound pictures or deeply dramatic or narrative scenes or emotionally... They're just showing some very basic pictures. But the act of making sense, of finding coherence, elevates the sense of how meaningful their lives are. So, lets start to put this together: if you were to have an insight, that would give you an even more sudden increase in your sense of meaning in life, and what if it's in flow? Well that's going to be even more enhanced sense of meaning in life. And we already know that. The more often you have flow experiences, the more meaningful you find your life. And now what if it's beyond that? What if it's a higher state of consciousness that brings you this radical sense of deep intelligibility, not only of the world but of yourself in both directions at the same time? Well that is going to give you a profound sense of increased meaning in life.

Now if you get - try to put this together - if you get enhanced meaning in life coupled to an enhanced sense of understanding and that actually does guide you in improving your life, that is going to build a tremendous amount of confidence in you, that you've found a path towards self-transcendence and wisdom. We can start to understand some of the Buddha's confidence. Now what do we know about these flashes of insight?

Fluency

Well ***Tobilinski / Toplinski ***??? and Reber, in 2010 (This is a different Reber; not the implicit learning Reber.) talk about how insight is a "Fluency" Spike. Although it's related to flow it's not the same thing. Fluency is a general property of all of your cognitive processing. So how can we understand it? Well initially people thought that fluency was a sense of how easy it was to process things. So the basic idea is if I make it easier for you to process information, you will rate that information as better, more trustworthy, more believable, regardless of the actual semantic content.

So for example, compare this (black word 'fluency') to this (orange word 'fluency') - the contrast isn't as great and if I were to get you to read some text in black and the exact same text in the orange you will rate what you read in the black as better, you'll have more confidence in it, more likely to be true. The semantic content is exactly equal. It's because it's easier for you to process the black and white contrast than the orange on white contrast. Now it turns out it's not quite ease of processing just because simply repeating a stimulus doesn't trigger this sense of fluency. It's more like how accessible the information is; how applicable it is. I would argue that it's how well your system is zeroing in on the relevant information. How much has the information been formatted for you so that you can zero in on relevant information. A way of thinking about this, to help make sense of it, is our discussion of psycho-technologies: alphabetic literacy made your cognitive processing more fluent and that improved your ability, your cognitive power, and by improving your cognitive power that gives you an enhanced sense of how real and important the information you're processing is.

So the idea here is, when you are fluent you are processing information very efficiently. When you have, according to ***Tobilinski***??? and Reber, when you have an insight experience, what you're getting is a sudden spike in fluency. You're getting a significant increase in how fluently you're processing and therefore you start to judge the information that you're processing there in as likely being more real. Now, is this an absolute perfect rule? No! But the fact that it's domain general. The fact that it seems to be part of our evolutionary heritage. And there's also some independent logical argumentation indicating that this fluency heuristic that your brain uses, is actually a very good strategy. It's very generally the case - not perfectly, not certainty - but very generally the case that in real world situations, if you are processing them very fluently, you are picking up on the real patterns. So insight is "zeroing" in.

And then we talked about flow as an insight cascade which is even more zeroing in, and it's coupled to implicit learning in which you're picking - remember ? - you're picking up on bigger patterns that you're not consciously aware of. You can't put them into declarative utterances. Do you see what's happening here? So in the higher states... As you start to move towards the higher state of consciousness like flow, you're getting this enhanced fluency so your brain is working very optimally and the implicit learning is picking up on very complex patterns and you're tending to zero in on the causal ones rather than the correlational ones. I'm using all of this machinery we've already discussed because as I mentioned in the flow state you're starting to get a lot of the features of the mystical experiences and ultimately those mystical experiences that can be transformative, thereby enhancing meaning in life and your sense of connectedness to realness.

You get the "at-onement" in the flow state, the radical loss of self-consciousness, you're not egocentric. Although you know there's tremendous energy it feels effortless to you. It's graceful, there's a super-salience. It's intrinsically rewarding. It's evolutionarily marked in. Its domain general and universal... All this stuff we've talked about. This is all being triggered in the higher states of consciousness.

Continuity Hypothesis

So this leads to a hypothesis I want to present to you. This hypothesis is a "Continuity" hypothesis. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? We are doing this because we want a scientifically legitimate, scientifically plausible explanation of what's going on when somebody claims enlightenment. Like Siddhartha Gautama. When somebody claims radical self transcendence like Plato because we want something that gives a good explanation for what's actually happening and a good justification for why somebody should follow and be guided by these transformative experiences.

OK. So what's the continuity hypothesis? The continuity hypothesis is the idea... - so this is a hypothesis I'm giving you, although as I was doing research on this Newberg, independently from me - we haven't spoken - has also come up with a version of the continuity hypothesis. It's not as developed as the one I'm going to give you but it's completely consonant with it. So the idea is Fluency gets enhanced in Insight; Insight gets enhanced in flow. So you've seen all those arguments already and then the idea is, as I'm trying to show you, Flow experiences can be enhanced into mystical experiences. And then there are mystical experiences that can bring about a transformative experience. These are the higher states of consciousness in which people are willing to transform. We'll come back to the problem of transformative experience.

So the continuity hypothesis is basically the same machinery is being used but it is being exaptated - remember exaptation? It is being progressively exapted into more and more powerful processing that can afford, what I'm going, to argue a rationally justifiable guidance into the kinds of transformation that we are seeking when we are seeking to cultivate wisdom and enhance meaning in life. When we are seeking to awaken from the meaning crisis we are trying to invoke one of these awakening experiences. And remember that's what Buddha means the awakened one.

So, Newberg argues that if you have a lot of these kinds of experiences, what he calls little enlightenment experiences, or regular insights, that this will eventually produce these kinds of experiences (Mystical Experiences). So this is not only a continuity hypothesis, this is a priming hypothesis. And I support that as well. The more you are practicing mindfulness, which we know is predictive of insight and flow (we know that mindfulness practices are predictive of mystical experiences. We know that they are connected to transformative experiences), the more you can prime this pump, the more you will be able to bring about this enhanced connectedness. This enhanced anagoge. So, this (I think) idea of the continuity hypothesis will help us to begin to explain what's going on in the higher states of consciousness and eventually use the very same machinery that we talk about in explaining it to justify it, to give a rational justification for it.

We know for example that in flow there has to be a relevant expertise. Remember we've talked about this. The flow state is when your skills - your expertise - can meet the demands of the situation. If you don't have the relevant skills you can't get into the flow state. So I can get into the flow state as a martial artist because I have cultivated the expertise. I can get in to a flow state while lecturing because I've been doing it for twenty four years. I have the relevant expertise. So what we might ask, and what you should ask me right now is "Well John, like what's flowing in these higher states of consciousness? What expertise are you using?". Well what I want to argue to you is it's a fundamental kind of expertise one that's central to your everyday experience of making sense of the world on a day to day basis.

So this ultimately goes back to work by Merleau Ponty especially in the book "The Phenomenology of Perception". But the people who I'm going to most often refer to the work of Hurbert Dreyfus. Dreyfus is famous within cognitive science for bringing the work of Merleau Ponty and others into cognitive science and also the work of Dreyfus and Taylor. This is the Charles Taylor that we've already talked about with connection to the Axial Revolution in a book called Retrieving Realism.

Optimal Grip

So what process is being optimized here? Dreyfus and others talk about what they call "Optimal Grip". That's soooo... I mean, they meet it metaphorically because we're talking about cognition, but that is such a wonderfully felicitous term because again it harkens back to the Conformity Theory of cognition, a Contact Epistemology, that of course Charles Taylor introduced us to. What did they mean by that? So part of this is the idea that when we're - let's talk about it first perceptually - when I'm trying to perceive an object, especially if I don't know what the object is initially, I don't remain static. I'm going to move around the object (cup again) until I get to a place that gets into a trade off relationship. Remember we've talked about these trade off relationships before. What trade off relationship [do] I want? Okay I want to get to a place where I can see as many details of the cop as possible, so that's sort of zooming in right? "Oh wow!!" But if I zoom in too much I lose on the other end. I don't get a sense of the Gestalt. Remember that? I don't get a sense of the overall thing.

So what I do is I move the cop around so that I get a place where I get the best optimization - for my needs! Because it's always relative to what I'm doing - I get a best optimization between the overall grasp of the cup, it's Gestalt, and a grasp of its details. So I'm trying to get a dynamic balance between them. That's why when you draw faces you draw them from the perspective of the optimal grip you have on them. You represent a face in such a way, you draw a face in such a way that you try to get as much of the whole, and as much as the detail together. You don't draw a face by drawing someone's eyes really in detail, and you don't draw a face by zooming out too far! You try and get exactly that right balance.

So, a lot of perception, and you're unaware of this because you learned how to do this when you were a young child, but think about for example, again, if you're learning a martial art. Just as an [example]... So when you're re-learning how to perceive your opponent, part of what you're trying to do is try to get an optimal grip on your opponent. So in Taichi for example we talk about Tiger Eyes. You don't want a hard focus on the person's face. One of the mistakes that many people make going into a confrontation is they hard focus on face or they hard focus on a weapon. We know this from psychological research by the way. You get people who have been held up... You know what they can give you an accurate description of? The gun!! Not the person who was holding them up because they hard focused. They lose that soft vigilance.

So what you want to do is you want to get at the right - and it takes practice, right? - you want to flow over the person. You don't want to be sort of flowing in a blurry fashion. You want to get this sense where you've got a sense of their whole body right. But you can zero in on details and then you also are trying to get an optimal grip on your own body. So for example you're going to take a stance, and the point about the stance is to try and give you an optimal sense... Give you an overall sense of... So now I'm aware of my whole body, but I'm also aware of it in connection to the details of where my fingers are, where my wrists are, what my joints are doing, and I'm taking a stance that I can ease[ily] - that's multi-apt - I can easily transform it into what I need to do. I get an optimal grip. You do this cognitively. Eleanor Rosch pointed this out in terms of the categories you use.

Categorizing

So you will describe things as a cat or a dog. That's how you'll usually talk about it. You usually won't go a level up and say "oh that's a mammal". So this creature's walking by on the road and somebody says "hey look at the mammal!" That would be weird, right? Now they might go down to another level like "there's the cocker spaniel!", but generally they are doing that because they have some intimate familiarity. Most of us would say "hey look at the dog.!" Rosch calls this the "Basic level". Why do we default to the basic level in the way we talk about? Why is this a table? Why is this a marker? Why do we default to the basic level? Because it's how we get our cognitively optimal grip.

Cats and Dogs

You see there's two things I want to trade off in, when I'm categorizing things. Here's my category (draws on the board). I want as much similarity within the category as I can get. But I want as much difference between two categories, and those aren't a tradeoff because as I go higher up I get much more abstract and I lose the specific differences. When I go down here, I'm getting too specific. I'm losing the broad generality. We've talked about this before. You're always trying to balance between getting - remember? The higher the higher states of consciousness - as comprehensive and as detailed as you can. And those are always in a trade off relationship. So you talk about dogs and cats because that's your way of getting an optimal cognitive grip on the world. D you remember we did this? "THE CAT" (with the funny, identical H and A)? Remember we talked about how you're simultaneously going up to the Gestalt and down to the detail. You're optimally gripping between the Gestalt of the word and the features of the letter. And you're doing it right now. You've got a way of paying attention that allows you to read and you had to practice that optimal gripping.

Dating (Example)

You're going into a first date - what do you do? Well you're trying to get a sense of the person. Now here's where the term optimal grip is a little in-felicitous but... So don't don't read anything... misread any sexual misconduct in my use of the term. I'm using it in the technical sense. But you're trying to get an optimal grip on the other person and it's very difficult. Notice how you're toggling your attention and your interaction and you know this because of the kinds of advice your friends give you. They'll say things, right... I happen to be straight so they will say to me, for example, you know: "Look into her eyes. But not too much!" "Smile. But not too much!" "Laugh. Not too often!" "Ask questions. But not too many!" "And mix it up between these strategies. But not chaotically!" ...and you're like sort of Uuuuuugh!!! And yet here's the thing: you do it. It works at least sometimes! You figure out, you find that sweet spot where you're getting the sense of the person, both as a whole. And in detail.

So I'm giving you multiple examples. You're always engaged because you're always trading between these tradeoffs. You're always optimally gripping. So you have to do this "domain General"! You have to do it in every domain: when you're swimming, going on a date, reading, looking at an object... you're trying to get an optimal grip. And you have practiced this skill so that you're extremely proficient. You do it without realizing it! Herbert Dreyfus', one of his favorite examples [is], "You know how close to stand to somebody!". How close should you stand to somebody? In order to get an optimal grip on the interaction? There is no algorithm!! It's like "always stand for inches!!" ...that's ridiculous! "Always stand one foot...". It depends on the context, it depends on the person. But you have that skill. Most of you are not socially awkward.

So, here's what I'm proposing to you: What if you didn't... What if you got into a flow state that wasn't... It isn't the flow state of doing a martial art; isn't the flow state of playing music, like a jazz or something. What if what you were getting into a flow state about was: Your ability to optimally grip the world. What if I made it really challenging by altering your state of consciousness, disrupting your normal framing and then opening up... Because, now remember what's happening in this higher state - you're both opening up your attention and zeroing in... "To see the world in a grain of sand." What if you had this optimal grip, but it wouldn't be on just one object. It would be a dynamical, flowing, optimal grip on the world and yourself. The most comprehensive attempt to make sense. Not intellectually [or] theoretically, but optimally gripping reality. This deep conformity.

So what I'm proposing to you is that what's happening in a higher state of consciousness is that people are flowing in their capacity to cognitively, perceptually, and even with the very machinery of their self get an optimal grip on both The World and The Self (top of the board). And that's why this relation (The Relationship) is experienced as so in tensely powerful and so intensely revealing.

Now, this would help to make sense of things because, again, if there is a deep continuity between the higher states of consciousness and things like flow and insight that would help to explain why the disruptive strategies are so important for getting into the higher states of consciousness. Because disruptive strategies are central, as I mentioned, to insight. You have to break up the bad framing. Now you can do that by using mindfulness and breaking frame. You also are naturally disposed to do this. Your mind wanders. Your mind distracts you from your task! And many of us find this annoying! It's like "Uuugh, why can't I keep my mind on something!?" But why is mind wandering so hard wired into us? And one of my former students and now colleague and good friend Zach Irving is becoming one of the world experts on mind wandering. I would point you to his work if you want to go into it in depth. What I would want to say for here, and I think Zach would agree with me on this, is that one of the things that mind wandering does is it enhances your capacity for insight because, by distracting you from how you framed a situation, it can help you return and break up that fixated frame. And there's work by Siegel and others showing that moderate amounts of distraction actually enhance your cognitive flexibility.

The reason why we mind wander - amongst other reasons! I'm not saying it's the sole reason - but one of the things it does is it helps disrupt our framing so that we can break frame and make a new frame. That's often why, and this is why people have built a whole mythology around "incubation" ("Go and sleep on it" or "go for a walk" or "take a shower"), basically what you're doing is a disruptive strategy of distraction. As I mentioned you can more deliberately engage in a disruptive strategy through mindfulness practices. We know experimentally, that if you give a person problem and you introduce entropy, noise into the problem, a moderate amount, that can help them have an insight.

And we know for example that when your brain is engaging in insight there is good reason to believe as I've mentioned that there's a significant shift - we talked about this - between the left and the right hemisphere. That's an internal disruptive strategy. So your brain has all these strategies and you can learn some psycho-technologies that enhance all this powerful disruption. So, the disruptive machinery that's integral to insight can be exapted and enhanced to bring about a higher state of consciousness.

Deautomatization

So, what all of these disruptive strategies do with insight is what's called Deautomatization. So you remember with the nine dot problem you automatically - and remember this because we're going to need this when we talk about other things like stoicism - you automatically, unconsciously saw it as a square. You framed it in terms of the square. You automatically, unconsciously formulated it as a connect the problem and then that automatic framing blocks you from solving it. And in order to get out of that, you get have to deautomatize your cognition.

Now we talked about this when we talked about attentional scaling and mindfulness. I'm just reminding you that that's happening in these disruptive strategies is very significant deautomatization. Something else is going on with these disruptive strategies. What these disruptive strategies do is they increase the variation in your processing, often by introducing a lot of noise, a lot of entropy into your processing. You're increasing the variation in what you're paying attention to. What processes you're activating in your brain. You're just increasing the variation. Now why is increasing variation good? Increasing variation is good because when I increase the variation, what I can do is get more awareness of what's invariant.

The more I vary what I'm doing, the more I become aware of what's not changing. So as I move around this object, lots of stuff is varying but its shape is remaining constant to me throughout the variation and that's why I think of the shape as more real - because it's "invariant" through all this variation. So when I increase the variance, I'm more able to pick up on what's invariant. The thing we need to know is that there are two kinds of invarience. Two kinds of things that are not changing in your attempts to get a grip on the world. There is good Invariants and bad Invariants (draws this on the board).

Good and Bad Invarience

What's good Invariants? By opening up the variation I pick up on bigger patterns that aren't changing that are real patterns in the world. This is what goes on in deep learning networks. You pick up on much more complex patterns of Invariants. You get more in contact with what's really going on. Again, think about what you do when you want to make sure what something is! You increase the variation - not only am I looking at it, I'm looking at it diff[erently], I'm touching it... I increase the variation to find out what's invariant because if I have increased variation and I find out what's invariant in it, that often tells me what's more real. That's good. Right? So, that can get me real patterns. But there's also about Invariants. Bad Invariants is like what's happening in when you're trying to solve the nine dot problem. You keep trying to solve it and you keep failing to solve it because there's something you need to change that you're not changing. Bad Invariantss are ways in which you're formulating your problems, framing your experience, that's actually blocking you from solving your problem.

The Notice Invariants Heuristic

So, Kaplan and Simon in 1990 talked about a heuristic, a strategy we use called the "Notice Invariants Heuristic". This is the idea: across all of your different problem formulations that are failing; "You keep doing 'this' and you keep doing... And I can't get it, I can't get it, I can't get it..." When you increase the variation you can then apply the Notice Invariance Heuristic: "What am I not changing in all of these failures? What am I not changing in all of my failed framings? Because very often what you're not changing is precisely what you need to change. And so the Notice Invariance Heuristic can help you break bad framing that has been causing your failure. Now this of course requires humility on your part [and] is why there's a deep connection between wisdom and humility, I would suggest. Paying attention, remembering your failures, such that you can apply this would be very helpful!

Now, let's talk about... this (bad invariants side) is one problem they were talking about - Kaplan and Simon. But what if I don't just have one error, here, but I have a whole system of errors? So very often, when you look at cognitive development, you take the 2 year old... sorry, 4 year old because they can count and you count out the five candies. They can count. They know that there are five here and there are five here. But they will reliably choose that row - five candies. Why? Because the amount of space taken up is super-salient to them, we've talked about this before, it misleads them. But they don't just make this error with candies they make this error systematically. They make this error all over the place in many different domains. It is a systematic error. So I can reliably predict that the four year old will not only be making this error, they'll be making errors about seriation; about trying to line objects up in terms of increasing height They'll have difficulties etc..

So it's not just one error. It's an entire system of errors. And the way you go through a developmental change - what kids do - is that they find a systematic pattern of errors and they find an insight that's not just about one problem but an insight that will apply systematically to all of those interconnected, interrelated errors. And when they have that systematically penetrative insight; when they've found that nexus of errors so they can massively intervene on themselves, then they go through a developmental change and they grow up, cognitively. They mature! And that is what can be going on in the Enlightenment experience. By opening up the variation massively, you can not only connect to what's more real and feel more connected to The World - remember The World? - you can get below the ways in which you are being held back in your own development. You can zero in on the systematic errors and afford a radical developmental change: as the adult is to the child the sage is to the adult. You can go through, you can get one of the hallmarks of wisdom. What ***Maggie and Barbara*** called "Seeing through Illusion into what is real".

OK so we're still not done [with] this discussion because this is pivotal! Trying to understand these higher states of consciousness. It's pivotal to understanding the power, the legacy of the Axial Revolution and therefore what we need to salvage from it... We do not believe in its two world mythology, but we can not afford to abandon all of this powerful psycho-technology of intervention. Of self transformation of self transcendence of the cultivation of wisdom and ultimately the deep enhancement of meaning in life by bringing about a developmental harmony within and a powerful conformity and connectedness to the world without.

So next time I want to continue and complete the discussion about the higher state of consciousness. Thank you very much for your time.

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Notes on Bevry
Summary and Transcript on awakeningfromthemeaningcrisis.com

Welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis. The last time we were talking more about mindfulness and trying to get an account of how mindfulness can bring about an insight. Not just a single insight into a single problem, but a modal insight, a systematic insight that is fully transformative of the Agent and Arena relationship, and bring about the alleviation of existential distress, and the affordness of enhanced meaning. And we took a look at that by getting into the machinery of attention, and seeing that attention involves two kinds of "attentional scaling". Attention in/evolves an ability to engage in a transparency-opacity shift, and also breaking up gastault into features, scaling down - the kind of thing we can enhance in meditation.

But it also involves an ability to scale up. To move from featured to Gastalt and to go from looking at something to looking more deeply into reality. And that in mindfulness, in meditation we're practicing the scaling down to break inappropriate framing and scaling up to train making better framing, and that if we can optimize by learning how to fluently flow between the two - bringing in an aspect of fluency and flow that we've already talked about - then we could optimize our capacity for much more comprehensive insight and we could take it.../ If we could take it to the depths of our-self, like we do in the pure consciousness event and the depths of reality and the resonant 'at-onement', if we could integrate those, optimize between them, we could bring about Prajñā a kind of non-duality that would be potentially transformative of the whole Agent-Arena relationship, dissipate modal confusion, enhance meaning in life by bringing about one of the most powerful kinds of mystical experience give people a sense of enhanced real-ness that will challenge, encourage and empower them to transform all of their existence and bring about a tremendous increase in meaning in life.

[We] talked about some recent cognitive science including some of my own theoretical and experimental work that seems to be supporting the claim that these higher states of consciousness can bring about these quantum changes, these radical kinds of transformative experience.

So today I want to talk about that. I want to talk about [the] transformative experience and the pivotal and really brilliant work of L.A. Paul on the notion of Transformative Experience. But before I do that we have to step back and talk a little bit about altered states of consciousness. We have to talk a little bit about what we mean by an altered state of consciousness, what we mean by this kind of transformation. And that gets us into one of the most difficult problems. David Chalmers famously called it the Hard Problem of consciousness. Arthur Schopenhauer called it the world not trying to explain consciousness is like trying to explain God. It is one of the hardest problems. I'm not going to endeavor to do all of that, although I'm going to try and make use of some of the work that myself and Anderson Todd and Richard Wu have put into trying to understand at least some of the important functions and properties of consciousness and why altered states of consciousness can be so affording of radical transformative experience.

So one way to do this is to look at two sort of questions we can ask ourselves. One is what is consciousness? How does something like consciousness emerge out of the brain? That's sort of the nature of consciousness. And a lot of people are doing a lot of work on that. And then we can also ask questions about what's the function of consciousness? What does consciousness do? Those aren't the same question. Because you may be surprised to hear that we don't have a consensus on what consciousness to justice does. Most people know that consciousness is a mystery. But most people don't realize that what consciousness does is also a mystery. I mean think about it this way: You love your consciousness. You identify with it. You don't just - and you don't know your consciousness the way you know other things. You know your consciousness by being conscious! Like if I ask you if your conscious right now you are. How did you do that. You just are conscious. And you know that you're conscious knowing and being - remember Aristotle conformity? - are the same. You participate in your consciousness.

And what would you give it up for? What if have I said to you "you could have unlimited power and wealth. All you have to sacrifice is any consciousness of it!" Would you take the deal? Of course not. But what does it do? Well you say "well it's Obvious!". No it's not obvious. Because you can do, and you [can] do most of your things, without consciousness. I have no understanding, no conscious awareness I should say - I have some scientific understanding - I have no conscious awareness of what my brain is doing that is allowing me to generate speech. Do you? You don't. This complex sophisticated thing that we still can't get artificial intelligence to do well. It's happening almost completely unconsciously.

What is Consciousness for and What Does it Do?

What's my consciousness for? What does it do? So, two really important questions. How does something as mysterious and strange arise out of matter (That's the nature question)? And what does it do? Again I am not going to presume or dare to try and answer these comprehensively. I don't need that for what we're doing here because I'm not trying to solve the hard problem of consciousness. I'm trying to solve the hard problem of meaning. One hard problem at a time please. But what I want to do is show you how a convergence of work that - some of the best work that's being done on consciousness - points towards something that will tell us why altered states of consciousness can be so valuable to us. So what about - one of the best accounts for the function of consciousness is called the Global workspace theory.

So the idea is that your consciousness functions very much like the desktop of your computer. So here's the idea you have your desktop (draws image on the board) and then you have all your files. And what you can do is you can activate a file you can bring that information into the desktop and you can activate this file and bring it into the desktop and then these pieces of information can interact with each other and then you can broadcast back to any or all or just one file the changes you brought about. That's how your desktop works. That's how you use it. Well what's the analogy? The analogy is here's all of your unconscious processing in your brain and what you do is you retrieve it, bring it into a space - something like working memory - you activate it so that the pieces of information can interact with each other and then you broadcast it back to any and all of the existing files.

Why do you want to do that? Why do you do it on your computer? Well you don't want all of your files active at the same time because that's a disaster. You want to be able - and notice what's going on here... You want to be able to select certain pieces of information that are relevant, bring them together, transform them in a way that's relevant and then broadcast the changes back that are needed. So the global workspace theory says this is - and it's gaining a lot of empirical evidence to support it - says this is what consciousness is functioning to do. Now this is very general. So more specifically - and so this theory is associated with Baars and then there was a paper by Shanahan and Baars that more specifically tried to answer the question about "yeah, but why this machinery?" (pointing at 'desk top' schematic/drawing on the board). Baars also published an attempt to answer that question more specifically in the Cambridge Handbook of consciousness. What it comes down to is the idea that what this architecture (schematics on board) is helping to do is to solve a problem that's called the "frame problem". Now I'm going to talk much later specifically what the frame problem is, so put a pin in it - we're going to come back to it. But the basic idea here is: What this is doing is helping you to zero in on relevant information. And that's very, very important because there are three areas in which this is a huge issue.

The Three Important Areas Being Worked With..

One is all of the information that's available to me right now - we're got to have to talk about this later, but technically, mathematically the amount of information that's available in this room is astronomically vast, and I can't... I can't make use of all of it. I get overwhelmed by it. So part of what I have to do is select out of all of that information what information I'm going to make use of. (2) I also have a huge amount of information in my memory. Overwhelming. It's vast, and possible ways it could be connected... I have to select from some of that. (3) And then I have to put those pieces of information together in all the ways I can put together the information and from out there and the information about here... All so vast and overwhelming. Later on I'm going to give you mathematical arguments about this. Right now I just need you to get it intuitively.

So what consciousness is doing is it's helping these problems. It's helping you zero in on the relevant information. The relevant information from out there, the relevant information from in here and the relevant information that will help put those pieces of information together for you in the way that it's needed. Just like you do that. You do that with your computer. You search through your memory, you select what's relevant, you bring it onto the desktop, you put it together in a relevant manner right and then you use it in a relevant way. But we can't use a homunculus explanation - there's no little man running inside! What's doing all of that in a self organizing fashion is your consciousness. This helps to explain why consciousness is so tightly associated with working memory, and working memory is so tightly associated with intelligence.

The Core Function

The core function of consciousness seems to be to help you realize, become aware of, actualize, put into action, 'Relevance': relevant information. We're going to come back to this in more depth. There's a more neuroscientific and psychological account by people like Bor and Seth. When we measure when people are conscious it seems to correlate with certain kinds of brain activity. What kind of brain [activity]? The brain activity that seems to be involved when people are chunking information or when they are restructuring it, like an insight. I've already showing you this. This ability to manipulate attention to afford insight. They're arguing that that's one of the key functions of conscious. But what does... what is all of that doing? It's the same thing right? The Bor and Seth model is basically saying the [that] function of consciousness is to give you a dynamic improvement in your ability to zero in on relevant information. One of the most prominent theories of the nature of consciousness right now is Tononi's is "Integrated Information Theory".

Integrated Information Theory

Now his theory is not about the function of consciousness it's about the nature of consciousness. But of course he's going to give a derived account of the function. What is consciousness according to him? It's how powerfully integrated pieces of information are. How much one piece of information in your brain is causally dependent on interacting and affecting other pieces of information in your brain. The more tightly the integration, the more powerful the processing, then what he would say is the more likely that complex, as he calls it because it's actually a complexification of information, is going to be affording consciousness. But then when you ask him "Well why is consciousness... Why...? 'That' might be what consciousness is...", I Think there's much more to consciousness, but for the sake of argument, "...that might be what consciousness is. But why is consciousness doing this massive complexification of information?" So he actually proposes something like a Turin test for consciousness. He says "you can test to see how conscious a system is by giving it anomalous pictures and figuring out if the pictures don't make good sense." Here, look, here's the idea: When I'm complexifying, when I'm doing this very dynamic integration of information, what that's tracking is how much I'm actually picking up on the patterns in the world; making sense of the world! The reason why I'm doing this (IIT) is precisely because I'm trying to, as best I can, track the complexity of the world.

So what's the main function? Well, the main function of the Integrated Information is to allow you to determine if pieces of information are relevant to each other and relevant to you. What consciousness seems to be... Now let's be careful: what I'm not saying, I'm not saying that every instance of relevance realization is consciousness. What I'm arguing is that what consciousness seems to do is the following: It seems to be a way in which you can coordinate attention and other related abilities of awareness so as to optimize how insightfully you can make sense of your world. So that's why you need consciousness for complex situations that require insight for situations and problems that have a high degree of novelty or challenge in them. It's why you can reduce consciousness when the problem has become very well-defined for you, it doesn't have a high degree of novelty, it doesn't require insight.

Sizing Up

I don't know if this is a complete account of the function of consciousness but it explains something we've already noted. That when you have an insight what do you have? You have a flash. It's like you get a sudden brightening of consciousness. It explains why you might want to alter your state of consciousness because if I alter my state of consciousness I'm going to alter what I'm finding relevant and how it is standing out for me: how it is salient for me. Let's put a lot of this stuff together: the machinery we had about attention; stuff we've talked about about fluency; stuff we talked about salience, and notice of phenomena that Matson called "Sizing up". Right.

Part of what's happening, part of what consciousness is doing, is it's creating a salience landscape for me. What does that mean for me? Well, first of all I'm picking out, out of all of the things I could pick out - and when I say "I" don't mean "me", I mean "my consciousness", I'm picking out some features ("Featurization" written on the board). You are not paying attention to every piece of information in this room. You can't. It's overwhelmingly vast. But you pick out on some. And then what you do, also is you begin... so you've already selected and you start to prioritize it and you foreground ("foregrounding" written on the board) some of it. So for example, presumably, I'm for grounded and what's around me is backgrounded. And of course we've already seen it's going both ways. Remember that right? And notice again what I'm looking at, what I'm looking through, and I'm taking the features and I'm starting to foreground them and then I'm going to gestalt those features. I'm going to "figure" (written on board) I'm going to create a figure. We use this language of "figuring out", figuring out, and making something... you're... I'm making it stand out even more (more salient to me) and I'm also configuring, con-figuring it together. So all the features, and then foregrounded, then this (cup) is getting configured (changes figure on board to "figuration"). This also is feeding back (Figuration -> Featurization). And then of course I'm "framing" problems ("framing" written on the board beyond feedback). I'm framing problems; we've been talking about that all through this series. So you've got a very complex dynamical system at work.

So what's happening right now is your consciousness is creating a salience landscape. Some things are rising up out of unintelligibility as features that are getting for grounded and configured. And then you're framing problems around them and then things are shifting and and your attention is shifting around. Other things are becoming sa[lient] and you've got this highly textured, highly flowing, salience landscape. That's what it's like to be here right now.

Now there's more going on of course, right? So part of what I'm doing, I get this salience landscape and my problem is around the cup, but I'm not quite sure, so I move around it. I try to get into an optimal position. If I get too close I lose too much of the gastalt, and if I get too far away I may see the whole thing but I'm losing the details. I need to get to the right place where I can metaphorically and also literally in this sense get what ***Marla Aponte?*** Calls "An Optimal Grip" on it. So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get... I'm optimizing between gestalt and feature; between looking through and looking at; I'm optimizing within this whole sizing up. So I'm taking my salience landscape and I'm using it to get an optimal grip on things. Not maximal. And 'grip' is meant here as a metaphor. It's meant for my contact, my interactional contact. How can we understand what this optimal grip is doing? Look.... When I when I get the salience landscape (using the cup again) and I adjust, an affordance opens up.

What's an affordance? This is goes back to Gibson; the idea of visual perception is this active process of landscaping. The cup is graspable to me. That's not a property of the cup per-say because it's not graspable by a praying mantis. It's not a property just of my hand because I can't.... my hand alone can't grasp. An affordance is setting up a relationship of coordination between the constraints in the thing and the constraints in my hand so that I can engage in an interaction. So it's a way of co-identifying. The cup is... This thing is... It's been made salient to me. I've got now an optimal grip on it such that I can create affordances. So it is presenting itself to me and I am configuring myself to it. It is grasping all by me. And what... And this is Gibson's point: You don't really... You don't see colors and shapes... What you see are affordances. I see that this is walkable. That this is where I can place things. That this is movable.

What Consciousness is Doing, Down to the Depth Landscape

So, do you see? You get the basics. The salience landscape gets you in contact then you start the optimal gripping and the optimal gripping gets you into the creation of affordances where basically the agent and the arena are being co-identified. I'm a grasper and this is graspable. I am presenting myself to it and it is presenting itself to me. So you have consciousness is setting up a "salience landscape", but within this you're doing this process of "sizing up" and that produces a "Presence Landscape". You get a whole bunch of... A whole affordance network is laid out for you. But that's not enough. Remember we talked about with flow... You need to be able to track the differences between correlational patterns and causal patterns. As you interact with things your brain is figuring out the causal patterns as opposed to the merely correlational. This is the "Depth Landscape". This is your ability to figure out... You see kids doing this right... You got the two year old and they got this spoon and what do they... They pick up the spoon and they drop it on the floor. You pick it up they pick [it] and they BANG BANG BANG... and they do this over and over again. Why are they doing that? Because they're trying to use their salience landscape to generate affordances. The spoon is grasping all its throwable and it's droppable.

But why are they doing...? Why do they repeatedly grasp and throw and drop? Because they're trying to figure out the causal patterns around the spoon. They're transforming the salience landscape into a presence landscape and that into a depth landscape. They're getting a deep kind of understanding - not in words - but interactionally. Of the spoon. This is what consciousness is doing for you. It's doing it right now. It's laying out... It's.... All of this is a way in which consciousness is helping you zero in on relevant information. It's creating this textured salience landscape so that certain things stand out for you and other things don't as much. And it's constantly shifting dynamically. And then within that it's creating a presence landscape of how you and what's salient are being co-identified, coupled together into an agent and arena relationship and then it's also affording you. And that's dynamic because the affordances are constantly shifting. And then that's affording you 'tracking the causal patterns', getting into deeper contact with the guts of the world. That's what consciousness is doing.

So if I were to transform my consciousness, I'm going to be transforming all of this machinery. I'm going to be transforming my salience landscape, my presence landscape, my depth landscape. The patterns I'm going to track, the kind of agent I can be, the kind of arena I can be in are going to be radically transformed. And I won't have just a flash of insight like I do with a 9 dot problem. I will have a systematic... Look, an altered state of consciousness is not a... It's not an insight in consciousness it's an insight of consciousness. It's a radical transformation of all of your landscapes, not just this particular problem. Look, I'll try and show you what I mean by this; by a "systematic insight".

A Systematic Insight

So this goes back to childhood development. Pivotal work of Piaget in psychology. And this is picking up again on one of the metaphors we were using. We use "wisdom is like enlightenment", "wisdom is like waking up" and here's another one "Wisdom, like, as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. Wisdom is like growing up". OK, so you take a four year old and you do this, you count out five candies: one two three four five. You need a four year old because they can count and they understand that five is more than four, it's less than six. You count it out right and then you count out five more candies: one two three four five. You show them that like this (one line of candies more spred out than the other). And you say "which row do you want?" And they reliably... And you've counted. They know there's five here. They know that there's five here. But they confidently pick this row (the more spread out one) and here's the thing: all the kids do it and that mistake is related to a whole bunch of other kinds of mistakes they're making. They're not making just a single error.

Look, this is what made Piaget a great, great scientist... Why he's a pivotal figure in trying to understand development - and think about Aristotle and development. See there have been lots of IQ testing way before Piaget - people have been testing kids IQ for a while - and they had been throwing away the errors as garbage because what you paid attention to was what the kid got right. ("yeah... Success... And the Protestant work ethic... yeah, yeah...") Piaget had this insight and he'd say "but wait! Wait, wait! What if there's a pattern in the errors? If the errors are systematic and not random, then that would mean that there are constraints..." - remember constraints? - "...there are constraints operating in the child's cognition". And maybe we could understand... and think about Aristotle again... And biology, because Piaget was, guess what? ...A biologist! Maybe we could understand development in terms of how those constraints are shifting and how they're... how they're shaping the kid's sensory motor interaction with the world. And what he found was in fact that the errors are systematic. The kids are... all of the kids are making this kind of error and they're making a whole bunch of related errors. There's a whole system of errors. And so that points to some underlying set of constraints. Now what's going on? What's going on here (candies)? Why is the kid picking the lower row? Because it takes up more space. Think about everything we've talked about here. This variable (longer spread of candies] is super salient to them.

Their salience landscape is only picking up on that. Now you, I hope, don't fall prey to this because you're also picking up on another variable at the same time. You also make salient that the extra space is non-candy space and therefore is what? ...Not relevant. But the kid doesn't pick up on that. Their salience landscape is not sizing that up. And so they don't have the same affordance as you. Now notice this: You see through this illusion because you're salience landscape has been trained to pay attention to these multiple variables at the same time. The way you size things up, integrate them in attention means you don't fall prey to this. Part of the way in which you become wiser than the child - you don't fall prey to self deceptive illusion - is because you've trained your salience landscape to zero in on the relative information in the relevant way. Now think about 'this' (super salience)... Remember we talked about salience and how when things are super salient to you that triggers bullshitting and self-deception. If I could change my salience landscape, I don't fall prey to this, I don't fall prey to the illusion and I wouldn't act foolishly.

Now, what I need you to understand is, here's a whole bunch of these errors that the kid is making (draws on the board). They form a system and they all have to deal with the fact that the salience landscape has not been sufficiently cultivated. So the kid might have an insight here, but it doesn't really matter because they're still going to be blocked in this problem and this problem and this problem. They're still going to be locked into a particular stage of development. But what if, and this is an idea that [I'm] working out in conjunction with Juensung Kim. What if you didn't have as a single insight? What if you had a systematic insight? An insight that changed the whole system. It wasn't an insight in your consciousness. It was an insight of your consciousness, in which you're changing your salience landscaping as opposed to just changing how you're framing a particular problem.

That's what the child does when it develops. It actually changes its salience landscaping so that this whole system of errors falls away and it starts to see through an illusion and into reality. Here's the thing you need to now think (writes Child -> Adult -> Sage on the board) and you've heard me say it: You have trained your salience landscape so that you do not fall prey to the systematic illusions of the four year old. Yes? Yes! But you know what? You are falling prey to a lot of systematic illusions you're not aware of because you can only become aware of them if you can transform your salience landscape, your presence landscape and your depth landscape to get in at what is actually most relevant systematically. Not here and here. All of us can have an insight here and here. But what it is... What is it to have a systematic improvement in insight? That's to be wise.

Your Significance Landscape

when you have salience systematically tracking presence in depth so that you can wisely zero in on the relevant information and make your life more meaningful... That's your "Significance Landscape". It protects you from bullshitting. It allows you to see through illusion and into reality. And it affords you having things more present to you. It would afford you to have a more comprehensive, flowing relationship with reality.

Altered states of consciousness have this potential. To create an insight of consciousness. Now they also have the potential to do the opposite. They have the potential to screw up your salience landscaping and make yourself more prone to bullshit! More prone to self deception. That's why most altered states of consciousness are rejected as being allusory and illusory. But why is it then, why is it then that certain altered states of consciousness have the opposite? Why is it that certain altered state of consciousness feel like this (board)? Like "Wait! It all makes sense now! I'm seeing through illusion into reality in a way I haven't before. Why is that altered state more real? The 'really real'...", As Plato was fond of saying "...and this, this every day is less real". Why do I feel like I woke up? That I became an adult to my previous form, that seemed to me like a child? What's going on?

So, let's set up the problem because getting clear about the problem is half the battle. Formulating a problem well is much, much of the important work at trying to bring a solution to it. So we know that many people experience, as I mentioned, these higher states of consciousness. And what... reliably - we'll talk about the phenomenological profile in a bit - but reliably what is characteristic of these states is that people find them to be really real and and in both directions: Arena and Agent. They say "wow that's the way the world really is". And they also say "this is who I really am". So much so that I'm going to transform my everyday experience so that it comes more consonant with that realness, that enhanced realness. So there's a mutual 'moreness', a mutual more-real-ness that happens in these higher states of consciousness and it's prescriptive, it demands change. It challenges people to change. It taps into those platonic meta-drives of getting your fullness of being, your real self and getting the fullness of contact reality. It switches those on and you go "I need to have that! I've got to try it. I'm willing to transform everything in order to get back to that really real world and that really real self".

Ontonormativity

So I call this... So we have a higher state of consciousness. I call this the problem of the "Ontonormativity." Remember that "ontology" has to do with the structure of reality. Normative is when things are placing a demand on you to be better, to improve. So these higher states of consciousness are precisely 'experiences-higher' because they're challenging you to change because they're presenting you more-realness, and they're triggering those platonic meta-drives.

Now as I mentioned, these states are historically important and they're pervasive. So you can read Taylor's book "Waking from sleep". He has about one hundred and fifty interviews. You can read many of them. He presents a lot of first person narratives of these people and these experience[s]. You can take a look at Newberg's book "how enlightenment changes your brain". He did an online survey of fifteen hundred people in 2016. As I mentioned there's just larger general surveys of how often people have these kinds of experiences and they range in intensity but it's around 30 to 40 percent of the population. So we have to take these experiences seriously. We know that from the work at the Griffiths lab that what's happening in a subset of psychedelic experiences - so here's (drawing) all the psychedelic experiences; you have a subset of which people have a mystical experience; and some of those people, the mystical experience is deeply transformative - It triggers that kind of quantum change.

OK, so why is the Ontonormativity of higher states of consciousness problematic? Well here's why... The transformative experience that people undergo, the radical transformations they're willing to make, seems to be driven and justified by this (HSA -> Ontonormativity). They say/ ..."Why are you doing this?" [they say] "I'm doing this because I had this experience and it was more real and I've got to stay in touch with more real!" They justify this transformation... I mean, sorry... I don't mean to be reductive and I'm not being disrespectful but, you know, Buddhism and Taoish and Vedanta and the core of aspects of Judaism and the mystical traditions in Christianity and Islam come down to this claim: "I had this (HSC -> Ontonormativity) and it justifies what I'm telling you. It explains and motivates the changes that I underwent". But why is that problematic? Look, because it's, like I said, it is in contrast to how we treat most of our altered states of consciousness. We go into dreaming, we come back and we say that's not real. We go into these, we come back and say that was more real and this is less real.

Dreams vs HSC

Now, let me try and explicate this problem further. Look, why do you reject your dreaming as unreal? Why? Because when you're in the dream it seems real! Because when you come out, that pattern, those things that happened in your dream don't cohere with the rest of your life. You've got this overall coherent picture of your life. Intelligibility - remember Plato. This overall picture makes the most sense of the most of your experience and if Plato's right the more intelligible something is the more real it is. This picture is more intelligible. It's more real. The dream is bizarre, it doesn't fit in. Ergo: less real!

So, realness is something like the pattern of intelligibility with the widest scope. Wide and rich coherence of content. It makes the most sense of the most of your experience. Puts together your beliefs and your memories. Etc.. But look what's happening in a higher state of consciousness. It's [the] exact reverse! You have this single experience. It doesn't cohere with the rest of your life, because that's why it challenges the rest of your life. It doesn't cohere with the rest of the life, it tells you that the rest of this is illusory and you need to change it! In fact, the difference is so great that instead of rejecting it you reject your everyday experience! So the thing that you use to reject the dream... So, look at the picture: "I use all of 'this' and I reject the dream. And then I have the higher state of consciousness - again a single thing - and I use this to reject all of 'this'! What's going on?

The higher state of consciousness is a temporary experience. It does not cohere with the rest of our experience. That's how and why it can challenge and demand such radical transformation of our everyday life, our everyday self. And here's what's even more, I don't know, perplexing! It does this without providing any new intelligible content. These experiences are traditionally ineffable. You can't put it into words. They are traditionally trans-rational. You can't give any argument or explanation or justification. How is it that this temporary experience that you...? "Why? What was it? Describe the experience!" "I can't, I can't describe it!" "Well can you explain to me what...?" "I, no, I can't! I can't explain it". So there's no content, it's temporary and yet somehow it goes the exact opposite of most altered states of consciousness. These states, these so-called 'higher states' should be the ones we most reject. They're temporary. They challenge all of our intelligibility coherence. They don't produce any viable explanation. Any viable content and yet we promote them as the really-real and use them to reject our everyday experience. And that's the core of the axial revolution. This problem of the Ontonormativity of higher states of consciousness goes to the heart of the axial revolution and the way it is still informing our very cognitive grammar and our existential ways of being right here, right now.

That's the problem of the Ontonormativity of Higher States of Consciousness. Now, we know that there is a possibility that altered states of consciousness can bring about a developmental improvement. But but? How? How do we tie this (insight development) to this (HSC & Ontonormativity)? Can we give an adequate enough explanation of these higher states of consciousness? And we need to do one that will help to explain why triggering them can be so transformative. Because here's the thing: Yaden's work shows: people's lives do get better. They're not making it up. After they've had these these higher states of consciousness - this encounter with the really-real - their lives get better! By all kinds of important measures. Measures of meaning, relationship, problems... They get better!

What Do We Need to Address This Disparity?

OK so what do we need? We need... We have to solve this problem! We have to make some progress on it! We need actually two explanations that need to be integrated together. First of all I need a descriptive explanation. I need an account of the underlying processes; cognitive, brain processes - we'll talk about this - that explain the phenomenological, the experiential nature of these states. Why do people... like, when people describe what's happening in these states, why do... why does it have the features it has? It has to explain why people feel it being more real. Why it feels that it justifies, empowers, and motivates them to undergo transformative experience.

Descriptive and Prescriptive Accounting for these Claims

But in addition to something that's a descriptive account, I need a prescriptive account. I mean the first account is going to be largely psychological. This is what's happening and this is why people are experiencing the way they're experiencing it. That's descriptively adequate. But prescriptively adequate has to show me this: Is it actually a legitimate thing? Do these states actually provide a rational justification and a guide for the transformations that people are claiming on their behalf? Are these states actually, philosophically justifiable? Or is their claim to Ontonormativity all just an illusion? Is it rationally justifiable? Now this prescriptive account must integrate with the mechanisms and processes of the descriptive account in order to be overall coherent. In order to give us the best explanation of how and why these states are operating.

The Descriptive Account: The Introduction to A Cognitive Scientific Approach

So, the descriptive account... the best way to do this is to do a cognitive scientific approach. Now at some point I'm going to teach you in this series how to do good cognitive science, but one of what we're doing in good cognitive science is we're plausibly trying to integrate different levels in our descriptive analysis. My descriptive account should give me a good account of the cognitive processes that are at work in the mind. It should give me a good account - and that's going to rely largely on psychology - it should also give me a good account of the information processes that are at work. That's going to rely on ideas drawn from artificial intelligence and machine learning because that's the project when we're trying to most understand and optimize information processing. It should also draw on neuroscientific accounts of what's happening in the brain. I need an account that simultaneously elucidates each one of these - the cognitive mechanisms; the machine learning mechanisms; and the neurological mechanisms - and does that in an integrative, mutually informative fashion. I want a plausible integration. That's what I need for the good descriptive account.

That's what I'm going to give. I'm going to try and argue how we can understand why these higher states of consciousness are the way they are in terms of all of those: the cognitive, the machine learning, and the neuroscientific level. After I'm doing that I'm going to then endeavor to try and show you how those processes, the cognitive processes, the information processing processes, the neurological processes, actually provide a rational justification for the transformation that the people undertake. It's not the kind of justification you might be expecting!

What I'm going to argue for is that it is not that these states provide us with any special knowledge. Because these states are not about changing evidence, acquiring new evidence, the way science [does], and we should not use these higher states of consciousness as a way of challenging our scientific claims. And many people will do this.

But the mistake is to then think "well that's it! That's the sum total. We've shown that these higher states of consciousness don't generate reliable kinds of knowledge, so we should reject them is irrational!" No, because that's again to think that the whole point of your cognition and your rationality is to get better beliefs, and I've already been showing you through this series that there's much more to it. When the child no longer falls prey to the illusion, no new facts have been discovered! The child knew that there were five candies on top and below. No new facts. It's not like there's been a new scientific discovery about space or candies! What changed? What changed is not knowledge. What changed was wisdom. The child has learned to see through illusion and into reality. And what I want to pursue with you is this idea: That higher states of [consciousness/cognition?] are rational not because they provide us with new knowledge - Look! Look... People go into these states and they come out with exactly opposite conclusions. You can read... I've read so many of these reports! People go in and they have this higher state of consciousness and they said "oh! And i knew god!" People go and they have this higher state of conscience "and I knew there was no God!". Exactly the opposite. The content is diametrically opposite. People will say very metaphysical claims!

What's changing is not the content. Not this or that piece of knowledge. What's changing is your functioning. You're not gaining knowledge you're gaining wisdom. You're gaining skills and sensibilities and sensitivities of significance landscaping that radically transform your existential mode.

That is why, for example, that the Buddha famously refused to answer metaphysical questions about Nirvana, about enlightenment, because that's not the point. That's not what this is about. This is not about getting supra-scientific knowledge. This is about getting extraordinary wisdom and transformation. We're going to take a look more at trying to answer the problem of higher states of consciousness next time and we'll return also back to discussing more how the Buddha integrated that into trying to deal with some of the deepest problems that we face as entities that have to realize relevance; pursue salience; deal with existential anxiety; cultivate significance and meaning; try and overcome our illusions and delusions and find a fullness of being in an optimal grip on the world. Thank you very much for your time.

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Notes on Bevry
Summary and Transcript on awakeningfromthemeaningcrisis.com 

Welcome back to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. So last time we continued looking through the myth of Siddhartha's awakening and we talked about him leaving the palace, the having mode, his attempt to rediscover, recover the being mode, and the difficulty he faced in pursuing self-denial as passionately as he had pursued self-indulgence and why this ultimately failed because it's still working within the same operation of trying to have a self. And then we looked at Siddhartha's commitment to the middle path, an attempt to overcome that through the cultivation of mindfulness and then we began our exploration of mindfulness. We first looked at what it meant, Sati and remember it's this deep remembering, this recovering of the being mode that leads to a fundamental transformation and alleviates the existential anxiety and distress that Siddhartha was experiencing and potentially is on offer for us. And then we started to take a look at 'that'; the practice of mindfulness and his attempt to address at least an individual or personal experience of a meaning crisis. And we were doing that because we were trying to investigate more broadly the mindfulness revolution and how that is a response to the meaning crisis within the West.

We began by noting that the study of mindfulness is misleading in some ways, the scientific study, because it begins with a feature list. And as we've noted multiple times feature list leave out the idos, the structural functional organization. In order to do that, we brought out four central characteristics in the feature list: being present, not judging, insightfulness, and reduced reactivity or an increased equanimity. And then we noted that what we need to do is to make distinctions between the types of features, between those that are states that we can engage, in actions we can perform and traits we can cultivate. Once we did that, we opened up the possibility of asking causal questions. How can the practice of being present, for example, produce the trait of insightfulness? And then we also could ask constitutive questions. What's the relationship, the part-whole relationship for example, between being present and not judging?

That being said we then also noted that we have to replace the language of training with the language of explaining; they operate according to different principles and for different goals. And we began that by starting to ask "what does it mean to be present?" And then we talked about concentration. We talked about different senses of that and the kind of "soft-vigilance" that's actually conducive of insight, discussed by Ellen Langer and others. This kind of involvement that is very much about conforming to, the "inter-esse", becoming deeply interested, connected to, the structural functional organization of something. We noted that that took us into discussion of paying attention and all the while remembering this idea that we got from Siddhārtha Gautama's story about tuning – getting the right tuning – optimization, and we started to talk about attention and made the argument that attention is not very well served by the spotlight metaphor.

While that metaphor does give us the idea of attention altering salience, the metaphor misses a lot of what attention is doing. We began to investigate what's missing by making use of Christopher Mole's idea that attention is not a direct action performed by walking but it's something you do by modifying something else, by optimizing something else. That's why you could successfully pay attention by doing many disparate and different kinds of things. You can pay attention by optimizing you're seeing into looking, by optimizing your hearing into listening, by optimizing you're seeing and listening into a coordinated tracking of what somebody is saying like you're doing right now. All of those are different ways in which we're paying attention. So what we needed was an understanding of attention that could capture the way it's an optimization strategy which lines up with this tuning idea and how such optimization might be linked to a response to existential modal confusion and the alleviation of the suffering found therein.

So I want to continue that discussion about attention and start to point towards what might be going on. If you remember, Mole talks about this idea of cognitive unison: getting a bunch of processes to share a goal, to be coordinated together in some fashion. Now he leaves it abstract like that and I think we should try and investigate a little bit more further, more concretely, what that might mean and there's a lot of – attention is one of the hottest areas in cognitive science right now. There's a lot of good work done by Frank Wu, by Sebastian Watzl, Christopher Mole... Many people are talking about this and I'm not pretending to canvass all of that rich and very fertile and very – like it's very creative, it's advancing. I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to pick up on some key themes here because what we want to understand is how can mindfulness train attention so as to cause more insight, to make one more dispositionally capable of insight. Because all – after all and we've talked about this before, we're not talking – when we talk about wisdom, we're not talking about an individual insight. We're talking about a systematic set of insights that are mutually related to a fundamental transformation of the person's, as we said last time, existential mode.

So let's talk a little bit more again about what's missing from the model of attention. So, this cognitive unison - I think we can make use of another important cognitive scientist, philosopher scientist, who did work on attention and that's Michael Polanyi and he pointed out that attention has an important structure - and we've been trying to follow the platonic idea of turning the feature list into a feature schema, picking up on structures - and the way in order to bring out what Polanyi is talking about, I'm going to run through an experiment with you. It's an experiment you can sort of follow along with me. So, let me describe it to you first. I need you to get some object, like a pencil or a pen and we will call that your your probe. Nothing untoward is meant by that that's just what it's called in psychology. It doesn't involve any aliens doing graphic things to your body or anything like that.

A Practical Psychological Experiment

So, what we're going to do is – let me describe it to you first. Okay, what I'm going to ask you to do is going to ask you to find some object that you could put it on a desk in front of you or hold in your hand and then you're going to do the following. Do not start yet because I want to describe it to you. I'm going to – I'm going to ask you to tap on the object as if you were blind and you're trying to figure out what the object is. Its shape, its structure, its weight, its density. "(tap tap tap...) Oh that's a cup, right?". That makes sense. Now, it's important while you – now you should close your eyes as you're doing this. I'm using touch because touch is slower than sight. And so you can become more aware of what's happening. Now, it's important while you do this, that you continue tapping.

So I'm going to ask you in a moment to close your eyes, start the tapping and then while you're doing it, continue the tapping as you are following my instructions. And this will –this will give you a sense of what you're doing. Okay so, what I want you to do is close your eyes. You start tapping on your object, right. Start tapping until you start to form an image of the object in your mind. Okay. So your eyes are closed, you're starting to get an image of what that object is in your mind. Okay. So right now you're aware, like you're focally aware – what you're focusing your awareness on is the object. I want you to keep tapping but I want you to shift your awareness into your probe, feel how your pencil or your pen is moving around, shifting. Okay, keep tapping and then I want you to shift your awareness into your fingers and feel how your fingers are moving around, shifting around.

Okay. Some of you may be able to pick up on the individual feelings that are occurring in your fingers. Now, go back, feel your fingers, your thumb and how they're moving. Now, feel how the probe is moving. And now, allow the tapping to reveal the object to you once again. So I've done this multiple, multiple times with people. And what's interesting is the following thing: most people find this very readily easy to do. And a couple of things, when you're initially tapping, for example, I was aware of my cup but then my awareness moves into my marker and then my awareness moves into my finger, and when my awareness is in my finger I'm not aware of the cup at all. Then I was able to reverse it. I go from being aware of my fingers to being aware of the probe to being aware of the cup. And you're saying "what's all this about? What's going on?". Well, there's an important structure. Let's take a look at it step by step.

Breaking the Experiment Down - What's Going On?

So here's the cup or whatever your object was, and I'm tapping on it with my probe. Now here's the interesting thing. It's not like I was completely unaware of my probe because if I was completely unaware of it, then I couldn't manipulate it. But I wasn't actually aware of it, I was aware through it. I was aware through my probe of the cup. So, I'm aware through this (probe) and I'm aware of this (cup). So it's like my probe is transparent to me and I'll give - let me give you an analogy right now, where this (cup) is opaque. Here's the analogy - and we talked about this before, but let's do it again, and it's like my glasses are like my framing, right. My glasses are transparent to me in the sense that I'm looking through them, beyond them, by means of them. They're transparent to me. But what I can do is I can redirect my awareness, so that I'm now looking at my glasses rather than through them. So, my glasses have now become opaque to me. So, I can do a "transparency to opacity shift". Now, what does that ability to shift indicate?

Well, this is – this is part of Polanyi's idea. Here's my probe (drawn on the board), I'm aware through my probe. He has, what I call, a subsidiary or an implicit awareness because I'm aware through it – I'm not aware of it, I'm aware through it, right, of my focal object, for example, my cup. And this I have a focal awareness or an explicit awareness. Now his point, which is really quite good right, is that attention is this kind of structuring phenomena. What it is, it's always attention as he says from-to it – that attention through subsidiary awareness into focal awareness. When I'm paying attention, I'm doing this. But here's the interesting thing, I was then able to step back and make this focal, and now it's my fingers that I am aware [of] – I'm aware through my fingers of my probe. And then I can even step back and be aware of my feelings, what some people would call sensations.

What the Spotlight Metaphor is Missing

So I can – I can keep stepping back and stepping back. So, I'm looking at the cup through my probe. Now I'm looking through my fingers at the probe, and now I'm looking through my feelings my fingers. And of course, the whole time I was actually looking at the cup I was doing all of that: I was looking through my feelings through my fingers through my probe into the cup. And you see the spotlight metaphor is missing all of that layered, recursive, dynamic structuring that's going on. And notice you can move in both directions; you can do a transparency opacity shift, in which I step back more and more into my mind, or I can go the opposite way. I can do an opacity to transparency shift. That's when you went the opposite way; that's when you go from looking at your fingers to looking through your fingers at your probe and going from looking at your probe to looking through your probe to the cup. And your attention is doing that all the time, flowing in and out: doing a transparency and opacity shifting. Now, that's very important because that's an important – what you're seeing is how many different processes are being coordinated integrated together to optimize and prioritize, to use an important term from Watzl, this particular object or this particular scene or situation.

So, that's one way in which attention is operating. Now, for reasons I'm not quite sure of, I think it has to do something with we're using a visual metaphor in the way vision is oriented in our bodies, we tend to use an in-out metaphor for this. Like that's why I'm using stepping back and looking at as opposed to, like looking through. Notice also something that's really important for where - we're going to need this when we talk about Gnosis and participatory knowing - notice when I was, if you'll allow me, when I was knowing the cup through the probe, I'm indwelling the probe. It's not like I'm/ I'm participating in how the probe is being with respect to the cup. I'm sort of indwelling it. I'm not knowing the probe, I'm knowing through the probe. I'm "inter-esse". I'm so deeply interested that I'm actually right integrated with it and threw it into the cup. The way my vision is integrated with these glass lenses so that I'm actually seeing through them and by means of them. And the point about this, and we've talked about this before of course, is this also works, not just with technology, but with psycho-technologies. We talked about this with second order thinking. You can so integrate literacy, for example, into your cognition that you don't look at literacy very much, you automatically look through it. And we'll come back to that.

The Psychology of CAT & HAT

All right, so this is... As I said this seems to be –people's talk about this metaphorically as moving in and out with their awareness. So one of the ways attentions work is it moves in and out. You can look through a lot of processing deeply out into the world or you can step back and look at a lot of processing and withdraw towards the center of your mind. There's another important axis upon which your attention is working and I can bring it out by a famous example. So you give this (writes on the board) to people and you ask them to read it and they say, what does it say? and they'll say "THE CAT". And they're like, "Oh yeah". All right. And then you point out to them that they're reading this as an H and they're reading this as an A, and these are exactly the same thing. Why are you reading one as an H and the other as an A? And so what they'll typically say to you, is "well because it fits in with this word as an H and it fits in with this word as an A."

So let's use language we've already developed. The letters are the features and the word is the "gestalt", the overall structure. Now notice here: you've got a problem. It's almost, you know, a pseudo-Zen problem. In order to read the words, I must read each individual letter, but in order to disambiguate each letter, I must have read the whole word. Therefore reading is impossible.

Now of course reading isn't impossible, which means something else has to change. What has to change is your model of attention. The search light metaphor – the spotlight metaphor – can't address that problem. Here's what your attention is actually doing. It's simultaneously going up from the features to the gestalt, the idos, the structural-functional whole... and it's going down from the gestalt, the words, to the individual letters, the features. It's simultaneously doing that. Your attention is also doing this: so not only is your attention flowing in and out, doing transparency opacity shifting, it's also flowing up and down between feature and gestalt. Your attention is doing all of that, it's doing it right now. And the spotlight metaphor doesn't capture any of that. And mindfulness has to do with making use of all of this complex, dynamical - remember what dynamical systems are - dynamical processing. These are dynamic, self organizing processes and they can be optimized. And mindfulness optimizes them in some way.

Scaling Up and Scaling Down

So, I'm going to put something up on the board. It looks like a graph but it's not a graph because it doesn't have absolute position. It's just a schema because it has relative position. So, when I move this way (draws a horizontal arrow indicating left to right) - like we we're talking about when we're talking about Polanyi's work - I'm doing transparency to opacity shifting and going this way is to do transparency to opacity and to go this way (the direct oposite) is to do opacity to transparency. It's not an ab[solute]; no position is transparent and the other is opaque. It's always the direction that matters. The more I move this way, the more I'm stepping back and looking at; the more I go this way, the more am in dwelling and looking out into the world.

Then we have this: I can be going down from the gestalt to the features (draws a vertical arrow to indicate top to bottom) using the word to decide the letters, for example, and I can be going up from the features to the gestalt. Nothing is inherently a feature, look: the letters are a feature in the word but the word is a feature in the sentence. Nothing is absolutely a feature, it's always relative. That's why I'm putting these double arrows. This isn't a Cartesian graph. Okay, this is not a Cartesian graph; this is a schema. But one thing you should know is that although I can describe, and you can understand these two axis independently, they're almost always operating in a highly dynamic integrated fashion. Very often, as I'm moving towards a gestalt – grabbing a bigger picture, I'm using that bigger pattern to look more deeply into the world. So, often I'm doing this (draws arrow from origin in a relative NE direction): I'm grabbing bigger patterns and I'm using those deeper patterns to look deeper into the world.

So when you find - this is what we do in science. For example, I find this and this and this, I get a pattern and then I find a way to integrate it together, and then I use that pattern to look more deeply in the world! This is what this is (writes F=ma on the board), right? I found a pattern and it allows me to look more deeply into the world. I'm no longer looking at these individual things – force, mass, and acceleration. I've integrated them together and that allows me to look more deeply into the world. Often when we're stepping back and looking at our minds (draws an arrow in a relative SW direction), our awareness processes within attention, we're also often breaking up gestalt into features. For example, you were breaking up your experience of your whole finger into individual sections of your finger when we were doing the experiment. You were breaking up the whole of the cup into individual moments of contact. So very often, [we have] these two to come together. Let's call this "scaling up" (NE direction arrow) of attention, and "scaling down" (SW direction arrow) of attention. So first of all, let's map these on to mindfulness practices, to make clear why we're doing this.

Scaling Up & Down with Mindfulness

So I teach my students Vipassana, [a] very traditional form of meditation. Notice what the word meditation means, it actually means moving towards the center. So we know it's going to have this aspect to it. So what do you do? Well typically you train people by telling them to pay attention to their breath. So first of all, what they're doing is paying attention not to the world, they're stepping back but they're not really paying attention to the breath! What you tell them is the following... (Again, language of explaining not the language of training; look at it much more fine grain.) You tell them to pay attention to the feelings and sensations that are being generated in their abdomen as they breathe. So as they inhale, they're feeling sensations in their abdomen and as they exhale.... And what they're doing is trying to do what I did with my finger. They're trying to maintain and renew their interest, constantly make it salient to themselves. Now notice what's happening. Normally, our embodied sensations – I'm not happy with that word for sort of philosophically important reasons but I don't have time to go into it right now - normally we don't pay attention so much to our sensations, we pay attention through our sensations to the world. So normally I'm not paying attention to my feelings, I'm paying attention through my feelings to the cup.

Meditation & Contemplation

With meditation, I'm stepping back and not looking through my sensations, I'm stepping back and looking at them. That's like: "I don't look through the way my mind is framing things... I'm looking 'at' the framing". I also do something else. I don't just look at it as one blob. I do something like observational analysis. I break the gestalt up into separate experiences. I'm doing this (indicates down-scaling arrow from the origin). I'm stepping back and looking at, and I'm breaking the gestalt of my experience up into its features, its atomic features, if you'll allow me a metaphor that you shouldn't push too far. That's what you do in meditation. And we'll talk about why would you do this? Why would that matter? And importantly our question is why would that help cause insight? So that's meditation ("SW"). That's for Vipassana for example. I also teach my students a contemplative practice ("NE"). So the word "meditation" means to move towards the center. And that fits perfectly with Vipassana and this kind of thing.

"Contemplation": Now it bespeaks how overly simplified the West is in trying to understand this in that these terms are now treated as synonyms – contemplative practices, meditative practices. It's all the same thing. Aren't these just synonyms? They're not synonyms. And paying attention to their etymology will quickly reveal this. First of all the Latin etymology, this look what's in the center of this (contemplation) is Temple. It comes from a temple which actually comes from the Latin word for a part of the sky that you look up to to see the signs from the gods; to contemplate is to look up towards the divine. This also goes well, its convergent with – 'contemplatio' the Latin term was a translation of this Greek word 'theoria'. And theoria also originally doesn't mean generating a theory – a theory is a species of theoria because what I do with theoria is I try to see more deeply into reality. Do you see? Meditation is moving this way and contemplation is moving that way.

Meditation emphasizes scaling down; contemplation emphasizes scaling up. And I was taught both. In fact, I was taught three things in an integrated fashion: I was taught Vipassana, a scaling down strategy; I was taught Metta, a scaling up strategy and your scaling up with your sense of identity by the way, we'll talk/ will come back to that later; and then I was taught Tai Chi Chuan because Tai Chi Chuan is about moving right in and out. In and out, flowing between these inner and outer movements in a dynamic and optimizing fashion. Why teach me all these things together? Because it's actually a system of these psycho-technologies that will optimize your cognition for insight.

Back to the 9-Dot Problem

Okay, so do you remember we did the 9 dot problem, right? We talked about that. Remember the fact that you can misframe things. So let's do the 9 dot problem again. Join all 9 dots with four straight lines and people find it difficult. Why? Remember we talked about this, they automatically - listen to the words! - remember, they automatically and unconsciously project a square there. And then they automatically take this to be a connect the dot problems and so no non-dot terms are possible and therefore they can't get the solution. The solution is here's four straight lines – one, two ,three, four. The reason why people find that so difficult is "I have to break the square and I have to not treat it as a typical connect the dot problem". "I have to not treat it categorically", to use language you've heard already, because you don't do non dot terms, remember this. Now notice there's two moments to having an insight. I have to break up an inappropriate frame. What do I have to do? I have to break up the gestalt. And I also have to de-automatize my cognition. I have to make it not operate unconsciously and automatically.

Well, how do I do that? I take stuff that's normally happening unconsciously and I have to bring it back into consciousness. Yes? Does that makes sense? How do I do that? I do that by doing a transparency opacity shift. Normally, I'm automatically sensing through my probe. But I can shift my awareness and become aware of my probe. I can bring things back into awareness. So you de-automatize cognition by doing a transparency to opacity shift. So I break up the inappropriate frame (points to solved 9-dot on the board). And I de-automatize my cognition by scaling down. Now interestingly enough there is lots of work by Knoblich and other people showing that you can improve people's ability to solve insight problems if you get them to do what's called chunk decomposition and constraint relaxation. Chunk decomposition is just breaking up the gestalt. That's what chunk decomposition means. Constraint relaxation is basically de-automatizing your cognition, de-automatizing your cognition. Scaling down helps you to break up the chunks, break up the gestalt and helps you to de-automatize your cognition. But is that enough for insight? It's not enough!

Limitations of Breaking Frame

Yes I have to break up the inappropriate frame but I have to make an alternative and better frame. I have to – watch – I have to widen, widen my field of awareness. I have to take stuff that was in the background and change its relevance. I have to look more deeply for deeper broader patterns that I have not considered before. What do I have to do? In order to make a new frame, I have to scale up. And we also have lots of independent evidence, having nothing to do with mindfulness meditation, that one of the ways you can improve people's ability to be insightful is that they get training – have training or practice or are naturally disposed to being able to scale up. If people can complete patterns in a kind of leaping that ***[[[CC Banner and Baker]]]*** talked about, right, and other people. We can scale up in that way if we – if we can take pictures that are out of focus and refocus them mentally so we can suddenly see what the picture is. Again and again and again when people can scale up better, they're better at solving insight problems. So both make you better. But there's a problem because both also make you worse.

Because if I – if I just scale up if I just maximize, like tightening a string, then of course I immediately project the square and then I'm locked. What, well, shouldn't I just scale down? Just meditate always – if I just keep breaking up gestalt, I'll never make the solution. I'll choke myself. That's what happens when people are choking. You get a way... Like, if you're sparring with somebody, a way to get them off is to compliment them. "That was a really good, like right hook you just threw!" Because then the person will start stepping back and looking at it and they'll get all screwed up. Because they'll break up the ability to generate the gestalt. So notice what I'm saying, stick with me because this is really sort of tricky. This (scaling down) can improve your chances for insight by breaking up a bad frame (9-dot). But it can also mess up your problem solving by causing you to choke. This (scaling up) can improve your ability for insight by causing you to make a better frame, but this can also cause you to leap into an inappropriate frame and be locked in fixation (9 dot).

So what should you do? You don't want the strings too tight; you don't want the strings too loose. And you don't want IT just half way. Well what you want to do is you want to train people in both of these skills and then train them to flow between them. It's called "oponent processing". So they're pulling and pushing on each other and so they're forced to coordinate and constantly get the right degree of attentional engagement that is most dynamically fitted to the world. That's why the people who trained me trained me in all these things. That's why you shouldn't equate mindfulness just with meditation. It's not. So if you pay attention, for example, to the eight fold path you'll have people being trained in meditative practices, contemplative practices, practices in which you flow between the opposites until you learn like a martial art to get an apt and constantly adjusted fittedness, attentional fitness to the world.

Associated Mystical Experiences

Now this leads very naturally into talking about mystical experiences and the kinds of mystical experiences that people can have within their mindfulness practices. But before I do that let's gather. Notice what we've said here. We have an understanding of mindfulness. What's mindfulness doing? Mindfulness is basically teaching us how to appropriate and train a flexibility of attentional scaling so that we can intervene effectively in how we are framing our problems and increase the chances of insight when insight is needed. Notice that this didn't really – what? – How is being present making you more insightful?

The Pure Consciousness Event

But I've given you a way of understanding being present that works. When I'm scaling down, I'm actually making my mind less representational, less inferential. I'm doing all of this work to become aware of and gain some mastery over my processes of problem framing and thereby training skills that will make me more insightful. What happens if you were just to scale down and practice scaling down and scaling down and scaling down and scaling down? Well you can actually get to one kind of important mystical experience. Forman calls this – and it's well attested – calls this the pure consciousness event the PCE – the pure consciousness event. It's a kind of mystical experience you can have after extensive mindfulness practice. I've experienced this. Let's do it.

So right now I'm looking at the world, and the thing you're doing when you're practicing meditation is you try and step back and look at the lens of your mind – if you'll allow me – and what happens is it's hard to maintain cause you have such deep developed habits of directing your attention back out towards the world. Then you start thinking about got to do my laundry, got to do this and then what you have to do is you have to bring your attention back again. You have to do that, you have to recenter and step back and look at your mind rather than automatically looking through it and you keep practicing. And that's like "aaaaaah!" and it's arduous but these like doing reps. That's meditation. Meditation is that you're building this ability to step back and look at your mind. And then what happens is, remember how we went back in layers? We went into the probe and then into our fingers and into the sensations. When I do this with people, it's often the people who've had some mindfulness training that can step back all the way into their sensations. That's not a coincidence.

So I stop – I start, now I'm looking at my mind. And then I start looking at the more subsidiary layers of my mind, the deeper layers by which I was looking at the upper layers and then I step back again, I step back again. So now I'm just looking at my consciousness. And eventually I step back and I'm not even conscious of anything. I'm not conscious of this sensation, I'm just conscious. It's what's called the Pure Consciousness Event. You're not conscious of anything. You're just fully present as consciousness. You don't – You're not aware of yourself. You're not looking through yourself machinery. You're not looking through your consciousness... you're not even looking through your mind you're just fully conscious – the pure consciousness event! This is the event that results from this (down scaling).

Resonant At-Onement

What about if you were to really – really scale up? We'll think about things that you might have heard associated with the Buddhist view. I see... I'm going to see everything is interconnected and everything is flowing impermanent. I'm going to create this overarching gestalt and the gestalt is going to be so overarching it's going to include and encompass me. I'm going to experience this resonant at-onement. And you already know what that's like because we've already talked about it. Think about that as just a super flow state in which I'm deeply at one with everything – super flow state. "Resonant at-onement".

I don't use atonement because that has a particular Christian meaning that I'm not trying to invoke here, at-onement. See this model of mindfulness explains why people get into these kinds of mystical experiences. If they do a lot of meditative practices, they will get a pure consciousness event. If they do a lot of contemplative practices they will develop this empathetic, participatory, flowing, super-flowing, resonant at-onement. But remember what we want ultimately, is we want these two together (up and down scaling).

Non-Duality

There's a third state. And this is actually the state that matters. This is called the state of non-duality. So let me try and explain to you a way in which you can at least imagine you could get into it. It's a way I train people. Imagine that you're going to be cycling - scaling up and scaling down with your breath. So as you inhale you scale up and you do that sort of resonate at-onement. You're trying to be, right, flowing at-onement with everything and then as you exhale you're doing the Vipassana. You're trying to step back as close as you can to the pure consciousness event. And you oscillate back and forth with the breath. You often have to do that for years. But what can happen, and there's other ways of getting into this state. This isn't exclusive. This is one way, the way I was taught. What can happen, is you can have the third kind of mystical experience. It's not the pure consciousness event; it's not resonant at-onement. It includes both and transcends both. It's both at the same time. Your awareness is deeply to the depths of your consciousness and deeply to the depths of reality. And it's completely at-one. It's just all at once.

This is a prajana state; a state of non-duality. This is one term for wisdom. This is kind of mystical experience. Now this is the state that's actually sought for, that non-duality because this is the state that should lead to a comprehensive capacity for insight. Because you're not going to have an insight about nine dots and four straight lines. You're going to have an insight into the fundamental – the guts, the grammar of the agent-arena relationship. You're pushing to the ground of the agent and you're pushing out to the circumference of the arena and you're pushing that machinery to optimize. So that you can see in as deeply integrated a fashion as possible that connectedness between the two.

So you have the capacity for an insight. Not into this problem or that problem, but an insight into your existential modes of being. This is how you can 'remember' the being mode. You can have a fundamental insight into it. Now this is in fact of course what Siddhartha experienced. He'd been practicing the Vipassana and a contemplative practice called Metta, very deeply, very powerfully. And it looks like one of his great innovations was to conjoin the two together. He often talks about them. And what happened was a radical transformation. He experienced enlightenment - and we're going to talk about what that might mean. So after his enlightenment, after his awakening, he's walking down the road and people come up to him and his visage has changed! Think about what you – think about when you are watching – when you see somebody and you know they're in the flow state and they're flowing. You can – that grace and that energy and that the musicality of intelligibility that's playing across their face and their gestures and their motions. And you can't – you're... Most of it you're only picking up implicitly but you've got a sense "what's going –oh that's so beautiful, that so graceful, it's so much power..." and there's a charismatic... And you're just caught up in it. So these men are approaching Siddhartha and he's filled with that.

And so they say to him, "Are you a god?" Think about what conditions have to be like where that's a reasonable thing to ask of someone. And he answers very clearly, "No, I'm not." "Are you some kind of angelic messenger or being?" "No, I'm not." "Are you some kind of prophet?" "No I'm not." "Are you just a man?" "No I'm not." They're frustrated. "What are you then?" "I am awake." That's how he gets his title. He moves from talking about an identity he could have to a fundamental way of being – "I am awake". He has fully deeply – the depths I've tried to indicate here – "Sati"; remembered the being mode in a way that isn't an insight about this or that problem, but is a fundamental insight into what it is to be a human being. A systematic set of insights that optimizes your entire being. That triggers and empowers a fundamental transformative experience.

So, as a cognitive scientist, especially one who studies the connections between Buddhism and cognitive science, I've become very interested in these kinds of experiences that people have, and I have colleagues and collaborators who are also interested in it. Why do people pursue altered states of consciousness? Why is the mindfulness revolution, which is the pursuit of altered states of consciousness, so powerful? Why are we going through the psychedelic revolution right now? Because unlike other therapeutic pharmaceuticals, psychedelics work exactly by bringing about an altered state of consciousness. Why is this so powerfully important? Why is it that we're not the only creatures, in fact, that pursue altered states of consciousness? It looks like the more intelligent a creature is, the more it will pursue altered states of consciousness. Caledonian crows will tumble down rooftops in order to make themselves dizzy. Which is a risky thing to do but they do it because they are enjoying the altered state of consciousness.

Why is it that these, that some of these altered states - mystical experiences, certain types of psychedelic experiences within a therapeutic context (we're going to talk about all of this) – can bring about and afford such powerful transformations? What is it that's going on there? And here's what's interesting, sometimes people will have a kind of altered state of consciousness that in my mind it recapitulate the axial revolution. Look, normally when you have an altered state of consciousness - let's pick up on Siddhartha's metaphor: awakening, wakening up. That's in contrast to being asleep to dreaming - so what happens in your typical state of altered state of consciousness, one that you experience every night, you're dreaming. And when you're in the dream state you think that that world is real. You interact with it as if real. But when you wake up you go, 'Oh that was just a dream that wasn't real. This is real. This.' Normally, when we come out of an altered state of consciousness, we point at it the finger of rejection and say that isn't real. "Oh I was drunk, that's not real". "Oh I was high, that's not real." But sometimes people have certain kinds of experiences - altered state of consciousness - in which exactly the opposite occurs.

Quantum Change Theory

They go into that state and they come back and they say, 'That was more real. That was really real. And this is less real.' You see how that's axial? That's like "wait!!! That higher, higher – why do we call it a higher state of consciousness? – that higher state of consciousness, 'that', I had access to the real world". And when I come back, like somebody in Plato's cave, I've come back out of the sunlight. This, I now realize, is only echoes and shadows. It's less real. In fact, and because of my desire to be in contact with what's real, I'm going to change myself and I'm going to change my world to try and recapture Sati. SATI!!! 'To remember' what that's like (taps the top of two circles on the board (Śūnyatā)). "I want to live in greater contact with that 'really real'", and so they start to transform their whole lives and their whole self. The whole agent-arena relationship is completely and radically, radically, revolutionary restructured. This is known as "quantum change theory" – bad name, bad name, good theory.

People do this. This is, of course, very important for understanding what happened to people like Siddhartha. In fact, most of the world religions that emerge at the axial revolution are predicated on the idea that there are higher states of consciousness. That should empower, challenge and encourage us to engage in such quantum transformation. To go through these radical transformative experiences. It's obviously at the core of Buddhism. You experience Satora-Satori. You realize Śūnyatā. It's at the core right of Vedanta. When I experience Moksha and release. It's at the core of Taoism, I realize the Dao.

Optimizing the Ability of Forging Transformation

So, how is it, right, that these experiences have such authority? But it's not just that they're important historically... They're at the core of the world religions... And you say "Well, what about the Western [religions]?" Like Sufism within Islam and the Christian mystic tradition and Karbala... All of the wisdom – all of the world traditions point to these higher states of consciousness that can bring about these radical, modal transformations in our cognition and our very being. And that's important enough! But when you do surveys - if you look at some of the work that's been done - 30 to 40 percent of the population has experienced these events. And it's like flow – across cultures, language groups, socioeconomic status, gender... Pervasive, and universal. Not universal in the sense that everybody has it, but universal in the sense that [there] doesn't seem to be any type class or order of human beings that is not capable of experiencing it.

So both qualitatively, historically and quantitatively, scientifically, this is an important phenomena. And here's what's really important for our purposes. There's a deep connection – remember I said before – there's a deep connection between how often you flow and how meaningful you find your life. That is also more radically the case for these states. People who have experienced these higher states of consciousness and undergone these quantum changes, these deep transformational experiences, reliably import – and there's good experimental evidence to support it – that they have had a significant increase in meaning in life. In fact, many people report these experiences as the most significant in their life and that a lot of the meaning of their life is hinged upon these transformations. There are deep connections between awakening and recovering meaning. There are deep connections between awakening and insight - as I've already indicated and we'll come back to see, there's a deep continuity between this kind of insight (9 dot), mystical experience and full blown awakening experience.

My lab, we've just finished running - with my associate Anderson Tod, my lab director lab manager Jensen Kim, all of my wonderful RA's (Research Assistants), and they'll show up in the acknowledgment – we just have submitted a paper because we ran an experiment. We did a massive Mechanical Turk survey trying to see if there was a relationship between if people have a mystical experience and how meaningful they find their lives. And there is, in fact, a significant relationship between mystical experience and if you have meaning in life. We did a more fine grained analysis and this is consonant with the work of Samantha Heintzelman and others – experimental work showing that it's something like a capacity for insight, making sense which is often called coherence in the literature, that seems to be what's doing all the heavy lifting. So it doesn't really matter – if you'll allow me – so much what the content of your mystical experience is. In fact, very often there's no content, they are ineffable.

But what seems to be happening is you're somehow optimizing your capacity for making sense, both inwardly and outwardly. It's like what's happening is some improved optimization of this of anagoge and people find that deeply meaningful. So there is good reason to believe –I'm not, I'm not advocating Buddhism here. Because I've already pointed out there are similar claims in all of the mystical traditions and I'm not claiming that those traditions are all identical. I'm not Aldous Huxley. But, there seems to be some deep truths here about the nature of attention, the nature of mindfulness, and the enhancement of the ability to enter into these higher states of consciousness that can significantly alleviate existential distress and bring about a pervasive and profound kind of optimization of our insight and our capacity for finding our lives meaningful. And that would be - being able to do all of those things, right; alleviate the existential anxiety, create a systematic kind of insight, a transformation of ageny and arena that recovers the being mode - [to] forge transformation – I mean isn't that the core of meaning. And the ability to do it, wouldn't that be the core of wisdom?

So what I want to do is I want to continue on and I want to explore this. What's going on with mystical experiences? What's going on with these higher states of consciousness? Why are psychedelics coming back into the center of the cognitive scientific investigation? We've got to talk about consciousness. We have got to talk about altered states of consciousness. We've got to talk about higher states of consciousness and transformative experience. And what is the knowing that's going on here. Because it's no knowing of words. There's no words, there's no content – Pure Consciousness Event – they're not conscious of anything. This is everything's the same, it's just there's the resonant at-onement, the flowing.

What kind of knowing is it? That's what we're going to take a look at next time. Thank you very much.

Other helpful resources about this episode:
Notes on Bevry
Summary and Transcript on awakeningfromthemeaningcrisis.com

Welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis. So last time we took a look at the second half of Aristotle and his further developments of the Axial-ages understanding meaning and wisdom. We took a look more at what you might call the world side of things. And we took a look at Aristotle's world-view; the two components. His "conformity theory" which is important alternative understanding of knowledge, it's a contact epistemology, an intimate knowing and being with something and how plausible that contact epistemology actually is. And then we also looked at a plausible - it turned out to be false! - but a plausible model of the world that is very consonant and consistent with that conformity theory.

This is a geo-centric world that is moved by natural motion, it's a cosmos. And then we used that to discuss how the theory of the world and the theory of how we know the world and 'be' within the world are intimately connected and mutually supporting, and you get world view attunement, and how that creates existential modes in which we are co-identifying the agent and the arena and creating the meta-meaning, the relationship that makes all individual acts and events and situations and places meaningful for us and how important that consonance is between our existential mode and our intellectual understanding and why Aristotle is so prominent because of his capacity to create a worldview that lasts for a millennium and being so well attuned a world view.

We then paused from our discussion of the Axial Age in Greece and we moved to the Axial age in India for the explicit purpose of trying to discuss the impact of the mindfulness revolution and the part of the thesis of the series is 'the mindfulness revolution is a response to the meaning crisis in the West and the growing confluence between Buddhism and cognitive science is an attempt to address and provide solutions to the meaning crisis in the West'.

We started by looking at the figure who epitomizes the Axial revolution within ancient India, and that's Siddhartha Gautama. And we began by looking at his myth, his mythological biography, if you want to put it that way and I remind you again how I am using the word myth. And we began by taking a look at his early life within the palace. We stepped aside and examined the palace as a mythological representation of a particular existential mode. We talked about two different existential modes following the work of Fromm, there's also a convergent of work for Buber and other important thinkers. Stephen Batchelor is going to make use of this distinction etc..

Fromm talks about two modes - two existential modes. The "having" mode that's organized around meeting or having needs in which we perceive the world categorically. We want to manipulate it and solve our problems and control it. And the "Being" mode which is organized around our being needs. These are needs that are met by becoming something, mature,, virtuous love. And we then talked about the possibilities of modal confusion: being locked in the having mode and trying to meet your being needs within the having mode. So trying to meet you need for maturity by having a car or meeting your need for being in love by having lots of sex. And we talked about the fact that you can become enmeshed in modal confusion and how that becomes a vicious cycle because as you're being these are frustrated you pursue ever more the mis-framed projects that the modal confusion is giving you. You try more and more to have things as opposed to more and more become what you need to become.

And then I suggested to you that being in the palace is a mythological representation of this kind of modal confusion in which we are stuck in the having mode and of course this also had one important cultural point - and I did say at the beginning that we would talk about it, we would develop a way of talking about the connections between the meaning crisis and other crises we are facing - so issues about a market economy and a commodification of everything and everyone. By inducing modal confusion it is possible to sell you more and as your identity becomes more and more a political and economic thing and commodity, that should be categorically understood and manipulated, the more and more I can sell you things and sell you ideas and manipulate you accordingly. So this has important ramifications for us now. That's why it's a myth. Because it has important ramifications for us right now.

But as I mentioned, Siddhartha does not stay in the palace. His curiosity becomes too great, and there are all kinds of variations on this story! And I don't think there is an absolute canonical way of saying it but he decides to leave the palace. He Goes out in his chariot with his Charioteer Chandra and they are traveling around and he sees a sick person and he is distressed. "What's wrong with that person?" He's... and Chandra says "my Lord! He's he's he's sick!" And Siddhartha said "What did he do to cause that?" And it's.. "Nothing!! It's just, it happens to everybody! Everybody gets sick at some point! It's just part of the way of things!". You can see this is the axial awakening. Remember the actual revolution is awakening about what's actually going on in the suffering in the world. And so Siddhartha is very distressed. [He says] "what? But, I could get sick too?" and Chandra said "Well of course! Of course.".

Part of the conceit of the myth is that Chandra is oblivious to Siddhartha's whole history which is of course unbelievable! But that's the point of a myth... To get you to realize things, not to convince you about historical truths. So, Siddhartha is distressed and he says "take me away from this, I don't want I don't want to see this anymore!". And so they drive. They drive along and they meet an old person. And Siddhartha says "stop, stop! Is this person sick as well?" "No my lord he's not sick. He's old!". "Old? What do you mean?", "Well this happens to everyone through the passage of time!", "You mean he didn't do anything in particulat...?", "No! It wasn't any... It's not his fault! He just is... He's become old!". And now Siddhartha says "No! OK, let's go back to the palace, this is really bad!". So they're making their way back to the palace. He's trying to return to that right that self enclosure of the pure having mode. But that's the thing about confusion - once it starts to be dissipated you can't return to it! So he's trying to return and of course, he meets a funeral procession! There's a corpse. And Siddhartha said "is that person sick? Or are they old?". "No! That person's dead. They're dead! They're not alive anymore." "What? But why is that?", "Well my Lord it happens to everybody!"

Now, do you see what's happened here. The having mode has been completely undermined. It's been completely undermined. And since Siddhartha is experiencing an existential crisis because this is happening at the level of his existential mode. That's what it means when we talk about an existential crisis. So he says "Get me back to the palace absolutely now!!" And so now there's a mad dash. And as he's trying to get back to the palace and trying to enfold himself back into that world he meets one more thing - one more person actually. He meets a mendicant, he meets one of these people that has given up the having mode. They were called "renouncers" because they have renounced the world of the palace, of luxury. And there's a deep peace in this man's eyes. And the contrast - and think about how, again, this is not just a matter of belief. This is a matter... This is happening in his entire being; his entire being is resonating with this distress because it's the whole way in which he is coupled to the world that has been suddenly thrown into confusion. There's all of this happening, this deep dist[urbance], and the contrast with the peace that he sees in the man's eyes.... And he turns to Chandra and says "Who is this?" and Chandra said "it's a mendicant! It's a wandering person." And [what] that person of course represents is the introduction, not the intellectual introduction, but the direct confrontation with the being mode. This is a person who has realized peace. And Siddhartha feels that contrast poignantly, powerfully. Painfully. So he returns to the palace with these four signs burning in him. The illness, the old age. The death. But also this representative of the being mode. Somebody who has cultivated wisdom and peace. Found some kind of deep connectedness that is untouched by the vicissitudes of our mortality.

Disillusionment

But of course Siddhartha cannot find the peace he wants; he cannot get back to the palace. Think about the double senses of this word because it's really pertinent here. "Disillusionment". When we describe somebody as disillusioned, we're usually talking about a state in which they are perhaps moving towards despair. They're sad, they've experienced loss. It's a negative state. But notice at the heart of it is the loss of illusion. This is an axial age thing. He is "losing the illusion" of modal confusion and he's losing that sense of belonging that he had when he was in the palace. He doesn't belong there anymore.

He tries. He tries to make it work. We're going to talk about this later - we're gonna talk about this. Why is it after people have these kinds of awakening experiences, they feel that they need to transform their whole lives? That they can't go back? That there's something irreversible about it? This is something we're going to directly talk about. In fact we can we get a cognitive scientific purchase on that. But he can't go back. The disillusionment is too real. So he decides to leave and this is not an easy choice! He has a wife, he has a child and we may have, in fact, even ethically criticized him! ...he's abandoning his son, he's abandoning his wife. But there's a sense here that, and of course we should make moral reflection, we should make moral arguments, but, what the myth is saying is 'the moral life sits upon something deeper'! That carrying out your moral responsibilities while important, of course, can ultimately be rendered meaningless if you've lost meaning. Morality sits on, depends upon, your life being meaningful. And we're going to talk about this a lot later when we talk about the work of Susan Wolf and others. That meaning in life and the psychological work about this right now. Meaning in life is different from, and I would argue that this myth says is deeper than, simply leading a moral existence. See, there's something more to wisdom than just morality. See virtue iss also about that meaningfulness, that meta-meaning. It's ultimately about being plugged into the cultivation of wisdom. Not just doing what is morally correct.

So Siddhārtha leaves the palace. He cuts his hair, leaves the palace, goes into the forest and he decides to follow the path of the renouncers and try to cultivate a solution to the fear and the turmoil that is still reverberating within him. So he pursues various... he meets up with various teachers and he pursues various things. But he gets into... he gets into another troubled spot because although he leaves the palace there's an important sense in which he hasn't left the having mood because he's still he's still carrying that confusion because what he's pursuing, is he's pursuing asceticism. He's trying to subject the body to tremendous trial and pain. Trying to bring it into complete submission. So he's practicing self-denial. You can see why this would make sense, right? The palace was all about self-indulgence, so surely the solution is self-denial! That seems reasonable! Think about how often WE do these swings between self-ndulgence and self-denial.

So he starves himself to the point where you can see his spine from the front of his body because his belly is so withdrawn and gaunt it's pressing against the vertebrae of his back! He looks like some anaemic Specter in representations we have of him from that period. But it's not working! It's not working, because do you see what's still going wrong? Do you see it? Trying to annihilate the self is still thinking about having a self. He's still in the having mode; he's just transferred it from having bodily things to trying to have his self. Yes, he's trying to throw it away but he's still framing it in the having mode. He's still understanding the problem in the having mood. He's still modaly confused. Self-denial is as much an aspect of this confusion as self-indulgence because it's merely the negation of self-indulgence. It is not it's transcendence. When you negate something you are still framing it in the same way. So he's sitting on the banks of a river and he's fatiguing. And he hears a barge going down the river and there's a musician playing and the musician has his apprentice. And it's a lyre, or a stringed instrument of some kind. And he's saying to the apprentice "No no no no listen! Listen to me! Strings can't be too tight and they can't be too loose! Too tight is just as bad as too loose..." (And think about Aristotle. Think about Aristotle and the Golden Mean which doesn't mean just the middle point in some sort of average! And I say that because of how this has come to be understood.).

The Middle Path

This is when Siddhārtha discovers the middle path. It doesn't mean mean some compromising middling solution. It means a radical reformation. The middle path is to transcend the having mode by rejecting both self-indulgence and its negation self-denial. We're going to talk about this a lot more when we talk about optimization strategies. We talked about it, remember, when we talked about Flow. You're not trying to maximize, you're trying to optimize. You're trying to get the right connectedness. And see, that's what the being mode is all about. It's about being connected in the right way.

So Siddhartha has this realization. In the story the realization com[s when] he tumbles into the river and he's drowning and a little girl saves him which is, in the culture of the time, that is extremely demeaning for a man who was once a prince to be saved by a little girl. It points to the radicalness of the change that's occurring for him. She gives him the equivalent of rice pudding (that's why on Bhodi-day Buddhists will often eat rice pudding to celebrate that fact.) So he realizes he must pursue the middle path. He must find a way of optimizing his cognition that allows him to transcend and rediscover this missing mode; the mode that he saw in the eyes of the mendicant. Now this is important, because this is the word for that kind of remembering: "Sati". It means to remember, to remind, not just like a fact. It means "to bring it to mind". So this is a modal memory. This is remembering a lost mode of being. This is not remembering a fact or event. This is remembering what it is like to be in the being mode. It is to recover a mode. It is a deep kind of restructuring of your being. It doesn't mean just simply remembering or reminding yourself.

It's like when you go back to a place that you haven't been for a while and you start to recover and remember an identity you used to have there. While you were away from the place you remember the facts and the event. But when you go there... "Ahh! Right! This is what it was like to be me at this time!" It's that kind of remembering. It's a modal memory. It has to do with that participatory knowing we were talking about. Siddhārtha is trying to remember (writes sati on the board) the being mode. It's in the eyes of the renouncer. Now why do I bring this word up and go on about this? Because this is the word that is translated today by this term: "Mindfulness". But I bet you when I say mindfulness, especially if you're in touch with this revolution that is sweeping our culture, you probably didn't think of remembering the being mode! Now there are some astute authors who describe it that way. Stephen Batchelor did in a beautiful little book called "Alone With Others" that I heartily recommend.

Siddhārtha is going to pick up on these psycho-technologies of mindfulness that he's learned fom his teachers, but he found inadequate because he's going to transform them because he precisely wants to remember (indicates sati on the board), he wants to 'recover', it's a better word I would think, the being mode. Not as an intellectual idea, but as his very Agency and the very way in which the world is realised in conjunction and co-identification with that agency.

Waking Up

So, I want to stop now, this story. We're going to pick it up and how/ what Siddhartha does in order to bring about this recovery. But I'm going to give you one way of thinking about it that we're going to build towards. Another way in which you remember, in this sense of "sati" is when you wake up. Remember we talked about this as one of the metaphors, the myths that people use for talking about self-transcendence. There's enlightenment, there's waking up, there's going from being a child to an adult. We'll come back to these again and again.

But why... When I wake up, this is not like when I just remembered an event, like right now and I remember "oh yes, I know it's out in the hall..." When I wake up I recover my world and my identity. I deeply remember... and even look at what this word means. (Writes remember; "Re-Member" on the board.) To belong to. To be a member. I belong again to myself and to the world. That's what happens when I'm waking up. And Siddhārtha wants a mindfulness psycho-technology - in fact not just a psycho-technology, [but] a set of psycho-technologies - that are going to help him 'remember', 'recover' sati: The Being mode. He is going to awaken. And that's, in fact, what his title means. Buddha is not a name. Buddha is a title. It means the awakened one. But we need to talk about the cognitive science of mindfulness because we are here looking at Siddhārtha precisely because of the mindfulness revolution that's happening here and now today. And the mindfulness revolution is a response to the meaning crisis and we can see why it is! Even better if we re-situate it within Siddhārtha's myth because we see that he's cultivating mindfulness to cultivate awakening, because awakening is a way of responding to the meaning crisis. Hence the title of this series: "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis".

But, as a cognitive scientist I'm critical, [I'm] both appreciative of all of the scientific work that's being done on mindfulness, but I'm also critical of it. As a good scientist should be. So I want to talk a little bit about how we can understand and better formulate what mindfulness means. And this is based on work that I published in 2016 with Leo Ferrara on mindfulness. So again, why am I doing this? If we want to awaken from the meaning crisis, if we want to understand what Siddhārtha's awakening was, we've got to understand what mindfulness meant to him. And what it meant to him is precisely the set of psycho-technologies that brings about awakening. And part of what I want to show is 'how can we get back to an understanding of mindfulness and it's constitutive psycho-technologies that will afford precisely that'.

How can we get a deeper understanding of the cognitive processes at work in mindfulness and how they can afford such important existential transformation? So if you ask people who are pursuing mindfulness practices (meditation, contemplation practices. I'll try and argue later why those shouldn't be treated as synonyms, for example, even though they often are), they'll give you a sort of standard understanding of what mindfulness is and what I want you to first note is how much it is not picking up on what we've already said about sati. So people will tell you that to be mindful, what you're trying to do is pay attention to the present moment in a non-judgmental fashion. Trying to learn how to... Notice: there's a hint! There's this hint of the being mode, remembering the being mode, it's still there! Because they'll say it's about "being present", they're invoking the being mode. But they're doing it in a way that, while helpful, is maybe misleading. Now, I want to make sure that you're understanding what I'm criticizing, what I'm not criticizing. In order to do that, let me tell you a little bit more....

I both studied mindfulness scientifically and do work on it; experiments and publish theoretical work on it. I also teach. I teach it as I mentioned. I teach meditative practices. I teach contemplative practices and I teach extracurricular Tai Chi Chuan, which is a form of moving mindfulness. So I am familiar with both the academic attempt to explain mindfulness and the pedagogical attempt to teach it. And I think it's important to have a foot in both of those worlds to realize a way in which you can become confused in your attempts to understand mindfulness.

The Language of Training and the Language of Explaining

We need to avoid confusion by making a distinction. We avoid Modal confusion by recovering the distinction between the having mode and the being mode. We can get deeply confused about mindfulness if we do not remember the distinction between the language of training and the language of explaining. This (training languaur) is the language I use when I'm teaching people meditation and contemplation and Taichi. I use language that helps them acquire the skills. And this is language of imitation and involvement and I can depend on our presence together. I can depend on the pragmatics of the situation. I can depend on the fact that their goal is that they want to acquire the skill. And so I'll use language there that's appropriate for that. But if I were simply to use that language unquestioningly here (explaining language), I would make a mistake. Let me give you an example and I'm going to use an example from memory because of the connections I'm making between mindfulness and memory. One of the most powerful ways you can train your memory is to use what's known as the method of location, or the method of loci, if you want to sound more pretentious! So some of you might have watched the Sherlock series. Sherlock does this with his mind palace.

The Spatial Metaphor of Memory

So what you do is you memorize a space. You memorize the rooms so you can visualize them in your mind. And then if I want to remember a bunch of things, lets say I want to remember stuff associate with Socrates, that I have a figure of Socrates here (illustrating this on the board) and then I put a bunch of other images there in that location... and now I want to remember some stuff about Plato and I have some other things here some other images and I put a bunch of images... started with Plato, and so forth... And then what I do, in order to remember what I need to remember, I call this (mind palace "schematic" drawn on the board) up, I go into this room and I have all the images and they're all tightly associated together and I get all the information I need from Socrates and then I go, and then I move in my mind palace to where the Plato room is and I unfold it... And this is powerful.

The orators of the ancient world could use the method of location in order to memorize speeches that would last up to six hours! And we know that this is a very powerful mnemonic. You should, if you're a student/ you're studying, learn how to use this. It's not just how to become a sociopathic superhero detective. It is a good way to become a student. The method of locations. Now notice this. It is powerful language of training. It trains your memory well. Now, what you may do, and this would be a mistake, is you may think "this is how memory is organized". This is called "the spatial metaphor of memory". You may think "oh well this is how memory is organized. All that all my memories for one thing are sort of stable things, like my image of Socrates, are in a stable location, and all the things that are associated in my memory are actually closer together in my memory. So the way memory works is I send in a little homunculus, a little memory guy, and he searches through the rooms until he finds the right room and then he goes in the room and everything's organized there and he finds what he needs. And then he brings it out. And then he passes it up to consciousness. 'AhhAHHHH...' and that's how I remember. Right?" And we talk about searching through our memory and retrieving from our memory. Here's the thing, and Eysenck and Keane pointed out this a long time ago, this spatial metaphor for memory is almost completely wrong. Your memory does not work this way.

It doesn't work this way. That's a mistake. Here, I'll show you. So tell me quickly other colors associate with blue... You'll say "Red, Green..." Tell me other words that rhyme with blue... "Shoe, new...". OK, so red is close to blue and shoe is close to blue, yes? That means what else is close? Shoe and red! So when I say shoe you should think of Red! Do you? Of course you don't! Here's another way in which your memory isn't laid out this way. You rapidly know when you don't know something. What's Meryl Streep's phone number? "I don't know!". Have you ever been in Bangkok. "No." What did "Bob" do? Did he get on some sort of hyperspace motorcycle inside your, like....? What did he...? Did he go to every place you've ever been? Is that Bangkok? Is that Bangkok? Is that Bangkok? No! He instantly knows! YOU instantly know that you weren't in Bangkok. He instantly knows that you don't have Meryl Streep's phone number. He doesn't search all the space. In fact it looks like he doesn't search it at all!

Reformulating Mindfulness

Memory is a lot more mysterious and it does not operate in the simplistic manner that the spatial metaphor says. That spatial metaphor is great for training your memory. It is great for training your memory but it is overly simplistic and gets you to mis-understand - listen to my language - how memory actually works. The language by which we train mindfulness should not be imported (*onscreen correction) UNcritically into our scientific attempts to explain it and understand it. Paying attention to the present moment. First of all you have to know what it is to pay attention. I'm going to show you that that's way more problematic than you think [it is], because you're probably thinking it's operating according to another metaphor: shining a spotlight; I pay attention the way I shine a spotlight. What's the present moment? I mean when I'm 'training' you, Yeah! we can sort of just make it happen because we can rely on the content. But what's the present moment? Is it right here right now? That nanosecond? This second? The last five minutes? The last hour? What's the present moment? See, the word "present" doesn't have a particular meaning. It's called an "indexical". It's relative to what I'm cons[sidering]. What's here? What's now? You see, then people think "oh well, I can tell you what the present moment is! It's paying attention to the here and now!" ...that's useless! What's "here"? This spot I'm standing on? This room? This city of Toronto? This solar system? This universe out of all of the universes in the multiverse? What's "now"?

See, you're not explaining anything! That language helps train people. But it's overly simplistic and misleading when we're trying to understand. What we need to do is re-formulate mindfulness and we need to do it in order to recover what Siddhārtha was talking about. How can we understand mindfulness such that it can tell us how people can become awakened? That's what we need. That's how we have to re-formulate mindfulness.

So let's try and do that. And let's make use of some of the things we've already built upon here. We can bring in Plato to help us. And what a great ally that is to have. Because, do you remember what Plato pointed out? That our knowledge is not captured just by a list of features. Remember the bird isn't just the wings, the feathers, the beak, it's also the structural functional organization. The thing is, if you look at most people's definition of mindfulness, even in scientific articles, all they give you is a feature list. "(1)To be mindful is being present", which we've got to do something about because that's just language of training, it's not explanatory language. "(2)Not judging"...and [-] that's going to be a problem! "What do you mean not judging? I'm supposed to pay attention to my breath and not pay attention to my distractions! THAT'S a kind of judging! What do you mean not judging?" Well.......... Right!!!! What does it mean? It's somehow supposed to bring about something like "(3)insight", and that's going to be important because insight, I'm going to argue, is on a continuum with awakening. I'll tell you... I'll explain what that means. And it's supposed to "(4)Reduce your reactivity". You're supposed to become more equanimous. More balanced.

So, (going through the list again) mindfulness is paying attention to the present moment. Being present, paying attention to the present moment in a nonjudgmental fashion that's supposed to bring about insight. The form of meditation I teach, the Buddhist form, it's claimed it goes back to Siddhārtha, it's called Vipassana. Vipassana means Insight - obviously not just an intellectual insight, but an existential insight. It's supposed to reduce reactivity, what does that mean? Now that's a feature list! We're missing the idos. We're missing the structural functional organization that tells me how all of those things actually go together.

So this is what we need to do. We need to turn this feature list into a feature schema. We need to recover its missing structural functional organization and we need to re-interpret all of these things so we can actually explain their functionality. And we need to do that by tying them to independently constructed theory or theoretical claims within psychology. Look, we have people who are doing the psychology and the cognitive science of attention, of insight, of improved self-regulation. Let's pay attention - no pun intended! - to what they're telling us about how insight, attention, self-control operate. So, one of the things you do to turn a feature list into a feature schemas is you make some distinctions between the types of features.

States and Traits

So here's these core four that we keep seeing a lot: being present; I'm not judging or non-judging; insight; reduced reactivity. I've split them up like this (on the board) because there's a distinction here. These are states that I can get into. These are things I can do... So being present is something I can do. I can start it. I can stop it. We've got to come back to what it means. But we know it's an activity you're engaging in because it's constantly being disrupted while you're meditating and you're constantly having to engage in it again. And it's the same thing with not judging. Not judging is something you're doing. It's a weird kind of paradoxical 'not doing', but again you can start it. It can stop. You can restart it again.

But these, these are not things you're doing. These are results. So to use the language of psychology these are states (being present and not judging) you can get into but these are traits (insight and reduced reactivity) that you cultivate. You want to become more insightful. You want to become less reactive. So immediately we understand "oh wait. So these are things I do (being present and not judging), and these are traits (insight and being less reactive) that I'm supposed to be realize[ing] when I'm cultivating mindfulness!". Now questions immediately emerge! By making this distinction, I can ask this question: "How does being present cause insight?". Or "how does being present reduce reactivity? Why do...? How...? Does non-judging cause insight? Does not judging cause reduced reactivity? What's the causal relation?".

Notice that the feature list doesn't talk about this at all. It doesn't talk about how the features are causally related. It doesn't talk about how the states can cause the traits. But it also doesn't ask constitutive questions. Constituitive questions are "part-whole" relationships. What's, what's this (states relationship)? Is this a part of this? Is this a part of this? Are they both part of some whole? What's that? What's the structural relationship here? What about these (traits relationship)? Is this part of this? Is this part of this? Are they both part of some whole? See, the feature list does not have the idos, and by not having the idos, or not looking for the idos, it's not asking any of these questions. These causal and constitutive questions.

Now as we start to answer these questions and as we start to answer them with the language of explaining rather than the language of [training? uncorrected error], we will turn a feature list into a feature schema. We will start to get at the structural functional organization of mindfulness and we'll start to get a deeper understanding of it. And that will help us to see how it is that mindfulness can bring about the kind of radical transformations that were promised by Siddhārtha's realization.

Insight from the Right Kind of Concentration

So I'm going to focus on this one right now (Being Present -> Insight). And again, we'll start by talking about specific insights, but obviously we're not talking about, 'this insight' or 'that insigh't. We're talking about a fundamental existential, modal kind of transformation. I've already said this language ("Being Present") is useless. People say "OK well what I meant was something like 'concentration'". That can't be right! That's not good enough because if you take a look at Siddhārtha's attempt to explain it, he talks about 'right concentration'. That's why I have concentration here (points out a tattoo on his arm). If Siddhārtha is telling you that there's 'right concentration', what does that strongly mean? That there is 'wrong concentration'! Mindfulness isn't about concentration. It's about getting the right kind of concentration. What does that mean? Well all it means [IS] paying attention! OK... Again, You're using a particular model for attention. Let's talk about these two things (concentration and paying attention) a little bit and let's talk about [-] Siddhārtha [-] when he's hearing "not too tight, not too loose" for the strings.

First of all, let's work our way up phenomenologically... I want you to compare two ways of concentrating. (This is based on work done by Ellen Langer who wrote probably the first book on mindfulness in the West called "Mindfulness" in 1988, way before the mindfulness revolution took off. And there's a lot of questions about what's the relationship between her account of mindfulness and the Buddhists'... I'm not getting into that right now because that's not what I'm trying to establish. I'm just using her way of trying to get you to understand concentration.) OK, so we're going to do it right here right now. So I want you to concentrate on my finger. Concentrate on it. Concentrate. Concentrate. Concentrate on my finger... Concentrate! Don't let your mind wander. Concentrate. OK. So most of you found that unpleasant because - notice what the metaphor even says is what I'm doing - I'm concentrating, I'm making my mind into a tunnel and then I'm sort of taking it on something and trying to keep it there and not let it move. And the only training you were given was what I was doing: Yelling! Concentrate! Concentrate!

OK. Let's do something else. OK. Ready? I want you to look at my finger. I want you to notice that it's not actually perfectly straight it's bent a little bit and it's a little bit thicker at the bottom than at the top. And there are sort of multiple sections to it and it's a little bit red on ones[ide]... It's very different wasn't it? She calls that "soft vigilance", because what you're doing there is not 'GRRRRR' externally hardening your mind and sticking it on things. What you're doing is constantly trying to "Renew your Interest". And this is a great word (interest). This comes from inter-essay/assay; to be within something. To be within something.

It's about that conformity that Aristotle was talking about. What you're doing is constantly exploring and opening it up. So we need a model of concentration that does this soft vigilance. It's constantly renewing your interest, getting you deeply involved with something because it's going to get you intimately in contact with it. So, what kind of attention are we talking about? We don't want "TOO HARD!" (SHOUTING) "Those are... The strings [are] too hard. Concentrate. Concentrate. Concentrate. ...strings are too hard, too tight!" (stops shouting and goes to the other extreem...) "Oh just do whatever you want." That's too loose! How can we [find the middle ground]? Notice how, when I had you sort of move over my finger, it's almost like a well tuned string! It's almost got this musicality of intelligibility to it!

Well, now you need to know [and] understand what's going on with attention, because what I want to show you is attention isn't a spotlight. It's a very complex optimisation process. It's really about tuning and getting between too tight and too loose and allow you to becoming intimately involved, conformed to, participating, 'inter-essay' with whatever you're paying attention to.

OK, so why do we like the spotlight metaphor? It's even in psy- you'll find it in psychology textbooks: "attention is like a spotlight!!!" Well, because one of the things that attention does is captured very well by the spotlight metaphor. Look when I shine a light on something, it makes that stand out! It makes it stand out because it's brighter. Remember when things stand out that's salience? It makes things more salient. That's what attention does. It makes things more salient. Attention is about... now we're getting somewhere! ...and that's what I was doing here (Langer's finger attention exercise), I was making things salient to you. Features of my finger more salient to you. What's wrong with the spotlight? Well what's wrong with the spotlight metaphor is, while it picks up on [the fact] that attention is about optimizing salience, it's missing so much of what that optimization actually is. And how it can be connected to insight. So some excellent work done by Christopher Mole - again, a very complex argument and I'm not going to try and go through the whole thing - but try to get into an understanding that attention isn't something you directly do.

Let me try and give you a comparison here. Walk and practice (writes these on the board). See walking is something I can ask you to directly do. I can say "walk" and you walk! Start walking. Stop walking. Start walking again. Great. But if I say to you practice. Come on!! Practice!!! You should say to me "practice what??!". See, you practice something by optimizing how you're doing something else. If I'm practicing chess I'm not playing chess and doing some other thing "practicing"! To practice chess is to optimize how I play chess. To practice tennis is not to do tennis and some additional secret action. Practicing. What I'm doing when I'm practicing tennis is optimizing how I play tennis. Mole's point is you don't directly pay attention. But it's not obvious to you that that's the case because of both the prevalence of the metaphor and how skilled you are at paying attention. But this is how you pay attention. You pay attention by optimizing some other process.

That's why when I ask you to pay attention, I can be asking you to do many different things. I can ask you to pay attention and it means optimize your seeing so that it becomes looking and watching. I can ask you to pay attention and it means optimize your hearing so that it becomes listening. I can ask you to pay attention and that means doing the two together: optimizing your looking and you're listening so that they're coordinated well together. But notice if I say to you "I want you to pay attention but I don't want you to do that by optimizing or improving anything else you're doing. I don't want you to pay attention by improving you're looking or you're listening or you're remembering. I just want you to directly pay attention. Come on do it right now. Pay attention!!!" You don't know what to do! So you pay attention by optimizing other things you're doing.

Now, Mole talks about this as Cognitive Unison; when we're optimizing what we're trying to do is coordinate various processes so that they're sharing the same goal and working well together. Think about Plato's idea about getting various different systems to work well together.

So what we need to understand is "what is attention?". How is it optimizing, how is it integrating things together? How does that get improved in mindfulness practice and how does it bring about insight? Not just the insight into this problem or this problem. But the insight, the systematic insight, that is awakening, that motivates and empowers people to radically transform themselves so that they can escape from modal confusion and other existential dilemmas. We'll take a look at that next time. Thank you very much for your time.

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Notes on Bevry
Summary and Transcript on awakeningfromthemeaningcrisis.com

Welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis. So last time we began our discussion of Aristotle and how he has contributed significantly to our understanding of meaning and wisdom. And we talked about how Aristotle was centrally concerned with something that he thought Plato didn't give an adequate enough account of: change. But importantly Aristotle's term for change is properly understood in terms of growth and development. And we talked about how much your sense of growth and development is constitutive of finding your life to be meaningful. We talked about how Aristotle understood that development in terms of making use of Plato's idea of idos, form, the structural functional organization. And then what's happening in change and in development, is that something is being "informed". In particular something like wood is the potential to be a table or a chair and when it has the correct structural functional organization then the wood starts to act like a table or the wood starts to act like a chair. And that is then the idea that when you inform some potential it gets actualized into a particular thing and so change is the actualizing of potential via "in-form-ation" and then in order to understand that better we leapt ahead to look at a current account of growth and development that was directly inspired by Aristotle. We looked at Alicia Juarrero work and we went through the discussion of what a dynamical system is and how we can use it to understand growth and development in terms of the idea of a virtual engine. We then returned and used that language to better understand Aristotle's idea about wisdom as the cultivation of character where wisdom is to create a virtual engine. And there is a deep connection between being a virtual engine and the cultivation of virtues.

That wisdom is the cultivation of a virtual engine, a character that regulates your self-development, in fact your self-making, so that you can actualize your potential. You can live 'up' to your potential and what does living 'up' to that potential mean? It means, and we talked about [it], it means moving through that hierarchy that we talked about last time. The hierarchy of actualization from the mere plant to the animate thing to the mental thing to the rational thing. So to be wise, to live up to your potential, is to cultivate a character that most helps you realize your capacity for rational self reflection, your capacity to appropriate and take charge of your ability to engage in self actualization, self realization and to do so in such a way that fulfills the potential of your humanity that you most realize, reveal, actualize, the characteristics that make us uniquely human. And that foolishness is to have not properly cultivated your character, so even when you have the correct set of beliefs, you believe that you should not do something, you will still fall prey to AKRASIA because you have not cultivated adequate enough Character.

Then I challenged you in two ways: I challenge you to try and reanimate and deepen these terms that we use every day to talk about how meaningful our lives are [in] terms of growth and development and actualizing ourselves and living up to our potential to deepen those terms by returning and reflecting upon them using Aristotle. But also a Socratic challenge via Aristotle. What are you doing to cultivate your character? How much time are you dedicating to it? Since it is now reasonable, given this argument that it plays a significant role in how meaningful your life is, how much time have you devoted? How much time do you regularly devote to it?

Rationality

Now as promised last time I want to turn to the other side of Aristotle's work and show in a further sense how he contributed to the Axial development of these ideas of meaning, wisdom, self transcendence, and of course Aristotle is understanding self transcendence as this living up to your potential, self-realisation, ascending through the hierarchy until you are a fully realized, fully rational human being. Now, Aristotle was interested in rationality for exactly this reason. He thought it was the way of defining human beings. Now his understanding is Axial. Rationality is what we've been talking about since the beginning of this series. The Axial revolution idea of second order thinking; you can step back and reflect on the ways in which your [are] self deceptive and you have a capacity for self correction and self transcendence. That's the hallmark of rationality. Please remember that. Because we have tended - and we'll see much later why - we've tended to reduce rationality to the idea of being logical. But that's not the core idea of rationality. The core idea of rationality is your capacity for reflectively realizing your capacities for self-deception and illusion and for self correction. And for Aristotle that self correction is a process of also realizing your potential through the cultivation of character.

But what is at the heart of rationality? Because, if we go back to the Platonic model, Aristotle has told us a bit about one side: character. This is - remember Plato talks about how you are aligning the psyche - but Plato also talked about being in contact with reality. How did Aristotle develop this side (contact with reality) of the Platonic equation. This (character) is his way of trying to give a deeper analysis of structuring the psyche to reduce self-deception. What did he do to try and develop Plato's idea of being in contact with reality. Because if you remember, we also have this meta-drive, we need to be in contact with reality. I put it to you that that is in fact the core feature, or at least the core motivation of rationality. The core motivation of rationality is the desire to come into as deep a contact with reality as possible by those means that are as reliable as possible. So for Aristotle this brought him into a discussion about what it is to truly know something. To truly know something. And again he's going to be deeply influenced by Plato while of course making his own unique changes and challenges to Plato.

A Blueprint in the Mind

So, We have got a view in which we think, we largely conceive of, 'knowing' as being able to give a very accurate description of something. I 'know' what a chair is if I can really describe it very well to you. Now, there is a challenge to that if I were to ask you the following: "Who knows better what a chair is? Somebody who could describe a chair very well to you, or somebody who could actually make a chair?" And many people would say "well, the person who can describe it doesn't really understand..." and they'll probably struggle for words here and they'll use words taken from Aristotle without realizing "...they don't get the essence of a chair because if you can make a chair then you've grasped something more...". And this is again related to this notion, if you can cause a chair to 'be', if you can 'cause' it to 'be' (writes because on the board: be-cause), then you deeply understand what a chair is. So, Aristotle then asked "well what is it that the chair maker has that the accurate descriptor does not have? And again it goes back to what we saw before. When I gave you my description of the bird: it has wings and beaks and all this stuff... and I was lacking the idos. I was lacking the form, the structural functional organization. So Aristotle says "what the chair maker has that the good describer doesn't have, is the chair maker actually has in their mind the idos.

Think of it like an architect that has a blueprint. The architect has in their mind the structural functional organization that is actually going to be shared in the building. The architect 'has' the ideas. The chair maker has the idos in their mind and they can actualize, they can use that idos to actualize the potential in the wood to make the chair. So to 'know' something is to possess the same idos as it. Now, the architect, when he has the idos for the building, he doesn't have a material building in his mind! You couldn't go in [and] house is a family of five inside his mind! When we say that it has the same pattern, we don't mean it's actualizing the same matter as wood and metal in a building but the same form is there. So for Aristotle, when 'I know' something - and this is the original meaning of this word - there is "conformity"; I share the same form with it. So when I know some object or know some thing, my mind takes on the same structural functional organization as the thing such that if I could take that idos from my mind and actualize it in some potential, I could make an instance of the thing: I could cause it 'to be (points out be-cause on the board again)'.

The Difference between Knowing and Being

So, if you'll remember 'shape' is not the same thing as form, but we can use shape - as Aristotle does - as an analogy for form. So when I know the cup (for reference, a cup prop/actual cup being used), I could know it by standing away from it and describing it, trying to describe its shape - and I'm using shape as an analogy for form. Or I can actually conform (picks cup up) to the cup. I'm actually taking the same shape! And notice how this enables me to causally interact (points out be-cause on the board again) with the cup in a much more intimate and complex and sophisticated fashion. So when you know something, for Aristotle, your mind is in conformity with it. Now, that's really important because that means [in] Aristotle's theory of knowing there is no distinction - that is [that] we [would] typically have - between knowing and being.

The Conformity Theory

What do I mean by that? Again using the analogy, here's the modern view (cup at distance): I'm over here describing it; it's over there, independent. I'm over here describing it. Here's Aristotle's view (picks cup up): I'm actually changing my structure. This isn't just... I'm not just knowing and having beliefs, I'm being changed (points out the physicality of his hand and the cup together). This is a change in my being, not just a change in my knowing. The conformity theory doesn't just change your beliefs it changes the very structure and functioning of your being.

So the conformity theory is a very different way of thinking about how we know things. So Charles Taylor, who I've mentioned before, Hubert Dreyfus and others, they talk about the Conformity Theory as a 'contact' epistemology. So to know something is to be in contact with it, is to actually participate in the same form as the thing. I'm going to come back to this sense of participatory knowing. Participatory knowing is when I shape myself in order to know the thing, and I know it by conforming to it. This is different from descriptive knowing where I stand apart and I generate propositions about the thing.

So, the conformity theory has this very powerful idea of an intimate connection between the mind and reality. And it's based on a very powerful idea and, as I mentioned, Aristotle is going through a significant revival in our understanding of living things. An understanding of mental things. We are increasingly coming to see that this kind of contact knowing, this participatory knowing, is much more central to how cognition works than we previously thought. We're going to come back to that a lot in this series. I just want you to take note of it now.

Notice how this... What we need to notice right now is how this theory of knowing, which is also a theory of being, satisfies that desire of being in contact with reality as opposed to being separate from it and merely pointing at it with my words or my propositions.

Making Sense of Things - Structural Functional Organisations (S.F.O)

All right, so if I'm in conformity with the world, that tells you something very interesting. The structural functional organization, my patterns of intelligibility (remmember for Plato, intelligibility (and Aristotle) completely inherits this. I could say again, read Erik Perl's book on this), how I make sense of things, the pattern of intelligibility is the same pattern by which the thing is organized. So when I'm making sense of things, there's a structural functional organization in my mind that is shared with the structural functional organization of what I'm making sense of [-]. But does that mean that everything I think is just true. No. Aristotle is a genius, he's probably a clear instance of what's been called a Universal Genius. We shouldn't dismiss what Aristotle says so easily. Aristotle literally writes the book on everything.

Say you're at a party with Aristotle. You say "Well, I'm interested in physics!" ...and then he'll [say] "hear, I wrote the book on this. This is called Physics. This is the book that started physics". "Oh, well I'm also interested in philosophy! I am interested in metaphysics". "Here's the book I wrote on metaphysics". "Well! I am interested in how animals move". "Here's my book I wrote on how animals move". "I'm interested in psychology". "Here's my book". "Dreams..." "Here's my book!" "How to write books". "Here's my book!". Aristotle is an astonishing intellect. So, what does he mean then? Well what he means is, that after we've done all that Axial Age, second order thinking. After we've done all this Socratic and platonic argument and discussion and we've done this rational reflection - once we then get to that... IDOS! 'That' structural functional organization... we can be confident that what structural functional or organization we're finding, and how we make sense of things, is the same. Or to put it in a slogan "when we've made sense of things, the pattern in our mind is the same as the pattern in the world".

An Example of the Conformity Processes

So what are those processes? Aristotle, like everything he does, he tries to explicate a little bit more. So, think about this! Think about how you try and determine if something was real. If it really is the case. So let's say you're interested in Susan. And you're talking to your friend Tom. And Tom and Susan and yourself, you're at a party the previous night and Tom tells you "Oh Susan... I think Susan really likes you!" Now this is important to you because you really like Susan! You'd really like it if Susan liked you. This would be a good thing. But you don't want to leap into this because your heart has been broken before and you've acted foolishly and impulsively so you want to make sure. So you say "wait, wait. Come on Tom. I saw you last night you were really hammered. Like you were drunk. Pfff... I don't believe you!" And Tom says "no no no no. I heard this way before I was drunk I heard this at the beginning. I heard Susan say this at the beginning." And then you say "come on Tom. There was so many people, it was so noisy. How can you be sure?" And Tom says "no no. This was in the kitchen. Susan was in the kitchen when I heard her say. It wasn't that noisy there!" And then you say "I don't know...." And then Tom says "yeah but Andrew and, you know, Jane also heard Susan say that". And you go "Oh wow. I think Susan likes me!" So you do these three tests! You make sure that the relevant organ of cognition, your - your attention, your memory, your brain - was functioning normally. Yes it is. It's functioning normally. OK. So I was sober. You make sure that the environment isn't creating distorting conditions - too much noise... No no it's an optimal environment! So, let's do this: Organ operating optimally. Environment optimal or really good. And then I look for "Did other people experience it?" Inter-subjective agreement. So, this is what you do!

You very carefully try to get your mind into an optimal state. You make sure the medium is the best. And you do a lot of inter-subjective discussion to make sure that you're in agreement with other people. So you do really deep philosophy: you argue and discuss, you enact like this Socratic thing. You really train your mind, you get the appropriate conditions. You do all this. You get you come to some agreement and then once you get there you can have significant confidence that you are in conformity with reality. That the pattern that's in your mind is the pattern that's in the world. Now, I point this out to you, not because I want to say that Aristotle is ultimately right because we're gonna see how that way of doing things was challenged, but I want to point out to you how you still do it now. There's something deeply plausible and practical in what Aristotle was saying! This is how you, on a day to day basis, try to make sure that you're in touch with things.

The Structural Functional Patterns When Making Sense of Things

So how are things? What is the structural functional pattern of the world when I'm making sense of thing? So Aristotle is also, as I said, considered [to be a] foundational figure in science. In fact for literally millennia, A Millennia, he is basically identical to science. Knowing Aristotle is to know science. He's building upon all the pre-Socratic philosophers before him. But basically what he says is "OK how is the world organized? What is the structure of reality?" Well how does it look to us? What can we all agree on? OK. So, we're all stone cold sober. Clear Day. We can all talk. We can agree. And this is what - try to get back to Aristotle's time - this is how things seem to all of us. We're at the center. And this is something we're going to come back to because that's how your perceptual cognitive system seems to operate. You're at the center. Things are moving around us.

So he has a geo centric world view. The Earth is at the center. Well why did things move? Why are things moving? So he has the idea, again, that things move for the same reason you do. Remember Thales talked about that - the magnet is moving, your moving. When I lift on this (table) and it's pushing against me, that feels no different to me than when a person is pushing on me. It feels like the table is moving itself against me. Again, don't concentrate on whether or not this is true, concentrate on how much sense it makes. When I move the pen away from the earth, it looks like it moves itself to get back there, which looks exactly like I want to be over there and I move myself there, because I'm separated from where I want to be. So Aristotle's idea is that everything is made up of elements, basic elements like earth, water, air and fire. Things that have a lot of earth in them - like this marker - want to be where Earth naturally is. Earth is at the center. So as you move things away from the earth, things fall back towards it. Water is going to be on the surface. Fire moves up and air is above. So notice when I burn some wood how much sense this makes of it! Because when I burn the wood the fire comes up, the water that's evaporated spreads out as condensation, and then the ash, the earthen part falls down. So for Aristotle the Earth is at the center and this is the thing: everything is moving by a process of natural motion. Everything has an internal drive. Just like you. Everything is trying to get where it belongs. Everything has a natural place. So - and this is very important - everything is moving on purpose. Everything is trying to get where it belongs. So notice how meaningful this view of things is. Everything is moving, just like you! You're doing things to get where you belong and where you are where you belong, then that's the fulfillment of your goals. That's what makes your life meaningful. So all of these things (on the board: Natural Motion -> Internal Drive), the whole [of] everything in this cosmos - and we remember we talked about that, we talked about Pythagoras (a beautiful order) - everything in this cosmos is moving purposefully, meaningfully.

It's important that you resist the temptation here to be smug and say "wow what a silly idea! I mean...? Thinking the Earth is at the center? Is he a Luddite?" No, because the idea that the Earth is not at the center, the idea that the Earth is rotating was known in the ancient world. It was known by Aristarchus for example. The problem with this view is that there were great counter arguments about it. Look: if the Earth is rotating/ you think the Earth is rotating that means, if I'm on the earth and is rotating and I drop an object, as the object is dropping I'm moving forward with rotation; I end up 'here' (diagrm being drawn on the board) and the object drops, should [that] then end up behind me? Because as I let go of it, I'm moving on the earth, it's rotating and it should fall behind me! So let's do it! Let's run the experiment. (Drops pen.) Oh it doesn't fall behind me! See, what you need to realize is that until you also have an idea of something like universal gravitation, and other ideas like inertial motion, the idea that the Earth is rotating actually doesn't make good sense of the phenomena! If it's rotating, why am I not feeling a breeze on my face constantly when I face one way rather than the other? So there was all kinds of arguments.

Ego-centric vs Conformity Theory of World Views

So, Aristotle has a sense that we can still appreciate. He has a sense of, "well, this (gesturing down) is how we get in contact with reality, and this (gesturing up and around) is the pattern that is making sense to me", and what I mean by that is, even though you and I are post-Descartes, post Newton, post Copernicus, we still move around the Earth as if it's at the center and that the Earth isn't moving and that objects fall directly down etc. etc.. So given that, given the tremendous plausibility of Aristotle's proposal, we can now put these two sides together. You've got the eg-centric world (written on the right of the board) - and by world I don't just mean the Earth, I mean the Cosmos - with the earth at the center and everything moved by natural motion. And then what we have over here is we have the conformity theory (written on the left of the board), 'Knowing', and I'm going to hyphenate these words because these are not separate for this theory the way they are for us: "Knowing-being" (a way of being and a way of knowing) and what I want you to see is how much they mutually support each other. This is very plausible. That's why I told you that whole story about the person who knows how to make the chair. And once you admit that this is plausible, and you use Aristotle's test, it supports this view of things. Because if the conformity theory is right, and I do all of this rational reflection, this is the intelligible pattern that I see.

Now, I can look at this (left: ego-centric view) and say "this is the intelligible pattern and it's plausible! That makes sense of so many things" and that view that view of the world then lends evidence that I am in fact in conformity with reality. It provides evidence for the conformity theory. And notice these two things are now mutually supporting each other (drawn in a simple cycle). That's how you get a "World View": you have an account of the world, and you have an account of how you know the world that mutually support each other in very strong bonds of plausibility. Now that sets something out for us.... Notice that there is now a deep connection, a deep bonding as I say, between your understanding of your understanding and your understanding of the world!

The Agent and the Arena

So let's try and put this together. This (left: ego-centric) is a view of the world that totally makes sense of your actions. This is a world organized according to purpose, things are moving on purpose. Things are trying to get where they belong. The structure of the world is very, very similar to the structure of the meaningful structure of your experience. So this view, basically - if you'll allow me a term that I've crafted with Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic in our book - this basically makes the external world an "Arena". An Arena is a place that's organized such that you know how you can act in it. It makes sense to you. You know where things belong, what actions are appropriate, how to measure and calibrate your performance - and I don't mean just your physical performance, also your intellectual performance. If you are a football player and you go into a football arena, things are organized in such a way that you know intimately how to be involved and how to interact. You can conform (listen to my language) you can conform to that situation very powerfully.

The Co-Identity of this Existential Mode

This is how you become an "Agent". To be an Agent is to be capable of pursuing your goals. It's to be able to organize your cognition and your behavior so that your actions fit the situation. They fit the environment. So what you have, when you have a world view, is you've got this Agent and Arena coupling. Aristotle is explaining to you how you become an agent (how you know and structure yourself to act accordingly) and then he's telling you how the world is organized (cosmos) so that you can meaningfully interact within it. And these two (Agent and Arena), there's a process here of Co-Identification. The identity of this (Arena) is determined by and determines the identity of, this (Agent). And the identity of this (Agent) is determined by and determines this (Arena). So the professional football player is a particular kind of agent. They're a football player and they go into an Arena. The Arena allows them to be a football player. It affords them. Them being a football player makes sense of why this part of the world (the Arena) is structured the way it is. They Co-identify. The identity as an Arena and the identity as the agent Co-identify.

This is important! We need to stop here and take a little bit more care because I want to introduce an idea to you, this "Co-Identification" because this is something you're doing all the time right. You're always assuming an identity. I'm doing it now. I'm assuming the identity of someone giving a talk and I'm assigning an identity to everything around me. Everything has the meaning of how it's facilitating and affording my talk and even you as the audience have been assigned a particular identity. I'm always assigning an arena and assuming agency, and they are co-defining together. That is an "Existential Mode", to use a term. This process by which you are co-identifying agency and arena so that they fit together and make sense of each other and you get a coherent and functioning world view... That's your existential mode. And of course it matters really greatly to you. We're going to come back to this later. This is an idea from Clifford Geertz. It was an idea that he used to talk about religion in general and we'll see about that later. But what I want to point out, because a similar idea was also proposed by other people like Buber and by Fromm, and although they also said there were important connections to religion they didn't they didn't identify just with religion... Existential Modes, they are "Meta-Meaning" relations. What does that mean?

Worldview Attunement

If you do not have the Agent: Arena relationship, then none of your particular actions have meaning. If I put the tennis player into the football arena, it's absurd! It doesn't make any sense! Things aren't... the tennis player can do all they want and it doesn't make any sense. The environment is like "What? what's going on. That's absurd!" (Notice that word we're going to come back to it.) Unless the coupling works, your individual actions and projects of meaning don't work. It's a meta-meaning system because this mode makes possible an entire system of meanings. It means that the throwing [of] the ball has a meaning for the football player. The catching the ball, the running here... All of these different things take on their meaning because an Agent: Arena relationship has been set up. You're doing it right now. You have assumed a particular identity; you've assigned an identity to me and within that existential mode everything you're doing and I'm doing take on whatever meaning they have. This is very, very important: this idea of your existential mode being a meta-meaning relationship and that what it does is it's an instance - a particular way of enacting - this world view relationship. Geertz calls this (the full cycle drawn on the board of all of this), this thing we're seeing in Aristotle, the way you get this mutual support, mutual intelligibility - not as a static relation but as an unfolding process. He calls this "Worldview Attunement".

So one of the things that's really important to you is that your existential mode - the way in which you are creating co-identifications of Agent and Arena - actually fit into a process of Worldview Attunement. If you don't have a world view, with world view attunement, then ultimately you can't get this going. You will be like the tennis player trying to play tennis in the football arena. You will start to experience your existence as absurd. It won't make any sense to you. Now that matters because one of the ways in which the meaning crisis expresses itself is in people saying that they feel existence is absurd. People often express the opposite of absurdity when they articulate that they have a meta-meaning existential mode that affords a functioning Worldview Attunement which gives them ways in which they are co-creating, with the world, the Agent: Arena relationship.

So, notice what this has done. What Aristotle has done here that's so powerful. He's given us a way, a language of articulating a connection between what we often don't see, a deep connection between, our projects of trying to intellectually understand the world and our existential projects of trying to feel like we fit in and belong in a meaningful fashion. That's what's so beautiful about Aristotle. He's given an integrated account of both of these. And for many of us today we don't find that clear, consonant connection. We have a scientific world view - a view of how things are, how we understand things given our science - but one of the most common complaints of that worldview is it gives us no existential guidance. It doesn't tell us how to make our lives meaningful.

Nomological Order

I wanted to propose to you a term for talking about this set of things where you have a worldview that is demonstrating, on an ongoing reliable fashion, worldview attunement and so that it is constantly affording existential modes in which Agent: Arena relationships are unfolding and blossoming naturally so that the person is not experiencing absurdity. And so the person is constantly experiencing a deep connectedness between their intellectual projects of making sense of the world and their existential projects of finding meaning and belonging and fitedness (placement) within it. I'm going to call that a "Nomological Order". Nomological Order comes from no "Nomos(*****)", Law. This is what makes the universe law-like, not just in our current sense of scientific law but in the sense that it is a cosmos for us. It's a cosmos in which there is deep convergence and consonance between our best attempts to scientifically explain the world and our deepest endeavours to existentially dwell within it. When we have that, when we have those two together, we have a Nomological Order. As the Nomological order breaks down, of course, then we start to confront absurdity and we start to lose a sense of how we fit in and how we belong.

So, Part of what we can take from.../ part of how we can understand the Axial-Age heritage..../ part of the way we can understand what [this] is telling us about meaning, is this idea of a Nomological Order. To have a meaningful life is to have a life that is situated within a Nomological Order: an attuned world view that is reliably generating existential modes that are consonant with our best scientific understanding.

Buddhism the Axial Revolution in India

So I want to pause now in the discussion of the Axial-Age in Greece and in ancient Israel. We will return to ancient Israel after we complete our survey of the Axial Age. But I'd now like to move to another place that is an important locus of the Axial revolution that is having a significant impact on us today. This is something that I mentioned earlier on in this series. We're in the midst of what's been called the mindfulness revolution one of the ways in which people are responding to the meaning crisis is by an intense interest, both existentially and personally and scientifically, in the phenomena of mindfulness. That somehow mindfulness and the cultivation of mindfulness is a way of retrieving the project of cultivating wisdom and self transcendence and somehow deepening the meaning that we are finding in our lives. And of course when I talk about mindfulness, and mentioned things like meditation and contemplation, our thoughts should turn of course to India and the Axial revolution that was taking [place] there.

The particular form that revolution took that is impacting the Western meaning crisis, as I mentioned at the beginning of the series, was in the generation of Buddhism and the set of practices around it. Now this is a very complex topic. We're not going to do it all at once right now. It's going to unfold as we move through the series. But I want to talk about the Axial revolution in India. I want to talk about mindfulness and I want to talk about what it is as a psycho-technology, how it is associated with wisdom and self transcendence. And I want to begin the discussion of the nature of enlightenment and why enlightenment is largely a project of trying to deal with threats of meaning in one's life.

So, it's only analogous in this way, so don't draw too much [from this], but in the way Socrates was the embodiment of the Axial revolution in ancient Greece, I think you can see Siddhārtha Gautama as the embodiment of the axial revolution in India. As I mentioned, of course, the Axial revolution is being driven there by similar kinds of processes. There's coinage and there's alphabetic literacy and other things like this developing. But the specific psycho-technologies that seem to have come to the fore, and the reasons for that are very complex - I would recommend taking a look at Karen Armstrong's book The Great Transformation because she tries to tease out "why did psycho-technologies of mindfulness become so prominent in ancient India? - and I'm not going to go into that history, but she gives a fairly coherent explanation about historical, cultural factors that generated it. What I want to do instead is start talking about Siddhārtha as a way of again giving us a doorway into the axial revolution in India.

So Siddhārtha... It's in all of these figures: Socrates and Siddhārtha... later when we talk about Jesus. I mean trying to talk about "well who... what's the historical...?" ...this is a quixotic endeavour! Trying to somehow peel away and separate them from their legacy is largely a project that you can only pursue to a certain degree. So I cannot, and I don't think anybody can say with certainty "this is what the historical Suharto was doing!" and I'm not going to endeavour to try and separate the myth - and I told you how I use the word myth - from the history. I'm going to let them still remain seamlessly together because that's precisely how they are making an impact on the West.

The Story of Siddhārtha

So the story goes like this... When Siddhārtha was born his father had all of the sages and wise men come to his birth and it was prophesied, foretold, in sort of an oracle fashion that the boy had one of two possible futures. One is he would be a great king. Or the other was he would enter religious life and be a really important religious figure. The king, being what all kings are, chose the former. He wanted his son, of course, to be a great king and he decided, in order to do this, he would try and remove all of the things that might trigger Siddhārtha from pursuing a religious life; a life devoted to the ideals of the Axal revolution. So what do you do if you do not want someone to go through the Axial revolution? Well, you try and give them all the benefits of the pre axial world. You try and give them all the benefits of power and prosperity. So the story goes that the king rigged things so that Suharto never saw anything distressing. He was always surrounded by beautiful women. The correct amount of food. Everything that he wanted. And we can just take that as it is, or we can step back and do something that you should always do with things that have a mythological component. Remember myths are not irrelevant stories about the past, they're attempts to get you to engage, right now, with perennial ongoing patterns.

So I want to talk about what the palace represents. A good way of getting at this right, is Marcus Aurelius's famous quote that, and this is how it goes: "It is possible to be happy even in a palace." That tells you how much the Axial revolution is antithetical to palace life. A way of getting that is to get at a notion, which we're going to come back to later when we talk about stoics like Marcus Aurelius, drawn from Fromm, and this goes to this idea that I just explained to you - Existential Mode - that the palace represents a particular existential mode. It's a mythological way of trying to get you to experience, not just think about, but activate in your memory a particular existential mode.

Having and Needing

So, we're talking about the palace, because we're talking about Siddhārtha living in the palace. What does this represent? Fromm talks about two different existential modes that we all face. Again, perennial patterns. They're organized around two different kinds of needs. They're "having needs" and "being needs". So of course this mode (having needs) is called "having mode". It's an existential mode. It's a way in which you make sense of the world and make sense of yourself in this process of Co-identification. This (being needs) is the "being mode".

So "having needs" are needs that are met by having something. These are needs that are met by categorizing things efficiently. Controlling them effectively. So my understanding of thing[s] is categorical. I put it in the correct category. Here's a cup. It's like all the other cups. It functions like another cup. I can replace it with a cup of this one gets damaged. It really improves my ability to control things. I have this categorical way of representing it and it's oriented towards me getting very effective, efficient control over things because I need to have water. I need to actually consume it! If I don't I die. So being able to categorize my world, manipulate it and control it so I get water is very important. That means I relate to things in what Buber, who I also mentioned, called an "I-it" fashion and "it" is an identity something has when it belongs to a category. And so what I'm mostly relying on here is my intelligence, which is my ability to control and manipulate things, to achieve solving my problems. There is nothing wrong with the "having mode". You need to have water. You need to have food. You need to have oxygen.

The "Being mode" is different. The "being needs" are not met by having something. They're met by becoming something. So for example, you 'need' to become mature. Or Aristotle might say "you need to become virtuous". It's not met by having something. It's met by becoming; developing. These are developmental needs. Now according to Fromm, because of that, these are needs that have to do with a particular kind of meaning that you're creating for your existence. And so you're not relating to things categorically, but as Collingwood for example [would] say, relating to them "expressively". Let me show you what I mean with a concrete example. And we're going to come back to these kinds of examples when we talk again about the connections between love and Anagoge. When you're in love with somebody you are engaged in a "being need". You're trying to, if it's love as opposed to just desire or sex, you're trying to become something. And you're trying to afford them becoming something, you're trying to meet your needs of meaning and maturity, growth and development. That's why we pursue love. As apposed [to]... you know... And I'm not a prude! ...sometimes you just wanna have sex with people. That's not what I'm talking about! I'm talking about when you have said "no, what I want here is love".

Now, notice that... So I'm in love with this amazing woman, Sara. OK, and I'm in this relationship with her. This relationship of mutual development, mutual realisation. In fact that's a great way of thinking about love. Love is this process, like Anagoge, of reciprocal realization. I don't think of Sara categorically. Remember, how I thought of the cup? This is a good cup because it reminds me of all the other cups that I've ever seen and I know how to replace this if this one's damaged and I can control and manipulate it. If I was to say to Sara "you know why I'm with you? Because you remind me of every other woman I been with and I could easily replace you if I lose you and I know how to control them manipulate you", I have not made this relationship better! I've pretty much just destroyed it. OK? Because I don't interact with Sara from the having mode. I don't understand her (on screen correction for this) categorically, but expressively. I'm not trying to control and manipulate, I'm trying to engage in a process of reciprocal realization. We're going to talk a lot about this when we talk about gnosis. So, my relationship... I don't assume control or manipulator of an 'IT' thing. I have an "I-thou" relationship with Sara. And here I'm not trying to solve problems. I'm using my reason because I'm not about trying to get rid of my problems. I'm trying to make meaning.

To live in the palace is to try and live everything from the having moved. It's not that this is good and this is bad! Fromm's point is we get mixed up. We try to satisfy our being needs within the having mode. We suffer from "Modal Confusion". Think about how much our culture is organized around this because it serves a lot of market interests if I can confuse you, if I can get you to try and pursue your being needs within the having mode. "You need to be mature. Here's a car you can have". "You need to be in love. Here's lots of sex you can have". Notice how we talk about making love but having sex! Modal confusion. Deep existential confusion.

And what happens when you're mortally confused is that your need for maturity isn't being met by having the car, your need for love is not being met by having sex. So you pursue it more! Buy more cars! Purchase more sex. The more the corporate world, the market world, can get you to try to pursue your being needs from the having mode, the more they can induce modal confusion in you, the more they can sell to you. Being in the palace is a myth in a sense that I'm trying to teach you for modal confusion. It's a myth of trying to live your entire life within the having mode. But here's the thing, because the story continues, Siddhartha leaves the palace and he leaves the palace in a way that teaches us something about overcoming modal confusion. And in our next time together we're going to look at how Siddhartha left the palace. And we're going to look at "what does mindfulness have to do with that?" And "what does all of this have to do with wisdom and enlightenment?"

Thank you very much for your time.

Other helpful resources about this episode:
Notes on Bevry
Summary and Transcript on awakeningfromthemeaningcrisis.com

Welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis. So last time we discussed the important and foundational work of Plato. The grammar of Western civilization is basically made up of the Bible and Plato. We'll keep coming back to both of those repeatedly in certain ways. And we talked about Plato's notion of wisdom and how it involved this process of aligning the psyche so as to reduce inner-conflict and reduce self-deception by bullshitting ourselves and how that enabled us to also achieve one of our meta-desires - the desire for inner peace, but how we could also align that reduction in self-deception with getting more in contact with what's real. And that as we practice tracking real patterns in the world we could then reflectively internalize that back on ourselves. And there was an intimate connection between how we knew the world and knew ourselves. And as we increased our ability to pick up on real patterns we could increase our self knowledge, reduce our self deception increase our contact with reality and that would flow in the process of Anagoge. And that would bring about the satisfaction of our second meta-desire which is to be in contact with wellness.

And so Plato has this idea of wisdom as this Anagogic process, and we talked about that in connection with his great parable, "The parable of the cave". I then pointed out that he had - just as Socrates was lucky to have a great disciple in Plato - Plato was lucky to have a great disciple in Aristotle. Aristotle is pivotal for us because he lays the foundation for further aspects of a scientific approach to wisdom and meaning and also for an important formulation of one of the ways in which we deeply connect the self to reality that we're going to talk about when we talk about world view [at-onement?].

So as I mentioned, Aristotle was a student of Plato. He studies with Plato for about 20 years and then at some point he breaks away from Plato, famously claiming "that while I love Plato, I love the truth more". Aristotle remained, and many people would argue this (Gerson for example and others), that Aristotle remains in some very important senses a Platonist. But there was an aspect of Plato's work that Aristotle thought was lacking. Plato did not really, adequately, account for change. So Aristotle was deeply influenced by Plato's account of what made something real for us. But he thought that Plato could not really explain change very well and he was going to invent some very important concepts that are going to become integral to [our] understanding of what it is to be meaningfully connected to reality.

Growth and Development

Now Aristotle is very influenced by his father who is a physician. He's much more of a biologist than a mathematician so while Plato is much more prone to using mathematical analogies, Aristotle is much more used to using biological analogies and the word that Aristotle uses for change is actually better translated as "growth" or "develope". Aristotle was really interested in how living things grow; how they develop. And that should pick up your ears right away because part of, I take it, what we often mean when we say we have a "meaningful life" is that we are "growing" or "developing". in fact people will often use the word growth as a way of indicating an improvement in the meaning of their life and in some sense the developing of wisdom. So Aristotle picks up on Plato's notion of the 'idos'. So if you remember last time we talked about this. We talked about, that a bird is much more than a set of its features. It's not just a beak. It's not just some feathers. It's this "gestalt". It's that structural functional organization such that all the parts function together as a whole and so what you have is something that acts as a bird.

And that pattern, that "logos", that "Idos" is very hard, actually, to put into words. But it's very much what does two things for us: It's what makes a bird a bird. And it's also the pattern by which we come to know what a bird is - when we can grasp the structural functional organization (that Idos), then we understand what a bird is. Now Aristotle was very impressed by that, but he wanted to give it a more dynamical approach. He wanted to talk about it in terms of development. And so he was very interested, as I said, in how things grow. And he noted the role that form had in growth and development. So what he did was he first started with an analogy. So he would use the analogy of artifacts - human made things - and then use that to try and understand biological things. So, for example, I can have a block of wood and I can make it into a chair, or perhaps a table or if it's big enough amount of wood I can make it into a ship or a boat. And Aristotle asked "what makes the wood behave like a chair, as opposed to a table. Or to a ship?". And this is where we get the notion of "actuality" from. We often use the word actuality, in fact, as a way of talking about realness: "It's an 'actual' something" is way of saying "it's a 'real' something" as opposed to a fraud or a simulation. So, what makes a chair act like a chair? Why does the wood act like a chair here, act like a table here, and act like a ship here? And so Aristotle said "Well first of all this is important change, and it's a good analogy for development." When I'm making a chair, that's somehow analogous for how an organism is growing.

So what is it? What makes the wood act like a chair here and act like a table here? And his argument was "well it's the 'form'!" Again where this means "idos", not "shape"; although you can use shape as an analogy. This is the Structural Functional Organization. The wood is Structurally Functionally Organized in such a way that it will act like a chair. Whereas here it will act like a table and here it will act like a ship. Now, Aristotle's point is that it's not that "this" (THE WOOD ITSELF) doesn't play any role! But he invents this really important idea. He invents the idea that the wood is "Potential". These terms "actual" and "potential" actually come from Aristotle. We use them every day. We think they are just part of our natural grammar, but they're actually an invention of Aristotle. We're gonna see how important they are.

So the idea is [that] wood is potentially a chair. Wood is potentially a table. Wood is potentially a ship. Now when that potential has a particular form given to it, then it starts acting like a chair. It starts acting like a table and acting like a ship and this is where we get the notion of "information" from. You put a form into something and you will actualize its potential, namely you will give it a Structural Functional Organization so it will start to act in a particular manner. Now that's really important!

And then what Aristotle argued is "well what you see in living things is that they are basically doing this for themselves. [So if you'll use...] I just mean this is an analogy: a living thing is like a chair that is making itself. A chair - imagine that a chair could somehow start to impose a structural functional organization on wood so that it started to turn itself into a chair...? That's what a living thing does! Food! Food is potential you. You put food into you, you inform it, there's a code in your DNA that ultimately puts a particular form in it that gives it a structural functional organization that becomes you. Now of course this unfolds across time. [It's not...] That doesn't happen like that (clicking fingers to demonstrate happening instantly) and that's why we see it as change and development. Now this is really important as we'll see because it's going to be foundational to understanding a lot about how you connect to the world.

Circular Explanations

So, how are we going to make use of this in talking about the way human beings are connected to reality? The way they develop and grow as cognitive agents? So what I want to do first is to step aside from Aristotle in the axial age and move into current cognitive science and talk about an important way of thinking about development and change. Especially the work of Alicia Juarrero that was directly and explicitly inspired by this Aristotleian framework. So when we talk about how things change, we often have a model that we inherited from the scientific revolution. A model we get from Newton. And this is a model that change occurs because of causal impact. So the standard thing [is]: "here is this marker... I press it.... Why did it move? It moved because I pushed it!". Seems so obvious and non-controversial. Right? So we give an explanation: "what causes it to be, BECAUSE it was pushed." ...and the idea of "All change and development is: there is an event A and it somehow causes event B, causes event C. Event A precedes B makes B happen and then B precedes C, and B makes C happen. So as Newton was engaging in the scientific revolution this notion of how things happen was becoming prominent in him. And for the people that [were] going to take up the Newtonian world view. Now what was very interesting about that is that this (A->B->C) seemed to solve a lot of problems. And this was brought out by a famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who Alicia Jurado talks about. Kant was interested in "why was this Newtonian model becoming so successful?". The Aristotelian model had been around for thousands of years - why was Newton's model overtaking it so rapidly?

And what Kant said as well... This does something very wonderful for us because what it does is gives us a very simple account of how we explain things. I explain C by showing you how it was preceded by an event B that caused it, and how B was preceded by an event A that caused it. Very nice, linear, clean we're like "it seems that... Isn't that what's happening?" ...So obvious, right? And again remember, again and again, I've tried to show you [that] things that seem so obvious, so natural, are actually historical creations. You have to pay attention to how we got where we are. Now, why does this matter? Well, because this (A->B->C) prevents a kind of vacuous explanation that can occur. This prevents what are called "Circular Explanations". This line (causality) prevents circular explanations.A circular explanation is when you assume the very thing you're trying to explain in your explanation.

Here's a standard kind of model - people often use this without realizing - there's a triangle out here in the world (draws on board). The light comes in into my eye, it goes to nerve pulses, that goes into my consciousness, it's somehow projected onto an inner screen and then there's a triangle there and then there's a little man inside and he goes "triangle!". And we have updated versions of this, like the central executive and such. This is called a homuncular theory. Homunculus means "a little man". When you present it like that (diagramatic form drawn on board) I hope you can all see why this is obviously useless because what you should then ask is Well how does a little man see the little triangle inside. And then what you go is "well inside the little man's head there is an even smaller screen with a littler man Golden 'Triangle!!'". But how does he see? "Triangle, Triangle...!" You see what this is? It's an infinite regress because you're actually using vision to try and explain vision. Please remember this notion of a homuncular fallacy, because that's what this is, because while it's easy to explain I need you to understand that we fall into it very often when we try and understand and explain ourselves.

That (homuncular illustration) is a circular explanation because you're using the very thing you're trying to explain in order to explain it. Kant said this Newtonian scheme (A->B->C) is wonderful because if you stick to its grammar, if you stick to its rules, the cause has to be an independent event that precedes... then you don't fall into circular explanations. That's amazing.

Now, you've got some problems here (before/preceding "A->"): what started it all? Maybe God...? and then Kant says "no!" and he's got all his arguments, and I'm not going to get into that right now. Suffice it to say that this (A->B->C) became a predominant way of trying to explain how things work. But then Kant encountered a very significant problem. And it's not a coincidence that it has to do with the kinds of things we were talking about with Aristotle. The kinds of things that can grow. Living things. Because Kant went out and he saw a tree! And this was very problematic for him because trees don't follow this model readily. Becuse... He was looking at it and he was saying "okay, well what's making the tree?" Well it's the sunlight! "Well how does the sunlight get in?" Through the leaves! "So... what's making the leaves?". Well, the tree! "So, the tree makes the leaves and the leaves make the tree! So the tree is making the tree!!" And he coined the term "Self-Organizing". The tree is Self-Organizing. Now the problem with that is living things make use of "Feedback Cycles". In a feedback cycle the output from the system feeds back into the system. The tree makes the leaves, that gathers energy that goes into the processes that makes the leaves. Living things are self organizing. They use feedback cycles but when I try and give an explanation of a feedback cycle, I fall into a circular explanation.

I fall into a circular explanation! So Kant came to a rather startling conclusion. He came to the conclusion that there could not be a science of living things! That biology was impossible. No Kant is a towering intellect, he's a genius. A philosophical genius. And so you can't just sort of dismiss that. "Well there obviously is biology. What an idiot Kant is!" ..No no!! You're the one who needs to step back and think: "Where's the mistake in the argument?"! Because if there is biology (and it's true that there is, and I agree that there is), and that living things use feedback cycles (which they necessarily do) they're self-organizing (which they necessarily are) and when I try and trace out the causation I get into circular explanation (which seems like a necessary thing) and circular explanations are vacuous and empty... Then where is Kant going wrong?

Reconciling Kant's Problem - Where is the Model Wrong

This is what Alisha Juarrero takes up and she said "actually for a very long time we had no way of solving this problem". And so there was a huge gap between our biology and our physics. Now again, why are we caring about this? Because we need to... If we're going to understand Aristotle, if we're going to deeply understand what we mean when we talk about that we are living things that grow and develop and that growth and development is integral to our meaning and our sense of who and what we are - our 'personal identity' - that if we cannot give an answer to this problem (issues / question on the board!), we can not understand, fundamentally, who and what 'we' are and what the hell we are talking about when we talk about how important growth and development are to us... Because that language will forever be separate from any kind of scientific understanding! So where's this going wrong? This (feedback cycle diagram) seems, just... "Living things are feedback cycles, self-organizing: they grow, they develop, they make themselves!

So, what has to go? Well, this (A->B->C)!!! Now, before you jump and say "But that's just... That's just what causation is!", think about the fact that we know, we actually know, that Newton was ultimately wrong! Newton doesn't work with relativity. Newton doesn't work at the quantum level. So we know that we shouldn't be absolutely committed to this view. Juarrero actually makes use of an important idea from Aristotle to solve this problem. She's going use Aristotle in order to explain a new and powerful way of talking about growth and development and self organizing processes which is known as "Dynamical Systems Theory".

Causes and Constraints

So Juarrero first of all makes a distinction between "causes" and "constraints". So to get at that distinction, let's go back to what seems so obvious. OK.... Here's the marker... I push it! Why did it move? And immediately the Newtonian grammar just comes into place: "It moved because you pushed it!" And then you might step outside of physics and say "well, I wanted to push it!", but that's not what I'm asking! Because it could also just be that some other object bumped into this and it moved! Why else did it move? Okay, so think about what has to also be true in order for this to move. There has to be empty space. Relatively empty space in front of the marker. This (the surface - table) has to have a particular shape to it. This (the pen) has to have a particular shape to it. Those aren't events. Those are conditions. Causes are events that make things happen. Constraints aren't events, they're conditions! They don't make things happen, they make things possible. There's a big difference between a condition and an event. The Newtonian way of thinking has us so fixated on this (causes -> event -> happen), so fore-grounded on this that we're not seeing this (constraints -> conditions -> possible) anymore! But Aristotle, because of his Platonic view, actually considers this (Constraints flow) more important. Why? Because when I talk about a Structural, Functional Organization, when I talk about a pattern, I'm talking about this (Constraints flow). This is where you will find form. It is sometimes called the "Formal Cause". This is where you will find the Structural Functional Organization. Conditions are structurally, functionally organized such that motion for this is possible. Now this is important because this is, of course, actuality ("causes flow") and this is where we get potentiality when I shape possibility ("constraints flow". That's what I mean when I say something is potential. I mean that possibility has been shaped. by constraints so that these events are more possible than these events.

Possible Fix Review

Okay so we're going to do more but let's stop here and let's see how this is already starting to solve the problem of talking about the tree and itself organization. So in a tree you've got a bunch of events happening. Biochemical events. What they're doing is they're actually causing a particular form, or formula, or structural functional organization. Now think about it... Why do trees grow the way they do? Why do they grow like 'this'? Why do they spread out their branches? Why do their leaves spread out? Because what they're trying to do is they're trying to change the possibility of a photon hitting a chlorophyll molecule. The structure of the tree shapes the possibility of the events. So the events cause this structure. They cause it. But this (form) then constrains the events. So look at me I'm a living thing. I've got a bunch of events happening in me. And that creates a structural functional organization. That organization creates an internal environment in which the probability of events is dramatically altered. So events that have very low probability of happening out there have a high probability of happening in here. And events that have a very high probability of happening out there have a very low probability of happening in here. And that's what it is to be a living thing. The events cause a structure - a structural functional organization, an idos, a form - and then that constrains the events. Now this is not a circular explanation because I'm talking about two very different kinds of things. I'm talking about actuality and potentiality.

The Relation to the Conservation of Mass and Energy

Now, it's important to realize that the discussion of possibility - many of you were saying "oh this is so abstract!" and "what does this..." - this is actually integral to science! Science depends on there being real potential; the potentiality is a real thing. So, here's the object moving around (back to demonstrations with the pen)... it's on the ground... Look at all this kinetic energy. Look at it moving (lifting the pen above head). Oh! It stopped. Did I destroy all that energy? Where did the kinetic energy go? You can't destroy energy! Well, the kinetic energy has become potential energy. If the principle of the conservation of mass and energy is real, then potentiality is real. Look at this... Look at something from Newton: force equals mass times acceleration (F = MA). Is that an event? Is it: "Oh! That's happening over there right now... does it happen every Tuesday at 4 o'clock? This isn't an event. This is how things are shaped. It puts a limit on what's possible in the world. Talking about real potentiality is not talking fictional or abstract it's a way of talking that's integral to our current science.

Connection to the Theory of Darwinian Evolution

OK, we're still not done though because Juarrero points out that there are two kinds of constraints. So our explanations can become even more refined. There are constraints that make a form of event, a type of event more possible. She calls those "Enabling Constraints. And then there are constraints that reduce the possibilities, reduce the options for a system. These are the selected or "Selective Constraints". Now this is going give us a very powerful way of understanding development. Let's use it the way Juarrero does to talk about one of the most significant theories of development and change, one of the great hallmarks of science. In fact it's a foundational theory for the science of biology which of course is the theory of Natural Selection, the Theory of Darwinian Evolution. Because the theory of Darwinian Evolution is probably the first dynamical systems theory in science and it is a theory that is designed precisely to account for growth and development. Obviously not within an individual but across speciation.

Okay so let's take a look at the theory. So what you're looking for first of all is [that] there has to be a feedback cycle for any dynamical system theory because we're talking about a process that is self organizing. So what's the feedback cycle that evolution talks about? Of course, well it's sexual reproduction (writes this on the board). Where do goats come from? Other goats! Goats are produced. There's the product and then it feeds back into the system and becomes the producer. ...Makes more goats that make more goats that makes more goat. That's why we call it "re-"production. It's a feedback cycle. So what did Darwin realize? Well he realized that there were selective constraints operating on that. There were conditions in the environment that reduced the options for organisms. So what are those conditions? Scarcity of resources. So, I've been looking at some of the theories of early life and there's an argument by several biologists that there's no evolution for about, probably, 800 000 years or so because there's no scarcity of resources when life first evolves. So life is static because there's no scarcity of resources. Scarcity of resources means there's competition. Scarcity of resources means not everything can live. And so that reduces the options for the system.

OK. So selection reducing options (writes this on the board). But that's not all that's going on. If that was the case, everything would just die!! Evolution would end and that can happen - Extinction events. But there's something else. There's enabling constraints that open up the system (writes this on the board). Open up the options. So, look around... Look at me, look at other people. There's variation (writes this on the board with enabling constraints). There's considerable variation. Variation increases the options (adds this to the board with the last). So look what's going on here. You've got this feedback cycle. As it's as it's cycling through, you've got the selective conditions reducing the options that are available and then the variation opening them up. You can think of it almost like an accordion model: the variation opens it up and then as it cycles, the selective constraint pushes it down. And then from there it opens up again and then it gets pushed back down and then it opens up again it gets pushed back down and as its cycles like this it's constantly changing, in a way, to be better fitted to the environment. That's evolution. It's a kind of circular... "Evolve" is related to words like revolve... This revolution with change.

The Virtual Engine

Now notice... what I'm trying to get you to see is - first all this is important! I mean I wish I was Charles Darwin! This is one of the great great theories! He gets to sail around the world and... What a life! He gets to sail around the world, go to some amazing places and then he comes back and makes a world changing theory! It's just, it's amazing! But notice how much this Darwinian theory that is at the foundation of biology, how much it is beholden to Aristotle. How much it depends on Aristotelian ideas. Now, Juarrero talks about this as a "Virtual Governor".

A governor is any device that limits what you can do on a system, like if you have a governor on a steam engine it sets the range, it limits the range at which you can cycle. She calls it a virtual Governor because it's not an actual machine. It's the shaping of possibility. She stops there and work that I've done with Leo Ferraro and Anderson Todd and Richard Wu, we think she should continue to finish the metaphor. This is a virtual generator ("enabling constraings" part of the cycle; written on the board there) because it's a set of conditions that are generating options for a self-organizing system. And here's the idea: when you put a virtual governor systematically together with a virtual generator, such that you are systematically regulating a feedback cycle, this whole thing is a virtual engine because when you attach a governor to a generator you get a "virtual engine" (diagram with terms drawn on board).

So this is what a Dynamical System Theory is. A dynamical system theory is basically a theory that lays out the virtual engine. It shows you how there's a feedback cycle - and why that's not just random and chaotic - why it produces growth and development precisely because there's a systematic relationship between a set of enabling and selective constraints. Now all of this is very very Aristotelian.

So let's now take it back to Aristotle because Aristotle was interested... now, he doesn't use this (points out both diagrams on the board), he doesn't use the dynamical systems language. That's our language. But this language was directly inspired by, powered by, Aristotle so using it backwards to try and connect Aristotle to our current understanding, I do not think is anachronistic. So Aristotle is interested in our development. He's going to add something that was missing from the Socratic notion of wisdom. Remember the Socratic notion was trying to overcome self-deception. And then Plato adds a whole structural theory of the psyche to explain how we overcome self-deception - how we become wise and achieve wisdom. But what's missing, in the account of wisdom and meaning, according to Aristotle - if I can use this (board) language - is what's missing is an account of growth and development. How does wisdom develop? How does meaning develop? Well this is where we get something that we talk about and we use in our language, but we don't, I think, get the depth of what Aristotle is talking about...

Character

There's an aspect of who and what you are that's fundamentally connected to your projects of meaning and your project of wisdom. You often might have used this term, or related terms, but do you really know what you're talking about? And this is the notion of your "character". And first or your character isn't your personality. Because if we're going to use these terms strictly, you're born with your personality. Personality is part of your, just your general constitution. It's what's given to you by the biology and the environment that you have no choice over. But your character is that aspect of you that you can cultivate. Now you can either cultivate it unconsciously, surreptitiously, indirectly, or you can cultivate it more explicitly.

But what is your character? When we say that somebody is acting out of character. We're usually making - and this is important - we're usually making either an existential or moral criticism of them. When we say "Peter's acting out of character", we often will mean something like he's normally honest. He's normally honest, he normally has the virtue of honest. (Notice the connection here by the way: "Virtue". And we've been talking about a "virtual" engine! That is NOT happenstance!) When you're talking about a virtue you're not talking about an event. You're talking about, again, a set of conditions that have been cultivated systematically in somebody. Now that points to something and when we're talking about character I'm going to suggest that what we're talking about is "what is the virtual engine on a person's development".

What system of constraints have you identified with, and what system of constraints have you internalized, that regulate your development? Let's ask a Socratic question: Let's do something that Socrates would do. We spend a lot of time on our appearance. We spend a lot of time on our status. How much time did you spend today on your character? How much? If it is the virtual engine that is regulating your growth and development, you should be, of course, spending a lot of time on your character! But are you? Now, Aristotle proposed ways of trying to cultivate your character. I would argue that his method, his famous method, of the Golden Mean is a way of trying to get you to set up conditions to cultivate your character.

So for example, what is courage (written on board)? We would all like to be more courageous, I take it! Well Aristotle proposed that it's the golden mean - not the 'average', that's a misunderstanding, because it's "golden" mean - between two things. Of course you can be a coward (written to the left of Courage), you can somehow be defective by having a deficiency. But you can also be foolhardy (written to the right of courage), just running into traffic doesn't make you courageous. What you're always trying to do is you're trying to set up a system where you're paying attention [to] when you lack the enabling constraints - when you don't have enough generation. And also [to] conditions when you lack the selective constraints - when you're too broadly... you have too many options, that you're identifying as courage. What you have to do is you have to train yourself to cultivate your character by engaging in practices that will slowly, over time, create a virtual engine because you ARE a self organizing process. You are the source of your actions that modify the environment that then feeds back into you. And changes you. And then you produce your actions and then the environment feeds back and changes you. Here's the question I ask you: Are you just letting that run? Or are you trying to rationally and reflectively cultivate your character, structure a virtual engine, so that that self-organizing process is growing and developing in an optimal fashion?

Living Up to Potential

Aristotle takes the question... and we use this! We even use - and I'm not saying we use it trivially, but we don't get the depth of what we're saying - one of the most trenchant criticisms we can make of ourselves, of other people is this (listen to my language. Listen to it!): "He's not living UP, "living up to" his potential." Part of what makes your life meaningful Is that you have cultivated character that allows you to actualize your potential. You've created a virtual engine that regulates your development in a way in which you grow up. It's a constantly improving... it's... in which self organization has been regulated and shaped into self improvement so that your potential is fully realized. So Aristotle brings in this notion, then, of development and growth as part of what it means to have a meaningful life. He brings in a new aspect to the notion of wisdom. Wisdom is gaining the ability to cultivate virtues to create your "virtual engine", a set of virtues, that basically is regulating your growth and development so that you actualize your potential.

Again, think about it. What are you doing to cultivate your character? Because Aristotle points out there's a deep form of foolishness that comes from a lack of character. [He] calls it "Akrasia" which we poorly translate as 'weakness of the will' because we're all post Protestants and we think the will is our central thing even though, increasingly, there's scientific evidence that the notion of will or willpower is a defunct idea, we should give it up! So what's Akrasia? Akrasia is when you know what the right thing to do is - you KNOW what the right thing to do is - and we talked about this, remember, with the chocolate cake. But you don't do the right thing. And here's where we can sort of put Aristotle and Plato together. Plato gives us the story about how we have to structure the psyche. But Aristotle gives us a much more penetrating analysis of what that structural functional organization is. Here is what Aristotle would say; why you're behaving foolishly: "Ignorance is when you do the wrong thing because you don't know. Part of what foolishness is, is when you know what the right thing is and you still do the wrong thing."

Here's Aristotle's answer: "you do the wrong thing because, although you have the right beliefs..." ( notice, again, the impotence of belief here.) "...you don't have the right... you don't have sufficient character". You have not trained things. You've not trained skills. You've not trained sensitivities. You have not created a virtual engine that is regulating your development and growth such that you will live up to your potential; you will actualize yourself and do the right thing. So, we're starting to see, again, the deep grammar of what we talk about when we talk about "meaning". And we notice now that there's this developmental aspect to it.

What is it to 'live up to your potential'? I mean, that's a phrase we use! What is it you're saying when you say that about somebody? Why does it matter so much? So Aristotle would say.../.

Let's go back to the analogy - please always remember this analogy - let's go back to the analogy of a man-made thing. OK? How is it when we know when something has been well made? What makes something a good knife? Well, when it has a structural Functional Organization, that allows it to fulfill its "purpose". Knives are for cutting, if I've taken the potential in the metal and organized it the right way, structure the right way, it will actually function to cut very well! And noticed that this is a word (Purpose) that's also deeply associated with our sense of what it is to have meaning.

... So, Aristotle asks "Well what can we do with this analogy?" Human beings aren't made the way knives are made. We're self making. And here's an important idea: We're self making. We're not just self organizing! The term that Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson have generated to talk about this is we are "Autopoetic", we are self-making things. So you're different from a tornado. A tornado is self organizing. But a tornado will move... Its behavior... It can be rapidly self-destructive. It will move into conditions that destroy it. You're self organized in such a way that you have a structural functional organization that allows you to seek out conditions. So the tornado does not seek out the conditions that will protect and promote its own self organization. It's not self making. You are self making.

What Does This Mean?

So here's the interesting thing - and this is a brilliant idea that Eric Perl brings out in his book Thinking being: "in living things, the purpose of the thing is it's structural functional organization. It's a it's a self making thing". So what your purpose, your function is, is to enhance your structural functional organization. It's like "Oh waw, that's... that's just the problem...", you'll say "...with philosophy! It is all so abstract!!! What does that mean specifically?" Well, for Aristotle it means 'paying attention to the fact that you are a rational, reflective, creature!' You're unlike a plant. A plant has this but all it basically does is actualize its ability to digest!

The "In-Formed" Hierarchy

So let's take a look at this (proceeds to write this on the board)... We have inorganic matter... And then it gets a particular [shape]; it's "informed". And that makes a living thing. And that... Living things can get a more complex structure that make them self-moving. That's what an animal is. An animal isn't a mammal. An animal is a self moving thing. And then some of those self-moving things have structural functional organizations - in here for example (tapping his head) - that take that self moving and really actualize it. Remember we talked about that the word "psyche" - where we get our word "psychology"/mind - originally met your capacity for self moving and we came to apply to the mind because the mind is that part of you that is the most self moving, the most self making. You're a mental thing, a psychological thing!

But, is that enough?. No! We're getting from Socrates and Plato and Aristotle [that] you can optimize that. You can take charge of that. You, unlike other organisms, you can do the Axial revolution on yourself. You're capable of cultivating your own character, rationally and deliberately. You can become a rational thing. To live up to your potential, is to make sure you have cultivated a character that takes you as high up this hierarchy (drawn on the board with all these terms ascending) as you can go. That's how you live up to your potential. Somebody who lived only as a plant would be a debauched, failed, degraded human being. Somebody that lived only as an animal un-reflectively, impulsively would be a debauched, failed human being.

But the argument continues! You say "Of course, of course (working up the board)." But all the way up here (top)? You must cultivate your character so that you, as much as possible, actualize your potential for being a rational, moral, human being. That's the hallmark for Aristotle. You become a good person if you actualize, if you inform your being, with a virtual engine that realizes those things that are distinctive of our humanity. What makes us different from the plants? The animals? The other creatures that just have minds? What makes us different? We understand that we have always, and still do understand ourselves, in contrast to the other things we find around ourselves. Why am I more valuable than this table? What is it? Why do I matter more? Because there are things that can be found in rational beings - things that we find intrinsically valuable and important - that cannot be found in merely mental things, and all the way down.

What are those characteristics that are unique to us? Well here is where Aristotle gives the Axial revolution answer: Your capacity for overcoming self-deception. Your capacity for cultivating your character. For realizing wisdom and for enhancing the structure of your psyche and your contact with reality. That's what "rational" means.

This sounds - if I hadn't said all of this - what I'm gonna say now would sound trite. Your purpose is to become as fully human as Possible! How are you cultivating your character to do so? This is what Aristotle is going to ask you again and again. How much of your life is dedicated to creating a virtual engine that realizes your rational capacities. Those things that make you most human in contrast to all the other things around you.

So Aristotle has developed this very impressive theory of wisdom, of character, growth and development. One of the things we could use today is to go back and make use of this so we can reanimate, rejuvenate these terms that have become tired and superficial! We have no alternative terms for describing our lives... For the meaning in our life. We talk about purpose and living up to our potential and growth and development and we it's just "BLAA BLAA BLAA BLAAA", because we don't have any depth to these terms. One of the things we can use Aristotle to do, is to go back and deepen what those terms mean for us; rejuvenate what they mean for us.

But, I want to continue on and to talk about this development that's occurring in the axial revolution and I want to talk about how Aristotle helped further the historical process by which he contributed to our cultural grammar of what it is when we're talking about meaning, purpose, wisdom, self-transcendence and so what I want to look at next time when we're together is I want to look at Aristotle's account of a world view. And what a world view is. And why it matters so deeply to our self understanding and our existential meaning. Thank you very much for your time.

Other helpful resources about this episode:
Notes on Bevry
Summary and Transcript on awakeningfromthemeaningcrisis.com

Welcome to the fifth episode of awakening from the meaning crisis. Last time we talked about how the Axial revolution came into Greece. We first reviewed Pythagoras and then we concentrated especially on the figure of Socrates and the Socratic revolution. And we saw again how issues of meaning, wisdom, self transcendence are so tightly bound up together. We took a look at Socrates and we took a look at how he has a particular conception of wisdom in which what we find salient or relevant is closely coupled to what we find true or real and those two things, those two concerns - what is transformative about us and what is true of the world - are meant to be held together. And this was pivotal in Socrates' method of trying to get people to realize how much all of us are so prone to having those two come uncoupled from each other and we become subject to bullshit and self-deception and that a life that is beset by self-destructive behavior is not a life that's worth living. That a way to afford human flourishing is by developing the skills, the wisdom, to keep those two tightly coupled together and Socrates was so convinced of how important this was, in fact, to making a life meaningful that he was prepared to die for it.

And as I mentioned there was somebody who was a follower of him who was at his trial, not present at his death, but was deeply traumatized and affected by his death. And this is of course Plato. Now if Socrates was controversial, Plato is beyond even that statement! Every year there are hundreds of books written about Plato. This is why Plato is one of the foundations, not only because of his ideas, but as we'll see there is an inexhaustibleness to Plato and his writing. We can come back to Plato! As a culture we come back at different times and see things we did not see before that are transformative and as individuals, myself personally, you can come back to Plato at different times of your life and Plato speaks to you in ways he did not speak before.

I want you to remember that because I'm going to try and suggest to you that that is a better model for what we mean by something being sacred than it being filled with some kind of supernatural presence. That what makes something sacred is that it's an inexhaustible font of insight and intelligibility that's transformative of us. That's certainly the way many people in the ancient world read Plato. They were deeply affected by him. I would go so far as to say that Platonism or Neo-Platonism, as Versluis and others argue, is the bedrock of Western spirituality. And we'll come back to that.

Now, Plato was traumatized by the death of Socrates. It's deeply I think disturbing to him. Why I think that is because he keeps coming back to it and trying to understand... He wanted to understand how is it that the city he loved, the city he belonged to, Athens, could have killed this man that he admired and loved so deeply? How is it that his beloved Athens killed his beloved Socrates? So where as Socrates had this dilemma given to him by the gods Plato has this dilemma given to him by the death of Socrates. Plato wanted to understand how people could be so foolish and so what he is going to do is he's going to take that to worlds mythology that we talked about: the lower less real world - and remember its mythological, it's not meant to be literally two worlds but he's going to take that two worlds mythology and he's going to do something with it very different than what the Hebrews did.

Remember the Hebrews turned it into "this is where... Things are fallen now, but we're moving towards a future; we're progressing towards a future." So they give a historical answer to how we move from the world of illusion to the world of reality. Plato is not going to give a historical answer. He's going to give a scientific answer. Because Plato is deeply influenced by the natural philosophers that we talked about last time. And what Plato is in fact going to do is he's going to create the first psychological theory in history. With Plato you can really see the beginning not just of science but the beginning of cognitive science. Psychology as a discipline begins in a very important sense. And I don't mean this trivially like "oh yeah it started with that..." Plato's psychology is still currently relevant right now in important ways which we'll talk about.

So let's get into that because this is again going to take us into these interconnected issues of meaning, wisdom, self transcendence, altered states of consciousness etc. I'd hope to show you how Plato, in trying to answer the question of how Athens could have killed Socrates, is ultimately influence not just by Socrates but also by Pythagoras. We know that Plato spent some time with the Pythagorean community and he seems to have gone through some kind of training in that community.

So Plato develops a particular theory about why human beings do foolish things and there's different aspects of it but a good way to think about it is by relating it to something that we're all familiar with. This is the experience of inner conflict. Inner conflict is when you have two strong motives that seem to be working against each other and you can see how this is immediately going to be relevant to existential meaning - to meaning in life because very often we feel most distraught, most anxious, or the most sense of being stuck when we have such inner conflict. When we're divided against ourselves in an important way.

So here's a classic example. So I like chocolate. I more than like chocolate. Chocolate has a deep attraction for me! So, recently I lost about 20 pounds. So I went on a diet. Now dieting is one of the most unsuccessful things that human beings can do. The recidivism rate is 95%. Recidivism means that within a year ninety five percent of people who were on a diet are back to their pre-diet weight. So the diet industry has a 5 percent success rate even though it makes billions of dollars. I mean I wish I had that success rate for my job. I wish I only had to succeed at 5 percent and I was given millions of dollars for that kind of work. You have to ask yourself "why does that work?" Well it works because of the problem. It's such a pressing problem that people will grasp and pay money and anything in the hopes that it might work because what's the problem? Well the problem is it goes like this... And we'll talk about the cognitive science about this. "I know I should lose weight. There is the evidence, it's clear [and] makes rational sense to me. I should lose weight. Yes yes. OK. I should lose weight." And then I go home and there sitting on the counter is some chocolate cake! And that doesn't quite capture it... It's not just sitting there. It's like (HUMMING NOISE) humming with its chocolaty goodness! ...And it's drawing me in... It's sort of (TRACTOR BEAM NOISE) ...And so you end up, often, just eating the chocolate cake!

Or another example you might be familiar with: procrastination. I know my students face this! "Yes. Yes. I have an essay due in two weeks. Two weeks! There it is. I should work on my essay tonight because if I start now I won't be rushed. I know if I'm not rushed I'll do a great job. I'll have more time to research. I'll be able to change my mind. I should start working on my essay tonight". Somebody calls up: "Want to go out for some drinks?"... "Yeah!!!" ...And you're gone and you procrastinate. So we are clearly beset by this inner conflict and Plato... Plato gets this great insight. He gets the insight that there seems to be a deep connection between inner conflict and self-deception; self-destructive self-deception. So Plato posits an idea that has become, again, so natural to us that we just say "Oh yeah of course!" But, again, he comes up with it! Plato comes up with the idea that we have different centers in the psyche and each center has a different cognitive relationship to the world and motivates us in different ways and he represented this mythologically. He said that there's a part of us that's like a man. I want to say something here right now because although Athenian democracy is horribly sexist and treats women horribly. So remember that context because what's intriguing is how much Plato was able to rise above that. Plato argues that women should rule as well as men; that women should be in the army as well as men. Now he doesn't perfectly free himself, of course, from sexism but given the context I think it's very admirable the degree to which he was able to do it.

Nevertheless he does use this idea of "a man" that's in your "head" and represents "reason" and that man is motivated by truth; [by] what's true. So he cares about truth and falsity. That's what he cares about, and scope - he can go into very long term goals. And he can deal with very abstract entities like your health or a essay. Very abstract entities. So this is "health" and "I should lose weight; It's gonna take me several months and I should do that because it's true that if I lose weight my health will improve". So why don't I just do it? Well, because opposed to it there's "a monster" and it's, sort of, in my stomach and genitals and it represents appetite. Now it does not work in terms of truth and falsity. It works in terms of pleasure and pain. [A] very different set of norms. Now there's nothing wrong with operating in terms of pleasure and pain. If you don't have a capacity to work in terms of pleasure and pain you're dead. So Plato doesn't think the appetites are evil. What he wants you to grasp is that they operate according to different principles than the man. OK so they presume long term goals? No, immediate! "When do you want the cake?" "I want it now. Now! I'm going to the party NOW." It works in terms of very superficial properties: "All I care about the cake is how it looks, it looks yummy!" I don't have some in-depth analysis... It's just "Aahhhhmmmmmm" (gobble noise) "chocolate, sweet YUM!!" So, very superficial! Again, that's not necessarily bad! Often in life and death situations a superficial appraisal is exactly what you need. I don't need to know a great deal about the inner workings of the tiger. I just need to know "Oh crap! Deadly! Get out of here..."

Now, notice how these are opposite to each other! Now I put a space between here, obviously because I'm setting you up for a third thing that Plato talks about. But before I do I wanted you to notice what Plato is doing with Socrates here. So Socrates didn't really have a theory. He had a practice. Socrates' practice, if you remember last time, was to get people to realize how often what they find salient is rushing ahead of what they find truthful. Remember that? What Plato was saying is "that's not a coincidence. The reason why that happens is because we have different parts of the psyche that work this way". This (MONSTER) makes things salient to you. Really catchy. Motivates you urgently right now. This (MAN IN HEAD) is the part that you use to understand! And see here's what most of us face. This monster is constantly racing ahead of what we understand! Do you see? What Plato is doing is he's explaining why we are so prone to bullshit! Why salience often exceeds understanding! We are perpetually vulnerable. Now we'll talk about why we have this.

Now, let's go back to the dieting example. What helps though? There's certain strategies you can use of course to improve... (How you frame things, and we'll talk about that later.) But typically what's one of the things that improves people's chances of losing weight? They join a group. Like Weight Watchers. Or they join a study group to avoid the procrastination. Why? Well here's an important thing. You are not just a biological creature. As I've been arguing throughout, you're also cultural. You have evolved across... You are the result of evolution that has crossed several species in which you come wired to learn about abstract symbol systems, use technologies (both physical and psycho-technologies). So you have a lot of powerful cultural, socio-cultural motivations.

So he compared this to a "lion" (between "man" and "monster"), because lions are social animals. Lions have been associated with honor because that's what this works in terms of. It works in terms of honor and shame. Honor is to be respected by those you consider your peers. To be shamed is when you feel that you have failed to be gained respect from your peers. We should not confuse shame and guilt. They are not synonyms. Guilt is when you feel that you have failed to meet your own ideal of who you should be. Shame is when you have lost the capacity to get respect from your peers. Now what's interesting is that, and this is Plato's point.... That this part of us can pursue intermediate scope. Because we're cooperating with other people, it doesn't operate just short term. But it doesn't quite operate abstract theoretical, it works within the socio-cultural domain. So it can pursue mid-term goals. Not just immediate goals, but not abstract symbolic goals, but socially agreed upon shared goals. And it works on the cultural aspects of things. Not their abstract meaning or they're superficial meaning but they're cultural. Their shared meaning. The way we can share it with other people.

Notice how much you want to share with other people your experience. I've been saying this for years... I still see people doing it, even people that I've talked to. People will reliably do this. They'll be eating something, they're trying it for the first time and they'll go "oh this tastes horrible, have some!" They'll give it to somebody else because you want to have that - in addition to whatever immediate response you're having - you want there to be a shared cultural meaning to what's happening in your experience, and there's good reason for that because as I've been arguing throughout your connection to distributed cognition is one of the most powerful ways you increase your cognitive power over the world.

Now, he sort of represents this ("lion") as being like in the chest. And this has to do because we feel a lot of our social emotions and motivation in the chest: pride and honor and shame... Things like that. Now "this" is problematic for us. What should go "there" (between Reason and Appetite)? Because the Greek word doesn't have a direct English equivalent. Sometimes people put "emotion" there. That's not quite right. Sometimes people put the word "spirit" there. That's closer, but the problem with "Spirit" is it has all kinds of spooky associations with it. I'm not going to translate it. I'm just going to leave it as is. This is your THYMOS. This is the part of you That is motivated Socially.

So, Here's an interesting idea Plato has... There is a lot of potential conflict in this system. There's a lot of potential conflict in this system. What you want to do is get it properly ordered. When you don't order it, think about what this means... Salience and understanding and participation get out of sync with each other. And then we're subject to bullshitting; we're subject to self-deception. The more inner conflict we have, the more likely we are to engage in self-deception, because these two (HEAD AND MONSTER) are out of sink and the more likely we will become very egocentric. So when people are suffering, especially inner conflict anxiety, they tend to become more self-centered even selfish. Because when you are experiencing inner conflict you're getting a sort of threat signal, "things aren't right", and when people are under threat they tend to become very egocentric. Again that's adaptive.

Now, we're going to come back to this. But we want to do a little bit of cognitive science. "Why do we...? What? Why?" (MOCK QUESTIONING OF PROCESSES ON THE BOARD) OK... It makes sense that we have this (LION, IN THE MIDDLE) as a motivation because we're social creatures. One of our greatest adaptations is our ability to cooperate together. So, you throw me into the African savannah on my own and (PFFFFFT SOUND) I'm dead soon because I don't have great claws, I don't have great teeth. I'm like... What a silly structure, right? I'm teetering around on two feet almost always losing my balance. I can't run quickly. Everybody can see me from a long distance because I'm towering above the grass. My throat and my vital organs are nicely exposed for any predator. This is a bad!! But you know what I can do? I can get together with a bunch of other human beings and we can get some pointy sticks and some dogs and then we can kill everything on the planet!

Hyperbolic Discounting / Temporal Discounting

Our ability to work together has always been adaptive. So we know why this (LION) is here. But why does this (MONSTER) have so much more power than this (MAN). Well, there's actually an important reason and this has to do with some work started by Ainslie and others on what's called "Hyperbolic discounting" or "temporal discounting" and what easily and other people found is [that] this pattern of behavior exists across species. It's not just something that human beings engage in. You can find it across species. It's even more universal than something like flow. It's not just universal amongst human beings. It's universal across many species. So this is a deeply adaptive mechanism.

What does this mechanism look like? So this is called discounting (VERTICAL AXIS), and this is a little bit confusing. Discounting is how much you are reducing the salience of a stimulus. The more you discount the less salient something is, the less it stands out for you, the less it grabs your attention. This axis (HORIZONTAL) is time in a tense sense. This is the present (LEFT AT ORIGIN) and this is the future (EXTENDING OUT TO THE RIGHT).

So what I'm showing you is what's happening to discounting which means how much a stimulus is losing its salience. And this is what it looks like. This is what the curve looks like (DRAWS CURVE ON BOARD). So a present stimulus has a large degree of salience to it - Remember the monster? Something that's in the future, especially as it gets into the far future, much less salience to it. That's why the monster can override the man. But why? Why do we have this? Well this is actually very, very adaptive. That's why it's a universal phenomena. How is it adaptive? So I want you to think about doing... you're about to do something here... I don't smoke - I do diet, but I don't smoke - but let's suppose I was doing this... Here's 'right now' and I decide to smoke a cigarette. And that could have one of two options: I get a cough here, or I don't get a cough there, or something like that... now notice - and I'm doing this very simplistically! I'm not saying that whenever you do something there's only two effects from it! I'm just doing it simplisticly, in a very simple manner so you can understand the point. OK? Now, the probability of now happening is 100 percent because it's happening. The probability of each one of these happening (cough/no cough) is 50 percent. Now if it goes this way then there's two more effects, the probability of each one of these is twenty five... and so on... So do you see what's happening. As you move into the future the probability of any one of these events occurring is going down very fast.

Now here's the thing. This is this is actually adaptive. You should pay less attention to things that are less probable [of] happening. That actually makes good sense. The less probable something, an event, is the less attention you should give it. Imagine if you didn't have this! Imagine if you didn't screen off things that were low in probability. Think about how you would be overwhelmed by all the possibilities. So if I get out of bed I might twist my ankle slightly and that might slow me down getting to class. And if I slow down getting to class that might have an impact on my mark. And that might cause me to fail my course. And then if I fail my course that might disrupt my degree and that might cause me to fail in my career. And then I'm going to end up in Buffalo alone married to a lamp or something!!! Now that's ridiculous right? Now it's possible. It's not impossible! Except the last part! I can't really get married to a lamp.

In fact here's a hypothesis I have. (Notice the word I used please.) I think one of the things that goes wrong in people who experience generalized anxiety disorder is that this (HYPERBOLIC DISCOUNTING) is not working well enough: It's not screening off and making low salient, low probability events! So highly anxious people find things salient that they shouldn't. They find low probability things too salient. So this is really adaptive This is why you have it. But there's a problem with it. This is a problem with any adaptive machine and you're going to see later why this is the case...

OK let's go back to the cigarette smoker... I smoke, and through a long chain (OF FORKING PROBABILITIES) this is me dying in Hamilton. This is the event of me dying in Hamilton. Lung cancer in my left lung. I'm not going to write this all out. This is me dying in Hamilton of cancer in my right lung. This is me dying in Toronto. Cancer left right. This is me dying in Burlington because... And so on.... There's all these different deaths. Now here's the thing. Each one of those deaths has a low probability of occurring, right? Do you see that? Each one of those deaths has a low probability of occurring. But here's the thing about me, and I bet you I share it with you, I don't want to just avoid death in Hamilton - although that would be a particularly bad death - I don't want to avoid just dying in Hamilton - I'm from Hamilton so I'm allowed to do tha - I want to avoid death! I want to avoid all these deaths. Think carefully - and I'm using this very technically, but I'm speaking accurately - I want to avoid death in the abstract. I don't want to avoid this death or this death or this death or this death. I want to avoid all possible deaths. I want to avoid death in the abstract.

Now here's the thing... The chance of each one of these deaths is very low. But if you pull them together the chance that cigarette smoking will lead to a premature death is very very high. So what does that mean for me The hyperbolic discounting blinds me to this because it's not very probable. Blinds me to this because it's not very probable blinds me to each one of these because each, individually, they're not very probable. But in blinding me to each you know it it blinds me to? What they share in common. It blinds me to what they all have in common and what they all have in common is a premature death. By blinding me to what they have in common - what they abstractly share - this adaptive machine actually has me take another puff on a cigarette and sets me on the course towards cancer or emphysema.

Do you see? Now please remember this. This is going to be a theme we're going be coming back to again and again and again; I mentioned it before when I talked about Flow. The very machinery that makes you adaptive is the machinery that makes you prey to self deceptive self-destructive behavior. Part of what meaning and wisdom have to do is they have to wrestle with that unavoidable reality. The unavoidable reality is [that] you can't you can't throw this away. You can't throw away this machinery because if you throw this adaptive machinery away you're doomed. You can't get out of bed because you're overwhelmed by crippling anxiety. You can't throw it away but you can't just let it run untutored because then you smoke the cigarette, you eat the cake, you go to the party and you harm yourself in a self-deceptive, self-destructive fashion.

So what do you need to do? Here's the monster. What you need, and what we developed, is we developed an ability - especially here [in the] frontal lobe area - to form abstract thought. To abstract what is in common in the distant future and symbolically represent it to ourselves. That's what the man does. The man can grasp the abstract thought of avoiding the premature death. But the man is so weak! The man's weak because you don't want him to be able to shut this off. You want him to be able to override it, but in a very minimal sense because that's so adaptive. So Plato is deeply Right! In fact I think Plato so deeply right [that] that's why we keep discovering this division.

Optimization Strategy

Freud divides the psyche into these three things: a super ego, the ego the id. There is a movement in the 90s in neuroscience to talk about the reptilian brain, the mammal brain, and the neo-cor[tex]... We keep rediscovering this platonic division. But Plato had an interesting idea. He said "you know what, The man can learn." The man is capable of grasping theory, abstract symbolic representation of the case. And the Lion really isn't capable of theory but what the lion can do is the lion can be trained. You can use your reason to train your lion. How do you do this? Well this is where Socrates is so relevant. And this is why Plato writes dialogues. Because what Socrates did was he took reason into the social arena. Socrates goes into the marketplace and dialogues with people. There is this social interaction happening and the social interaction is being wed to rational reflection and to inspiring people to try and overcome self-deception. And so using a Socratic Method, the man can train the lion. And then the man and the lion together can tame the monster. Not kill it. But tame it. And what you want is you want that teaching of the man, the training of the lion and the taming of the monster so that something happens. You reduce as much as possible the inner conflict. Plato describes wisdom as an internal Justice within the psyche in which the man has been taught, the line has been trained and the monster has been tamed so they can get along together as much as is possible.

This is what's known as an optimization strategy. If I let the monster rule, everything else shrinks to a minimum. What you want is you want the right coordination of the parts of the psyche so that each can live as much as it possibly can without putting the other two in danger. When you can get that inner harmony, that optimal relation, so each is living as much as it can without putting the other ones in danger, this mutuality of the most existence, for Plato, this is to experience a fullness of being. This is to be as fully alive as you possibly can be. It is also to experience a kind of peace because your inner conflict has dropped.

Reducing Inner Conflict

So this is very powerful. One of your meta-drives - in addition to all the drives people have - they want to have whatever they're having without inner conflict. They want to be at peace with themselves. This of course is a powerful meta-drive that you can tap into. Because if you have a strong drive within you to get this inner justice, to realize wisdom, to get this fullness of being, then I can appeal to it. I can appeal to it Socratically. But notice that this has an important component to it because as I reduce inner conflict my self-deception goes down. And as I reduce my inner conflict I'm less egocentric. Both of these things are making me more in touch with reality. So I'm reducing inner conflict, but the effect that's having is [that] I'm getting a clearer vision of reality because my self-deception and egocentrism is going down. Now that matters because, as we've seen before, you want to be in touch with reality. You have a meta-drive. Philosophers have various thought experiments for talking about this.

One I'll sometimes do with students as I'll say: "Imagine the following: you go home one day and your parents say 'come on, come here I want to show you something'. And you say 'what?' And they take you to this hallway that you've walked down a thousand times before. And they press on a part of the wall that for you has never meant anything and when they press a door opens and there's a room in there and there's TV screens and there's videotape and there's pictures of you at all stages of your life. And then they say the following to you: 'Just before you were born, nine months before you were born, we were hired by the government to have you. This is part of an experiment. The government gave us scripts to memorize. And we did this as a part of a government experiment. We don't actually love you or care about you at all. We've just been following the script. Doing what we've been doing because the government has hired us to do this. But we're but we're obligated, now that you've turned 21 to tell you the truth! We don't care about you! Now, we still have to keep doing this when we leave the room. You can forget all about this if you want... And we'll just say what we've always said we'll tell you how much we love you. We'll make sure that your needs are met. Just know right now that none of that is how we truly feel, Okay?'"

Now I ask people "how would you feel?" And they'd go "well I'd be devastated!!" But I say "but nothing's changed! They're going to still say all the same words to you. They're still gonna treat you exactly the same way..." And what people say is "Well it's no longer real!"

Here's another thing I'll do with people, I'll say: "How many of you are in satisfying personal relationships?" Quite a few people put up their hands and then I'll say: "how many of you would want to know that your partner was cheating on you even if that meant the destruction of your relationship?" Almost everybody puts their hand up. They're willing to destroy this relationship, that's giving them so much happiness, because they don't want it to be fake. They want it to be real. And we'll talk later about why this need to be real is so important. But I want you to understand what Plato is talking about here. Notice that two of your most important meta-drives are being met in the Platonic model. You're reducing inner-conflict and you're becoming more in touch with reality. Now that feeds on itself in an important way. I get better on picking up on "real patterns" in the world. My skill at picking up on real patterns is improved because I get a clearer vision, I get better at tracking real patterns. But what does that mean? Well, as I start to get more inner peace, I start to be able to pick up on real patterns. I get the skill, the vision ability. But of course what I can do is I can apply that to myself: Socratic self knowledge. As I get better at picking up on real patterns, I can apply that to myself. I can get better knowledge of myself.

As I get better knowledge of myself, I can better teach the man. To be a good teacher, you have to know your student better. As I get better knowledge of myself, I can teach the man, I can better train the lion, I can better tame the monster. So notice what's happening here: I improve a little bit; my skill at picking up on real patterns. I use that skill on myself to increase my self-knowledge and get better patterns, which means I reduce my inner conflict. As my inner conflict goes down, I get a clearer vision of reality. As I get a clearer vision of reality. I get better at picking up on real patterns, which means I improve myself knowledge, which means I reduce my inner-conflict... and you see what happens? This starts to spin like 'this' - These two sides feed into each other and reinforce each other and improve each other. And this is wonderful for you because you're becoming less inner-conflicted and you're coming more in contact with reality.

The Parable / Myth of the Cave

Plato has a famous story. A parable. A myth, in the sense that I'm talking about in this series. It's called "The Parable or the Myth of the Cave", and it's a way of talking about this - the relationship between these things. Notice two things here... You need to remember this! Notice how much self transformation and getting more in contact with the world are interconnected. This is participatory knowing! I'm not over here as an impartial passive observer, just forming true beliefs about this; I have to change myself in order to see the world and then the world changes and then that puts a demand on me to change myself. And as I change myself the world discloses itself in a new way. And so on and so forth. This is participatory knowing. I'm not just changing my mind. This is not just knowing with my mind, this is knowing with the very machinery of myself.

What's Plato's myth? Here is the surface (drawing on the board) ...pathway going down ...that leads into this inner cavern ...There's a fire here ...There's people chained to chairs so all they can do is look at the back of the cave ...Then there's other people walking in front of the fire and it's casting shadows onto the cave because of the firelight and they're hearing the echoes... And what Plato says is "people take the shadows and the echoes to be the real things because they're chained. They're caught up". But what happens is an individual gets free! And what does that individual do? That individual turns and sees the fire. That allows them to realize that the shadows and the echoes aren't the real things. They're shadows and echoes! And what happens is the person's ability to notice the real patterns - as opposed to the merely correlational patterns - is changed. Remember we talked about that? People start to see... They start to realize "oh these are what real patterns feel like, as opposed to what I thought was real". You get the taste for reality developing, and that taste means they start to look around and explore! And then they realize there's a path there's light coming through it and then they start a journey upward. Now notice how this journey works. When they take a step forward, they're blinded by the light. And they have to wait. They have to wait for their eyes to adjust. The self has to be transformed. And then once the eyes have adjusted they can see how to go and then they take another step and then they're blinded again. And there's this slow process and Plato kept talking about... At various stages they have to stop because they're blinded and then they adjust and then they gain the ability to see where they couldn't see before. It's this participatory transformation I talked about, and eventually they come up here and they look around.

And what are they looking for? They want to see the source of the real light. The light that's allowing them to pick up on the real patterns. Where is this light that shows the reality of things coming from? And not only is it showing the reality of things, this light is the source of the life of things. Whereas this source? Of understanding and light? And they look around and of course they glimpse, because they can't stare at it directly, the Sun. And it's overwhelming. It's beyond their comprehension. But they see it and it fills them with a kind of awe. And of course what they do is they go back down into the tunnel rapidly, and they get here, and they try to tell their fellow prisoners what they saw. But of course they're stumbling around because their eyes don't work anymore in that darkness. And they're saying things that make absolutely no sense to these people. And so they ridicule them and if they could they would kill that individual. And of course this is an allusion to Socrates.

First of all notice that, contrary to what people think, "enlightend-ment" is not just an Eastern idea. This (Myth of the Cave) is a myth of enlightenment: of coming into the light. It's a myth of self-transcendence and self-transformation. It's a myth of coming - and I mean "myth" in the sense that we've been talking about - it's a parable of coming in to greater and greater contact with reality. See, notice the story is "You pick up on real patterns that challenges you, it blinds you and then you transform to pick them up and then you're unable to move forward, then you confront those real patterns again... And you're doing that cycle that I talked about. There's a Greek word for this 'ascent' called "Anagoge". This is the "Anagogic", or the "Anagogical" aspect of Plato's idea.

Notice what he's doing... He's taking the movement between the illusory world and the real world and he's turning it into this account of how you can make your lives rationally more meaningful. You can become more fully alive and more at peace in conjunction, in concert with, you coming more and more in contact with the real patterns that make sense of reality. You can satisfy, in a mutually supporting fashion, your desire, your meta-drive for inner peace and your meta-drive to be in contact with reality. This is what Plato calls wisdom - a fullness of being. We become more and more real ourselves as we become more and more at peace so that we can more and more realize the real patterns. We conform ourselves more and more to reality... And you may say "this is kind of a crazy story!" Is it? Is it? ...because here's a story from 1999: There's all these people and they're trapped in a world of shadows and unreality. It's called "The Matrix" and they need to wake up and be welcomed to the real world and the character that's in there is "Neo" from Neoplatonism: the "new man". People flocked to that movie and all it is, is "this" (points at board and The Myth of the Cave) with some great martial arts and some interesting science fiction special effects!

This parable... This is what I mean about a myth! This isn't a story from the past right. The reason why you go to The Matrix, and people still watch it and talk about it is because it's a myth. It sings to you. It speaks to you now because it talks about perennial problems that you face. Problems of the psyche being in conflict with each other. The problem of being caught up in illusion, out of touch with reality, and it presents the possibility of liberation and self-transcendence and a fullness and enhanced meaning in life. It's a myth of wisdom that is perennially relevant because it's not about the past. It's about what's happening in you right here, right now.

I want you to notice a couple of things about this. I want you to notice, first, how reason and spirituality are not opposed to each other here. They're inseparably bound together. I want you to notice how Plato is putting Socrates - The Socratic project (because Socrates is how you get "the Man" to teach "the lion", how you get to realize your own foolishness) - with Pythagoras. Because here's the self-transcendence; the rising above yourself. The radical transformation of your consciousness and cognition that Pythagoras talked so much about. Now this is such intrancing and enriching and empowering myth - a perennial parable - that it's going to be a constant refrain throughout the West. People are going be coming back to it again and again and again.

I want to talk now more about the Pythagorean side of Plato just to bring out a few things. So, Plato talks about... He uses a term "idos", and that gets translated into the word "form", and when people hear the word form they hear "shape". It also gets translated into the word "idea", when they hear idea they think of "concept", or an idea in your head. That's not what Plato means. He's using that word, [and] It's much closer to our word like a "paradigm"... he's using a word to talk about the real patterns that we're discovering in reality. Now there's an interesting thing about these real patterns: They're both the access - the pathway we have to understanding something; the pathway we have for getting at the reality of something (because those are the real patterns), but they're not just the affordance of our knowing, the real patterns are also what make something be what it is.

Structural-Functional Organisation

This is work also from the psychology of concepts and how people understand things. We asked people what a bird is. They'll say the following. "Oh yeah well I know what a bird is, right... it has wings feathers, beak and it flies! There you go! That's a bird!". They give you what's called a 'feature list'. And then you take that... And then you can get involved in a very long process - which I think has largely been something of a mistake (we'll come back to this), No. Not totally (not a mistake) because it's important in science - but I'm thinking that the way I understand something is by having a definition of it in terms of the correct features. Now there's a problem with this. Although people believe that this (feature list) is how they know what a bird is, they're mistaken in an important sense because I could satisfy this definition in the following way: I could put a couple of wings on this table, a bunch of feathers, a beak and then throw it all up in the air! I have wings, beak, feathers and flight! Do I have a bird? No, I don't! I have a bloody mess because what's missing is something more important. What's missing is the structural, functional organization... The way all those things hang together... The way they're structured together so that the bird functions as a whole. What's missing from this is the "Structural-Functional Organization" that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The Germans have a great word for this - "Gestalt". In English we don't! The Greeks have a good word for this (S-FO): the word "logos", although a word that's being discussed a lot today. I think it needs to be discussed a little bit more carefully.

Now here's the thing I want you to realize. Remember we talked about how you pick up on real patterns, and a lot of those patterns you're not picking up an explicit sense [of]. You know what a bird is. You have some sense of the logos of [a bird]. But if I ask you "what is that logos? What is the structural-functional organization? And most of what makes a bird a bird is found in that logos. But if I ask you "what is the logos of a bird? How do these all structure together so they function as a whole in which the whole transcends simply an accumulation of it['s parts..]?" You can't tell me!! That's what the research shows in fact. You can't tell me! Your grasp is intuitive. So notice something very interesting here. You often have an intuitive grasp of the logos of things and the logos is "form" where form doesn't mean "shape", form means something more like "formula". It means the structural functional organization and that form, that logos, is not only how the thing is integrated together, it's how your mind can be integrated with it. Remember this logos, this real pattern, is not only how you know something but it's also the pattern that makes it be what it is.

So this is a very different idea of knowing. You saw it already in the myth of the Cave. But when I really know something I conform to it. I become like it in some important way. I get in my mind the same real pattern that's in the thing because that real pattern is what allows me to come to know the thing and to enter into that reciprocal realization with it.

Now this is going to be an important idea. This is an idea that's going be taken up by Plato's greatest disciple. Somebody we're gonna talk about next time when we're together and that's Aristotle. Thank you very much for your time.

Other helpful resources about this episode:
Notes on Bevry
Summary and Transcript on awakeningfromthemeaningcrisis.com

Welcome again to awakening from the meaning crisis. This is episode four. So last time we discussed the axial revolution and in particular how it moved into ancient Israel. We talked about the advent of the psycho-technology of time as cosmic history, as a narrative in which there is an open future and in which your actions - the moral quality of your actions - can determine that future in which you participate, along with God, in the creation of that future. This brings with it the idea of progress, more progress, the increase in justice. And this is how we move from the last real world to the more real world. For the ancient Israelites it's understood as a journey through time and space. Historically, we talked about the kind of God that the God of the Bible is; how he is, in fact, the god of this open future. And particularly he intervenes at moments of KAIROS - turning points where he tries to bring people back on course.

We talked about the sense of faith as the sense of being on course; to be able to sense how history is flowing and unfolding; how you are participating in that story how you are shaping it and being shaped by it in a tightly reciprocal manner, and that SIN is the deviation from that and what is needed is to wake us back up to bring us back on course and we talked about how the prophets represented that and they represent, increasingly, that vision - that Axial vision of the moral redemption of history. We then turned to look at how the Axial revolution was coming into ancient Greece and in particular two figures. We're looking at the figures of Pythagoras and Socrates. Last time we talked about Pythagoras and how he represents an exaptation of that shamanic behavior of altering your state of consciousness, entering into something like soul flight, but how for Pythagoras that had been allied with the psycho-technology that was being emphasized in Greece: Rational argumentation to discovery of rational patterns in the world and Pythagoras of course is famous for discovering that music can be expressed mathematically: he is at least associated, his school, with things like the Pythagorean theorem; this idea that we can enhance our capacity to pick up on the real patterns in the world even if those are not readily apparent to us. And by coming into a direct awareness of those patterns, through our rational insight and faculties, we can transform ourselves.

And Pythagoras changes the shamanic soul flight into a release, a freedom from imprisonment in this world which he represented as being imprisoned in the body and we fly free and so soul flight has been turned into a radical kind of self transcendence in which we are liberating ourselves from the illusory world as we more and more conform to the rational patterns that dictate the structure of reality. The other person who is going to figure in is - in fact figures even more largely in the Axial revolution in ancient Greece - is the figure of Socrates. Socrates and Pythagoras are gonna be the two most important influences on Plato and if you were to put Western civilization on to two feet, the one foot is the Bible the other foot is the works of Plato.

So Socrates is a very unusual figure. There are as many interpretations of Socrates as there are of people like Jesus. Even in his time there are many difference Socratic movements groups of people who claim to be adherents and disciples of Socrates. He is an enigmatic, interesting, provocative and maddeningly frustrating figure to try and get clear on. So I want it understood that when I'm talking about Socrates I'm talking about a particular interpretation that I share with other people. I think it can be well argued for. But, as I said, whether or not this was the full historical Socrates it's very hard to know and in some sense this isn't that relevant because it's the Socrates I'm going to talk about that has become part of the cognitive and existential grammar of the West.

So getting into the figure of Socrates is kind of interesting. A good way to start is to see how provocative a person he was... is to do his biography. So, as many of you probably know, ancient Greece was the world in which people believed they could speak to the God through oracles. The oracles were human, or otherwise natural phenomena, that represented how the gods were speaking to humanity. One of the most important oracles is at Delphi and I've been to Delphi. If you get a chance at some point in your life, go to Delphi. It will really put the zap on your brain because the way the landscape as organized, really does have a transformative impact on your consciousness and your sense of self and your sense of place in the world.

So the situation, the site of Delphi is itself very transformative. What would happen is a woman, Pythia, would sit in a cave or something similar to it - again the "cave". Always the caves! Like the association with shamanism. Remember that shamanism is associated with cave art; ritual practices taking place in caves like Pythagoras - so, she's in a cave, she's sitting on a tripod. There might be some intoxicating gases in there. She's eating perhaps eucalyptus leaves. She's probably going into some kind of psychedelic trance state - that seems plausible. And then what happens is people would - because that is a cross-cultural thing: We find that people are thought to have access to the gods by being able to enter into altered states of consciousness - So what would happen is people would come in, they would bring their questions, they would pose questions to Pythia. She would then speak on behalf of the gods and then after speaking on behalf of the gods the people around her would... there would be males who would interpret what she had to say!

So, the thing about being an oracle is [that] if you want to stay in business, you don't want to give clear answers! So if I come to an oracle and I ask a specific question, I don't want to give a specific answer. I think there's a very good reason for that. I don't think that people actually can foresee the future in any kind of supernatural manner. So typically if you go to an oracle and say "Should I marry Cassandra?" You'll get an answer or something like: "Sometimes the Spring comes early!". Or "should I invest in this project?". You'll get an answer like "sometimes the squirrels do not gather too many nuts!". You don't know what to make of this. And it might provoke an insight in you, it might provoke a reflection in you. And whether or not events go one way or the other you can often retrospectively reinterpret them as having been consonant with the Delphic oracle. So the Oracle seems to be providing foresightful information, but usually of course it's not.

So, what happens is a bunch of Socrates's friends - he's already famous when we "meet" him in his biography - a bunch of Socrates' friends decide to go to the Oracle and ask the oracle a question about Socrates. So they make the trek to Delphi and in my mind I sort of picture this almost like half jokingly! That they want to see what kind of crazy answer they're going to get from the Oracle about Socrates. So they go all the way up to the Oracle and then they pose their question. And the question they pose [is] "Is there anyone wiser than Socrates?", and what they're looking for, or perhaps not what they're looking for, what they're expecting is some very cryptic, obscure answer. Like "the snow melts farther in the south!" or some bizarre answer. And instead they get this answer: "No! There's no human being wiser than Socrates!" Crystal clear Answer! And so you can imagine how shocked they are!!

So they travel back of course to relate this story to Socrates and here's something telling. First of all, that's just telling in and of itself, that the Delphic Oracle would give such a clear answer! Now it's a qualified answer: There's no 'human being' wiser than Socrates. But, when they go back to Socrates, Socrates' response is also profound. Interesting. So if we're honest... If we're honest and we found out from some sacred authority that we are very wise, most of us would be very self-congratulatory. Like "yeah! I knew it!!". And how do I know that? Because one of the most persistent biases [we] have is that people believe they're above average intelligence. And of course most people must be wrong about that, because most people have, well, average intelligence! But if you ask anybody "is your intelligence average?" They will tell you "No, I have above average intelligence". More so of course even for ideas such as wisdom. But Socrates isn't self-congratulatory. He doesn't say "yep, I knew it all along! There's the confirmation I so want!". Now that's really telling in of itself because - to quote a friend of mine LEO FERRARO - we are entering the age of "confirmation porn" in which people are continuously seeking confirmation from their beliefs and part of what's going on to the meaning crisis, and the ever expansion of bullshit in our society, is precisely because we have technologically enhanced through social media our capacity for gratifying our bias for confirmation.

We'll talk about this later, but we all carry a terrific bias called the "confirmation bias" in which we seek information that confirms our beliefs and we tend to avoid information that challenges it. And part of what is going wrong right now in our culture is that through a lot of factors that are endemic to the meaning crisis we are accelerating and exacerbating our propensity for falling into the confirmation bias. And I think that's what my friend Leo means by "confirmation porn". We have a kind of pornography - if we take pornography to mean the gratuitous and unmorally justified satisfaction of a desire, then we are living in an age of confirmation porn.

Socrates is a corrective to that. Here is a great temptation. He is presented the word of God that he is wise - wiser than anyone else. And rather than accepting it and giving into that confirmation bias, his immediate response is to challenge it. The challenge is tricky for Socrates. Socrates is no atheist, although he's gonna be charged with athiesm when he's put on trial, but he does believe in the gods. He's gonna do something very important about the gods. He's going to transform the Greek gods into moral exemplars. But what that means for Socrates is the gods can't lie. The gods can't lie. For Socrates, and this is one of the ways he's going to transform the understanding of the gods and Plato along with him, the Greek gods as they are represented in standard Greek myths aren't very accurate portrayals because those gods lie and they cheat and they betray... Zeus cheats on his wife etc... But for Socrates, and this is part of the Axial revolution, the gods represent moral exemplars. They represent ways in which we can self transcend and morally improve. So for Socrates it's therefore axiomatic that the gods can't lie to him. So the gods are telling the truth. This wedding - and this is something we're going to come back to: the way the Greeks wed Divinity to reality, that truth and sacredness are bound up together - is gonna be really pivotal. Think about how much we separate those two in our culture. But for Socrates they are inter-penetrating. So the gods can't lie. They have to be disclosures of the truth. But on the other hand, Socrates has significant and profound self-knowledge. One of the things I have tattooed on my back is "Know Thyself". It was inscribed at the Delphic Oracle, but Socrates makes it his personal slogan. For life.

There's been some recent things written about this and I think they've largely reflected a misunderstanding of what Know thyself means... Know thyself doesn't mean "become aware of your biography". We all are prey to that and we have a culture that exacerbates that narcissism. We'd like to stroke the ego of our personal autobiography and store up treasured moments that we can point to [for] other people that indicate our uniqueness and our specialness and why the universe should specially take care of and pay attention to us.

That's not what "Know thyself" means. It doesn't mean that kind of stroking of your autobiographical ego. Know thyself is much more a kind of direct participatory knowing. It means understanding how you operate. It's not - if I were to use a literary analogy - it's not like your autobiography, it's more like your owner's manual. It's how do you operate. What are the principles. What are the powers, perils. What are the constraints that are operating within you. Socrates, as we'll see, thought that that kind of self knowledge was central. And this is the core of the axial revolution. The Axial revolution is this critical awareness and sense of responsibility of one's own cognition.

So, on one hand the gods can't lie when they say Socrates is the wisest human being. But on the other hand Socrates has deep self knowledge. He has Socratic self knowledge in which he is convinced that he is not wise. And he is not willing to give up on either one of those. And that's a telling thing about him. That tells you something very central about him. He holds these two together: his existential self-knowledge and this disclosure from reality are going [to]... Neither one of them is going to be given a greater authority! They're going to be held together. So now Socrates faces a personal dilemma: a dilemma that goes to the core of who and what he is. How can it be that he is the wisest human being when he knows that he is not wise?

So this is a very deep dilemma that he set for himself. It's a kind of profound problem that he seeks to solve. And what that means is that Socrates starts on a quest. He starts on a quest of trying to determine how both of those things could be the case at the same time. Now the quest seems to have evolved very naturally into a way in which he interacted with those around him. What Socrates would do is he would go to people who claimed or [were] credited with being wise and he would ask them question. He invented, in fact, what has become known as the "Socratic method", also known as "Elenchus". The Socratic Method is a way of asking questions in order to try and draw somebody out.

We'll talk a little bit more about Elenchus in a minute but first I want to talk about the two types of people that we have good reason to believe Socrates was interacting [with] and what that can tell us about the Socratic notion of wisdom. And we're going to see how this Socratic notion of wisdom - this idea of self knowledge - is deeply bound up with how meaningful your life is. So, the two groups that Socrates, the two groups of people that were accredited as being wise, were "The philosophers" and "The Sophists" If you remember last time we talked about Pythagoras... Pythagoras actually invents the word "Philosophy". It comes from two Greek words: "Philia" and "Sophia".

This means "the friendship love of wisdom". So, Pythagoras creates a community around him. You create a community - distributed cognition - in which you interact with other people in order to try and pursue wisdom. A philosopher is someone who, in concert with others, is a lover of wisdom. So Socrates is interacting with the philosophers and in particular one group of philosophers (The Natural Philosophers - written on board) that come before him. In fact Socrates is regarded as creating a revolution in philosophy precisely for how he differed from the natural philosophers. And he is also doing the Socratic method with the Sophists, and you can see that this also comes from Sophia: Wisdom. It's where we get the word "sophisticated" from. The Sophists are also people who claim to be wise.

Now the natural philosophers are very interesting. The natural philosophers seem to represent a fundamental change in human cognition. So I'm going to take, as an example, one of the natural philosophers who is considered to be the first example of it - Thales. Now, because these guys are just as we're coming out of the dark age and they pre-date Socrates sometimes by a hundred couple hundred years or thereabouts, a lot of what we have from them is very fragmentary. We don't have very much. In fact you can put most of Thales' philosophy into three lines; into three sentences. I once taught this to a course of mine and one of my students went out and made a T-shirt in which they'd put all of Daly's philosophy on one T-shirt because that's how fragmentary it is!

Let's talk about these three fragments because they reveal something very important. One is "All is the Moist", the next is "The Load-Stone Has Psyche" (and this is important because this would "Psyche" which we now pronounce psyche is going to be the basis of the idea of psychology as a discipline) and finally "Everything is filled with gods" which sounds very pre-axial... almost shamanic! Now, what you have to pay attention to here is not 'what' Thales is saying, but what he says reveals about the kind of thinking he is creating. What does he mean by this: "all is the moist"? Of course there's controversy about all of this because it's fragmentary, it's old. But given how other people in the ancient world, like Aristotle, followed up on this, a plausible interpretation is "everything is made out of water". Everything is made out of water. Now that's false! Everything isn't made out of water. It's not just scientifically false it's kind of metaphysically false. Everything can't be made out of water or we wouldn't be able to identify water on its own! But put that aside. Think about this: what surrounds Ancient Greece? Water. We dig into the ground, what will you hit? Water. What falls from the sky? Water. What does everything need in order to live? Water. What can take the shape of any container you put it in? Water. So what I'm trying to get you to see is, although Thales' idea is false, it's highly rational. It's highly plausible. What he's doing is using his reason and his observation to come up with a plausible explanation of what the underlying substance is behind everything.

By the way, pay attention to this word (writes SUBSTANCE on the board)... this means "stands under". Another metaphor. It's related to lots of other words where we use "standing" to talk about... "understanding" for example! So, notice what he's doing here. He's not doing mythology. He's not generating a narrative about some divine agent. He's not saying this has happened because Zeus cheated on Herra and then Herra saught to... There is no story here! There's no mythological narrative. There's no divine agents involved. That's not how he's trying to explain or understand. Instead he's doing a rational analysis based on observation and he's trying to get at the underlying stuff that everything is made out of. Do you see what I'm showing you? What Thales is inventing - is there any other word for this? He's inventing how to think scientifically. How this happens is obscure. But that's what's happening. He's inventing the kind of thinking that we now - and I'm going to say it again - take it for granted as if it's natural. But he's inventing it!

What does this mean? "The Lodestone has Psyche"? So Lodestone is a natural form of magnet. What's interesting about magnets is that they can move themselves and they can move other things around them. The original meaning of this is, of course, breath or wind but what it ultimately refers to and came to refer to is anything that's living in the sense that it's self moving. That it can move itself and that it can therefore cause other things to move. So I can move myself and therefore I can make other things move. The magnet can move itself and it can make other things move. I'm aware of Psyche (Psuke) within me. I see the magnet doing something similar and therefore I conclude that magnet and I both share Psyche (Suki).

He's wrong! But that doesn't matter. This is a plausible, rational argument. Here he is trying to get at what we would now call the underlying force behind things. Please remember that by the way. That Psyche (Psuke) originally means your capacity for being able to move yourself and make other things move. You may ask "well why does that become the word for mind?" Psychology/ mind/ psuke... because the mind is that part of you which you can most move. It is the most self moving part of you and it's where all of your capacity to move other things starts. If I'm going to move this marker, my mind first moves itself and that drives me to move the marker. But that way of even thinking about me, so that I can start a science of the psyche starts with Thales. And what's this: "Everything is filled with [gods]?" ...this seems so scientific, John! ...and then you're throwing this at me! The gods! "Isn't that a throwback to mythology?" I don't think so. I don't think so. Look what he's doing here (points at the first two Thales philosophies on the board). Now, I need to introduce a term - I promised to try and keep the technicalities to a minimum - but we need a term here right. So "ontology" is the study of being; the structure of reality. Ontological analysis is when you use reasoning to try and get at the underlying structure of reality by getting at the underlying stuff and the underlying forces that are at work in it. So Thales is introducing the ontological analysis that drives the scientific revolution: what are scientists doing? They're trying to get at the underlying stuff... they're still trying to do it, right now! They're trying to get at the underlying forces. They're trying to see into the depths of reality. They're engaging in "Ontological Depth Perception". This doesn't mean... "Physical"...., this doesn't mean our normal perception into spatial depth. What I mean here is seeing with the mind into the depths of reality. "Ontological depth perception".

Now once you get that he's discovering this way - he's discovering, he's inventing this way of looking at the world that's going to bleed into right here right now - think about how powerful that way must be. Think of the power in that vision! He gets an access to the depths of reality and what is he saying? That provokes awe. That provokes wonder. That gives him a sense of connecting to what is most real. It helps him to make the most sense of things. And that's what it is to experience something as sacred. So this is powerful stuff.

Now, Socrates seems to have been influenced by a particular one of these natural philosophers called Anaxagoras who was in Athens just before Socrates. Anaxagoras declared that the sun wasn't a god, for example, that it was a hot rock and he got into a lot of trouble for things like this! Socrates seems to have enjoyed... More than enjoy! ...he seems to have been impressed by the Natural Philosophers commitment to getting at the truth. But ultimately Socrates.... he rejects this not because he rejects reasoned, rational analysis - he's going to engage in that himself multiple times. Or argumentation his whole Socratic method, as we'll see, is all about argumentation. What does he reject about the natural philosophers? They don't help him with his axial project.

See the problem with the natural philosophers is they give you truth without transformation. They give you facts. They give you knowledge, but they do not indicate how you become wise. They do not indicate how you overcome self-deception. They do not indicate, as Socrates would say, "how to become a good person". Now it's interesting how much people say that even now, even today! Sometimes in clear ways that are helpful, sometimes in confused and mixed up ways which are unhelpful. But the idea that our scientific world view, while giving us all kinds of knowledge, does not in any way train us for wisdom, does not tell us how to become wise. Does not tell us how to transcend ourselves and become better people. This is a common complaint, and we'll come back to it, about the scientific world view.

Socrates sees it even then. So here you have truth, but no relevance. ("TRUTH WITHOUT RELEVANCE" written on the board.) The truths that are discovered are not existentially relevant. They don't matter. They don't enable the cultivation of wisdom, the transformation and transcendence of the self. Now, Socrates' is interacting with the Sophist, which is famous, is a lot more antagonistic. This, when he talks about his relation here, it's much more the language - or the tone, at least that's how I read it - of disappointment. He was expecting more, and he found less. Here, and it's not clear how much this is Socrates and how much this is Plato who's writing about Socrates, but here the relationship is much more antagonistic. Now who are the sophists? Well if you remember we talked about when the Axial Revolution is coming to Greece you get the emergence of democracy, and in Athens the democracy is direct democracy. Now before we get too far into this we don't want to over glamorize this. Yes Athens is the beginning of democracy. But let's remember, if I was a woman the last place I would want to do well in the ancient world is Ancient Athens! Ancient Athens treats its women horribly. Just horribly! Sparta treats its women better than Athens. Democracy is only for Athenian adult males. Women, foreigners, anybody else - even if they're Greek - they're not considered to be worthy of participation in the Democratic process. And it's a direct democracy. Everybody files into the assembly and votes on everything.

What that means is, as I've already mentioned, your capacity for debate and argumentation is a route to power. This is why it developed so powerfully in ancient Athens. The better you are at arguing, the better you are at persuading other people, the more powerful and influential you will be. What happens is a group of people invent a new psycho-technology. They invent rhetoric. They invent ways of picking up on how language and cognition interact. They find standardised skills that can be practiced and developed so that you can influence people... Increase the chance that your language will change their mind.

The sophist were only concerned with teaching the skills. They basically separated the technology from any kind of moral commitment. So for example, a particular Sophist might go in the morning to this aristocrat and help him argue for why Athens should increase the number of ships in its Navy and in the afternoon go to this aristocrat and help him craft an argument as to why Athens should decrease the number of ships in the Navy. The Sophists didn't care which was the case. What mattered was empowering the individual to win the argument. Now, how does this work and how can we relate it to our to our lives now? So basically a good way to think about this is the Sophists pick up on the fact that when we are communicating - we're going to talk about this a lot later as we go on - we are being driven by what we find salient and relevant, not just [by] what we find true or believed to be the case. Remember [that] with the 9 dot problem what stands out to us, what's relevant, shapes how we see things and how we understand them. So, let me give you a modern analog for how rhetoric works, a place where rhetoric is readily apparent. Advertising.

See, the point about advertisement is to make use of the way your brain will associate things, the way your brain finds certain things salient, make things seem highly relevant to you in order to manipulate your behavior. Now what's telling about this and this is the point about the Sophist is how much that can happen in a way that is disconnected from whether or not it's true. I mean you watch the beer commercial. And here it is, "here's really attractive people. And they all get together and they're all having a great time and it's this beer and here's the beautiful attractive people..." Go into an actual bar... That's not like that! You're not going to see the (uurrggggggggggh noise), the kind of broken down lives. Drunk people!

Now here's the thing. You know that that's not true. You know that!! If you went into a bar and you actually saw something like that happening... If, when you washed your hair with shampoo you were suddenly in the shampoo commercial, you'd worry about your sanity! You know it's not true! It doesn't matter! It makes certain stimuli salient to you. And so you buy the beer! You buy the shampoo! This is what I mean when I say your beliefs aren't the only thing driving you. So this brings us to a notion I promised to come back to. And I want to use it technically. I'm not trying to be vulgar but this is important. This is the notion of "bullshit" and the classic work is by Harry Frankfurt on this. His essay "On Bullshit" is 20 years old now. Because Frankfurt is very interested in talking about the difference between somebody being a bullshit artist and somebody being a liar because they aren't the same! They can overlap: a person can be both a liar and a bullshit artist. But let's talk about pure cases. How does the liar work? The liar depends on your commitment to the truth. The liar tells you something. I'll use "P" to represent some proposition: the liar says "P" to you, even though "NOT P" is the case because if he can convince you that "P" is the case you will change your behaviour because your behaviour is to some degree, significant degree, influenced by your commitment to the truth. If you believe "P" is true, that will change your behaviour. That's how lying works! Lying depends on the fact that, in general, people are committed to the truth because, in general, people want to be in touch with reality. That's not how bullshit works! See bullshit, unlike lying, works by making you disinterested, unconcerned with whether or not what is being said is true. When somebody is bullshitting you, they're trying to get you to not find important or, "central", how true the claim is. Instead they're working in terms of the rhetoric. They're trying to capture you in terms of how catchy it is! Like the advertiser. How salient it is, how much it grabs your attention.

So there was a famous example from this from The Simpsons. And The Simpsons has been on for a thousand years now, and I think it's still on! So this is from a long time ago and at the time it seemed so almost absurdly ridiculous funny. But it turned out to be extremely, extremely prescient! Because the example is a political example. There are two aliens running for political office and they're giving a speech to Americans. And I mean no insult to Americans, but I think we're [all] aware of how what I'm going to say is relevant to American politics right now and the speech goes something like this: One of the aliens named Kang says "My fellow Americans, when I was young I dreamt of being a baseball! But now we must move forward not backwards, upwards twirling, twirling towards freedom!" And everybody cheers! Now it's meaningless! It doesn't mean anything! But he invokes youth, baseball. Moving forward, moving upward, twirling and freedom. And so if you're an American you get this rush. You get this rush. That rush is these are all salient things. They're highly relevant to you. You associate and identify with them. And so you're swept up you're caught up in it.

Now why does bullshit matter? Well part, as I said at the beginning, part of the way people articulate the meaning crisis is 'there's so much bullshit' and it seems to be increasing. We are separating relevance and salience from truth. But there is a deeper reason and I think this is part of why it matters to Socrates. Look, you can't - although we use this metaphor for self-deception, it's actually not a good metaphor - you can't lie to yourself! It makes no sense. Cognitive psychologists have been pointing - and philosophers - have been pointing this out. You can't know "NOT P" and then say to yourself "but P!", "But P!". The trouble is you know that this is not the case ["P"] and so simply stating this to yourself doesn't do anything. You can't lie to yourself because you're in possession of the truth. Did I just prove to you that self-deception is impossible. No, not at all. See, you can't lie to yourself, but here's what I would argue: You can bullshit yourself. Why? Because lying has to do with believing - I'm going to come back to this again and again. Look. Believing isn't something you directly do.

Here I'll show you. Pick a belief you would like to have. I would like to have the belief that everybody loves me. I don't believe that. But I would like to truly have that belief. So what should I do. I should just believe. "Believe". You see televangelists doing this; telling people "believe"! But you can't! You can Hope that everybody loves you. You can wish that everybody loves you. But if I say "believe it", you can't do it. That's not how belief works. It's not a voluntary action. You can't lie to yourself.

See, self-deception works in a different way. You know what you can do? You can bullshit yourself. How can you bullshit yourself? Because what you can do is direct your attention. If I say pay attention to this finger you can and you can also choose to pay attention to something. Now attention - and we'll talk about this later and how central it is - there's two sides to attention. You can direct your attention, for example if I say: "your left big toe" you're paying attention to it, and suddenly it's salient to you. When you pay attention to something, it makes it more salient. It stands out for you. But you know what else? Attention can also not only be directed by you to make things more salient, your attention can be caught! [CLAP] a sudden noise, and you turn, and you attend to it. It was salient and it captures your attention. So not only can you direct your attention, your attention can be captured by what you find salient. Notice what this means you can do. You can direct your attention to something and make it more salient. And because it's more salient it will tend to capture your attention. And because you're paying attention to it you make it more salient which means it will more likely capture your attention. Do you see what's happening here? These two things feed on each other: I pay more attention to it. It becomes more salient. It becomes more salient. It gathers my attention. I pay more attention to it. I'm more likely to be attracted to it and it spins on itself in a self organizing manner until... your attention is attached to something. It's super salient to you. It's highly relevant to you and you lose the capacity to notice other things. That's how you bullshit yourself. The salience and the catchyness of the stimulus has overtaken any concern you have for whether or not it's true or represents reality.

This is how you deceive yourself. So do you see - that's why Socrates is going to be so antagonistic towards the Sophists. They are the opposite - the opposite - of the Axial revolution. They are the opposite of that rational self-knowledge; the attempt to overcome self-deception. The Sophist are promoting bullshit and when you promote bullshit you not only promote the deception of others, you make yourself more vulnerable to self-deception. You fall more and more prey to self-deception.

So the natural philosophers are "truth without relevance". The Sophists, and their propensity for the promotion of bullshit, represent "relevance disconnected from truth". So notice here they have the power to transform people, but they have disconnected it from the pursuit of the truth. These people can give us knowledge of the facts but do not facilitate self transformation. What Socrates wanted is he wanted both. He wanted individuals who knew how to pay attention in such a way that what they found salient helped them determine the truth and that the truth that they found help them to train their attention to find salience. Socrates wanted something like that. (DRAWS ENCOMPASING CIRCLE/CYCLE ON THE BOARD???)

So what he would do is he would go about questioning people. Maddening frustration. So Socrates would come up to somebody and say "well what are you doing here?", "Oh I'm in the marketplace!", "Well why are you in the marketplace?", "Well I'm purchasing something!", "Well why are you purchasing something?", "Well I want to get these goods!", "Well why do you want these goods?", "Because they'll make me happy?"! And then, then Socrates starts to "Oh, so you must know what happiness is?", "Well happiness is pleasure Socrates, I guess! And these things give me pleasure!". "But is it possible..." Socrates would ask "...to have pleasure and still find yourself in a horrible situation that you really dislike?". "Well of course, Socrates, that's possible!"

"Oh, so then happiness isn't pleasure! You're being coy with me! Tell me, tell me," Socrates would say "...what is happiness?", "Oh it's, you know, it's getting what's most important to you!", "Well that means that you have to have knowledge. Is it any kind of knowledge?", "Well no it's the knowledge of what's important!", "What's truly important? Or what you only think is important?", "I guess what's truly important, Socrates!", "OK, so, what's that knowledge of what's truly important called?", "I guess that would be wisdom, Socrates!", "Oh, so, in order to find happiness, you must have first cultivated wisdom! Tell me how you cultivate wisdom and what wisdom is....?" And the person goes "AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!". They collapse! They get to this point where they can't answer! They fall into a state called Aporia. People compared it to being stung by a stingray, or falling under a magician spell! You don't know what's going on!

Now here's what... Now one thing you might say is "Well Socrates is just a skeptic. He's trying to show people that they don't know anything because he wants to show that the gods are right, that nobody has any wisdom etc.." That's too simple! I think something more sophisticated is going on with Socrates. Socrates is trying to get you to realize... He's incarnating the Axial revolution. He's trying to get you to realize how much each one of us, myself included, how much we're bullshitting ourselves all the time. Why? Because we pursue things, we find things salient to us, THERE: happiness, fame, it's salient to us and we're pursuing it... We're putting our efforts into it way before we understand it. Way before we grasp the truths of it. We are always making ourselves susceptible to bullshit because we are being driven by powerful motivations that are salient to us that are greatly in excess of our understanding of their truth or reality. We are always, all of us, bullshitting ourselves. And the point about [that]... what that does is that provokes a reaction in people. It goes one of two ways: people either go "AAAARGH" and they don't want to be shown that about themselves and they become angry at Socrates. Or, some people have an insight! They realize "Oh. Oh!!! I need to transform myself. I need to find a way to keep relevance and truth tracking each other. Enabling each other."

And when Socrates realized that he was having this effect on people he had his answer to his dilemma. He knew how it was that the gods were not lying and he was the wisest of human beings. His answer was the following: He knew what he did not know! And we all say "I know what I don't know. I made note of a lot of [things]..." No no no no! He knew in a way that allows you to directly, painfully confront your capacity for bullshiting yourself.

To really realize what you do not know is to realize "I am pursuing her and I don't know what's going on." "I'm pursuing that and I don't know what's going on." That's what he's talking about.

Now, many people think that Socrates just concluded that that's it: 'He didn't know anything!' No that's not what Socrates is talking about. Socrates does claim to know things. You can imagine how Socrates pisses people off. So he is put on trial. In ancient Athens there isn't a state that arrests you! One citizen accuses another, you're brought on trial, you're put in front of 500 men - it's always men, remember? ...very very very chauvinistic society - and then the accuser presents their case the defendant presents their case and then the jury votes on it!

So, Socrates was accused by people that he'd pissed off of athesism, which doesn't mean "not believing in gods" it just means teaching strange gods, because as I mentioned he was concerned to make the gods moral exemplars. Now when Socrates is on trial, it becomes clear that they will let him go if he agrees to stop doing this philosophy stuff that he's doing, stopps pissing people off! And then he utters something that's very famous - and this is a statement of him deeply knowing something he says "The unexamined life is not worth living". A Life in which there is no effort made to put these two (Truth machinery and Relevance machinery) together, is a life that is not worth living because it is a life - to use our terms, that is awash in bullshit - that is beset by self-deception and self-destructive behavior. So Socrates knows what makes a life meaningful. There is a kind of wisdom. Wisdom is to keep your truth machinery and your relevance machinery tightly coupled together so that you don't bullshit yourself. Socrates famously claimed to know TA EROTIKA - we're going to have to talk about this later because it comes from "erotic" and, for most of us, all you hear when you hear erotic is sexual. That's not what Eros means. It's a much more broader term in ancient Greece. What Socrates means is he "knows how to love well"! That doesn't mean romantic love. What it means is Socrates knows what to care about.

He knows how to keep what he cares about (relevant/salient to him) with what's real (truth). He would do things like walk into the marketplace and say "look at all the things I don't need". He'd say "How much time did you spend on fixing your hair this morning?", "Oh, about 20 minutes!". "How much on fixing yourself?". Socrates knew what to find significant, what to find important, he knew how to properly care. He also compared himself to a midwife. He knew how to take that caring and that sense of what makes life meaningful - the cultivation of wisdom - and helped people draw out... Give birth to their better self. That's why he compared himself to a midwife. This is what he knew. Socrates knew how reason and love go together. You might find it entertaining to know that Frankfurt, who I mentioned a few minutes ago, wrote a book called "[The] Reasons of Love". What he also puts together; Reason and love. Things that we have been taught to keep as emphathetical to each other. For Socrates separating them - which our culture regularly and reliably does - is one of our greatest follies. They need to be interdependent and intertwined with each other. We need to rationally know what we should most care about.

So Socrates is put on trial. He's found guilty. He just narrowly loses. So then after losing - and it looks like part of the reasons were political and he's pissed off the powerful and all kinds of things... he associated with people that turned out to be corrupt - but he loses by a very narrow margin. And then what happens is each side proposes a penalty. The accusers propose death. That Socrates should be killed. And then this tells you something about Socrates. Socrates says the following. Practicing philosophy has cost me. I have to constantly work at it. It's very demanding. I'm not wealthy. I'm dependent on other people. People attack me. It's been very risky. The worst penalty could be for me to continue doing philosophy and in order to make that even worse the government should give me free housing and free food for the rest of my life! So as you can imagine, this pisses everybody off, and Socrates is found, in a much greater vote, he's condemned to death. Now notice Socrates is so convinced that he has the right kind of "know thyself" - not autobiographical, but "this" (references board notes) that I've been talking about - he knows how he works and how to train it to transform it so that he cares well and reduces his capacity for self-deception. That he's willing to die for it! He finds that meaning so important that he's willing to die for it!

[He's] a very interesting figure for that reason. But there's also other important things we should know about Socrates. The shamanic is still in Socrates because he could do the following: He could stand in one place for 24 or even 48 hours meditating on his own thoughts. He was terrifically capable of controlling his body's physiological reactions. He could drink a lot without getting drunk. He could go into battle in winter without any shoes on his feet. He was famously brave. He had this divine voice! Whenever he was about to do something wrong, he'd hear this voice that would tell him "don't do it Socrates". So once again you still find the shamanic has been carried into the Socratic in really important ways. We're going to talk about later how those two are interwoven together.

Now, Socrates has many followers. But there's one person who was present at the trial, but wasn't present at his death. When he drinks the hemlock. And you know what... I got to sit in the spot in Athens that corresponds to where Socrates was probably imprisoned. At least that's what they said! That person who was present at the trial and even offers to pay for Socrates' release but is ill and not present at his death is Plato. And Plato, as I foreshadowed, is going to take Pythagoras and Socrates and put them together and advance even more significantly the Axial Revolution in ancient Greece. Thank you very much for your time.

Other helpful resources about this episode:
Notes on Bevry
Summary and Transcript on awakeningfromthemeaningcrisis.com

Welcome back to "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis". This is our third time together. Last time we were talking about more what was going on in Shamanism and the Upper Paleolithic Transition. We talked a lot about the flow experience and how it integrates altered states of consciousness. Something like, or at least on a continuum with, mystical experiences and meaning making. Enhanced insight and intuition and how this resulted in an enhanced capacity for metaphorical cognition which greatly expands human cognition, makes it much more creative, much more capable of generating all of those fantastic connections in meaning that drove the Upper Paleolithic transaction's explosion in culture and technology. And then we moved to consider some other intervening revolutions that also had an impact. We talked briefly about the Neolithic revolution and the beginning of agriculture and the rise of civilizations. We got into the Bronze Age civilization and then that led us into the revolution we're concentrating on now which is the Axial Revolution - a period around between 800 B.C. and 300 B.C. following the Bronze Age collapse. The Bronze Age collapse, if you remember was one of the greatest if not thee greatest collapse in civilization the world has ever seen. Then that facilitated much more experimentation in smaller scale societies, and that experimentation resulted in the creation of new pshcho-technologies. One was alphabetic happening in the area of Canaan, and it's eventually going to be taken up very quickly by the Hebrews and then taken up by the Phoenicians and taken to the Greeks. The Greeks, as we'll see today or next time, further improved it. We talked about how that psycho-technology - alphabetic literacy - makes literacy more effective, more efficiently learned, more powerful and its operation greatly expands the number of people that can be literate, [it] enhances the distributed cognition, and how that psycho-technology gets internalized into our metacognition and produces second order of thought.

We get an enhanced awareness of our own cognition. Both its power and its peril. We get an enhanced awareness of its capacity for self correction self transcendence. We also get an enhanced awareness of its capacity for self-deception. We talked also about the invention of coinage to help deal with the mobile armies of this time and how that trains you in abstract symbolic thought and more rigorous mathematical reasoning. And that also gets internalized, it gets exapted into second order thinking and people start to become aware of themselves in a different way. They start to become much more aware of the meaning making nature of their cognition, its capacity to generate illusion and self-deception and also its capacity to break out of illusion and self-deception and to come into a contact with a more real world.

So, this leads to some fundamental changes. People start to become more aware of their responsibility for the violence and the chaos and the suffering in their own lives and they start to become aware of how much that transformation of mind or mind and heart - because in the Axial age these terms are often referred to in a singular manner - how much transformation in the mind and heart is the way to alleviate suffering. So what starts to happen is the mythological framework and the way people are framing [themselves] and their world changes. Now let me explain to you how I'm using this word "myth", because I'm not using it the way we standardly we use it. The use I'm going to talk about, it's been deeply influenced by people like Jung, people like Tilak, Victor Turner... just a whole bunch of different thinkers. So when we use the word myth we tend to mean a falsehood that is widely believed. And that's unfortunate because we've lost the term for what I want to talk about. See myths aren't false stories about the ancient past. They're symbolic stories about perennial patterns that are always with us. That's a very different thing! So a lot of what's going on in myth is an attempt to take these intuitive, implicitly learned patterns and put them into some form that is sharable with ourselves and with each other.

So in the Bronze Age world, before the axial revolution, people experienced the world in what's been called by Charles Taylor "the continuous cosmos" (I have a few questions about the use of word Cosmos but we'll come back to that later.) The idea here is human beings experience themselves in radical continuity. That sense of connectedness that you see even back in the shamanic world was very prevalent in the continuous Cosmos. In the continuous Cosmos. people feel there's a deep connection, a deep continuity, between the natural world and the cultural world. And between the cultural world and the world of the gods. So she differences are not really differences so much in kind as they are in power. It's not odd that animals might talk or [that] they might have deep societies. It's not odd for us, for certain human individuals to think themselves divine like the great greatest pre Axial Age empire is Egypt. The Pharaoh is a god king! He's something like a god! Why? For us we can only understand that, at most, metaphorically. Here's what we have to try and understand: it's not a metaphor for the ancient Egyptians.

Why? Because the differences between human beings and the gods are differences in power. This is a cosmos where reality is experienced primarily in power, in terms of power. The gods are just more powerful than us, more glorious than us. You can even see this in the Old Testament where, if you ask people/you can ask people "what term is most often used of God?" and people will say "righteous or holy"! Well those are used quite often, but the term that's most used is "glorious" - shining with power! Which is not a moral term at all. So think of the Greek gods. They're not moral exemplars at all. They're just extremely glorious and extremely powerful. The Egyptian king, the pharaoh, is extremely glorious and extremely powerful. So of course he's godlike or potentially even a god. So there's this continuous cosmos. And it's continuous in another way. It moves like this - It moves in great cycles. Just like the seasons. Just like day and night. Time moves in large cycles that repeat through eternity. In fact, what you're often trying to do with your ritual behavior is you're trying to tap into this continuity. You're trying to get back to the original power of creation. So you often enact the metaphorical story - the myth - of how the universe is created in order to try and tap into. That creative power. There's a constant nostalgia for getting back, and your attitude towards the world is you want to fit into these cycles. You want to be in harmony with them. You don't want to really change things a lot because if I change this, if I change my future, I'm actually undermining my past. It's a very different way of relating to the world. There's this continuity between the natural world, the social world and the divine world, and time is wrapped on itself in this really important way.

Now what happens in the axial age is this way of looking at things is shattered. Now it doesn't go away. There's aspects of our thinking that are still like this. But what gets layered on top of it is a totally different world view. A totally different mythology for understanding the relationship between the self and the world.

So Charles Taylor talks about this as "The Great dis-embedding": when the Axial revolution hits, this world is replaced by a different one. Now again I'm speaking mythologically here. People will talk about it mythillogically and you have to understand that it doesn't mean the way we would think of it as a literal scientific thing. Nor is it what we would merely call metaphorical. Mythological is neither scientific nor just metaphorical.

Now what's this new world? Well, this new mythological world view uses a mythology of two worlds. The idea is "this" is the "Everyday World". This is the world of the untrained mind. This is a world that is beset by self-deception, self-destruction, illusion, violence, chaos. It's a world in which we are out of touch with reality. But, opposed to this is the "Real World" and mythologically you can talk about this as two worlds. But of course in a lot of the traditions the real world is just cutting through the illusion of the everyday world. But the idea is the real world is how the trained mind, the wise mind, sees the world. This is how the world looks when you're in touch with reality. When your mind is not beset by illusion and delusion. When you have that sense that this is how things really are. This is a world also in which there is reduced suffering and violence precisely because the mind is not beset by foolishness, precisely because it is not out of touch with reality.

Now here (indicating left side of the board - The Continuous Cosmos), wisdom is power oriented. To be a wise individual is to learn how to acquire the power that was imbued at creation into the cycles. Its like energy's put into the system and it cycles around. And then energy is put in the system [and] it cycles around... and you want to tap into that power. Wisdom is how to tap into that power because what you're after is "long life". "Live long and prosper" as it's in the Star Trek mythology for the Vulcans right? You want to be prosperous, you want to live long, you want to be free of conflict, you want to provide security for your offspring. So that's a sense of wisdom that is still captured in our sense of the word prudence - being very "Prudential" is to have that knowing how to fit into the power structures of your society - how to make things work for you. Getting the most power and prosperity you can. But over here (right hand side of the board - Modern World) there's a radical change. Wisdom changes because "you" do not want to fit into this world because this is the world of suffering and violence. It's a world in which you're out of touch with what's real. And as we'll talk about it later you deeply desire to be in touch with reality. It's one of your most powerful drives. You don't want to conform to this world. You want to be transformed out of this world. You want to move from here [Every day world] to here [Real World]. Now notice what's happening here. The old shamanic enacted myth of soul flight - flying above - is being exapted into a new sense. It's being exapted into this sense of self transcendence out of the everyday world into the real world and wisdom is now knowing how to make that transformative leap. And meaning isn't about just 'connectedness' as it was here but a special kind of connectedness; a connectedness to the real world as opposed to a detrimental connectedness to an illusory world.

So meaning is changing and the notion of wisdom is changing. And the notion of your "self"; what it is to be a self. Because here (Continuous Cosmos) you're defined largely by how you fit in. And of course that's always going to be part of our definition. I'm talking about emphasis here, not talking about absolute differences. But here (Continusous Cosmos) you're defined more by how you fit in. But here (The Modern World) you're defined increasingly more by how you can self transcend; self transform. How you can grow as a person. Notice how pervasive this has become in our self understand. Notice how we don't like to be with people who aren't growing, who aren't somehow transcending. Growing... Which way do you...? Growing up [gesturing upwards]. Becoming "more" mature. Getting "more" in touch with themselves and reality.

So this is called "The Great dis-embedding" because now we have a different relationship to "the everyday world"! And this is a metaphor that you don't see before. You don't see over "here" (Continuous Cosmos). This (Modern World) is the idea that we're somehow strangers in the world. We're pilgrims. We don't belong "here" (The Everyday World), we belong "there" (The Real World). Now as I keep saying, some some people of course will literalize this, and this is really one world and another world. Most people will see this - when we talk about Plato and others - they're understanding this as a mythological representation for the process of self transcendence and self transformation. Once again we see the exaptation, just like the shamans were engaged in exaptation - we see the exaptation of that shamanic ability into this new mythological framework.

So, there's three places that I want to talk about in particular about this because they're the ones that we're going to talk a lot about. I will mention China periodically throughout especially when I talk about Daoism. But I want to talk about Greece and ancient Israel because those are the two foundational world mythologies for us. Those are two places in which the Axial revolution took place in a way that has become deeply, deeply constitutive of what "we" are - how "we" are still here in our minds the way we experience ourself and the world.

I also want to talk about India because India is the source of that of that - how do I put it? - that source of the confluence between Buddhism and the Western world that we talked about in the first session together - the mindfulness revolution. Mindfulness is a psycho-technology that came from India. So the axial revolution of Siddhārtha Gautama and the Buddha we're going to talk about that. And what I want to talk about is how each one of these areas, in addition to the axial psycho-technologies of literacy and coinage - alphabetic literacy and coinage - how they also develop particular psych-technologies that have become internalized. A lot of what you think is natural to you - just part of how your mind works - is actually culturally internalised. It has been generated historically and you have internalized it culturally and you think of it just as how your mind works. Think again about literacy. It is hard for you to remember, and I mean to reenact, what it was like to not be able to think in literate terms; to imagine words. In a similar way, a lot of these ways of thinking, these psycho-technologies have become so second nature to us that we forget the historical origin and that's problematic because the degree to which we don't have a historical understanding is the degree to which we are going to be ignorant of the historical factors that are driving the meaning crisis.

Let me foreshadow that meaning crisis right now. So this is a mere foreshadowing. We're going to come back to it. This (Modern World - "The Every Day") is a mythological way of thinking which allows us to articulate and train the psycho-technologies of the Axial revolution; these psycho-technologies of self transcendence. Of wisdom and enhanced meaning. But the problem is, this (the Modern World) mythology is failing for us now. The scientific world view is destroying the possibility of this for us. In a way that might seem sort of cosmically ironic, the scientific world view is returning us to a "continuous Cosmos". There is no radical difference in kind between you and the primates that you evolved from naturally. There isn't some radical difference in kind between your mind and your embodied existence. Science is levelling the world and returning to a "one world". We're going to talk about that. But if we can no longer live in this (Modern World) mythology - and that's what mythologies are: they have to be liveable. People claim to "believe" this. Don't tell me what you believe. Tell me what you can practice. Tell me what's livable for you. For most of us we can't live this anymore. We still talk this way. But we can't live it. So here's part of the problem: this is a foreshadowing. How do we salvage the ability to cultivate wisdom, self transcendence, enhanced meaning, overcome self-deception, realize who we are and how the world is, when we can no longer use the mythological world view in which it was born?

We are going through a re-embedding. It's been progressive and increasing. Copernicus and Galileo re-embed us. Darwin re-embeds us. Einstein re-embeds us. We're being re-embedded back into the physical world but we don't want to lose all that we gained through the "Great dis-embedding". How do we reconcile those? How do we live with the legacy of the Axial revolution when we can no longer inhabit its world view? That's part of the problem. That's only part.

Now the place I want to turn to first is ancient Israel. As I mentioned, some of you have probably read parts of the Bible or at least heard parts of the Bible, although biblical illiteracy is rising and that's problematic, not because I think people should be Christians or Jews - I'm not here to proselytize - but the degree to which you don't have a grasp of the grammar of the Bible is a degree to which you don't have a grasp of the grammar of your own cognition. And you may say I'm an atheist! I don't care! That's irrelevant! I'm not talking about 'what' you say. I'm talking about how you think. There's a big difference there. Grammar is how you put thoughts together. It's not the vocabulary; it's not what you say. So this is what Nietzsche meant when he said "I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar".

We still talk this way. We still are filled with the God grammar of the Bible and you say "no I'm not!" Yes [you are]!!! You go to a movie and you watch the person who falls in some way, and then they have an insight and they are redeemed and they find their way back - maybe it's through Alcoholics Anonymous or they come out of addiction... That's biblical grammar!

Again, what matters here is how it shapes our sense of self and world. I'm not advocating for a particular religion but of course I am going to talk about the Judeo-Christian heritage precisely because I want to explain to you how these psycho-technologies have become part of the very grammar, not only of your cognition, but of your existential sense of being.

So, there is an important psycho-technology that's invented, or at least significantly developed, by ancient Israel. Perhaps it was influenced from Persia through Zarathustra. But it's this idea - and when I say it ,it's going to seem to you like "of course!", but it's not "of course!"; even saying "of course" is important, remember that.... Here's the idea: It's a psycho-technology of understanding time as a cosmic narrative, as a story. It's applying something, again, that's universal - all cultures tell stories, and we'll talk about the cognitive science of this later - but you see this isn't a story. This is a circle. It's a cycle.

What kind of structure does a story have? Well a story has a beginning. It has some crucial climax, a turning point in it. And there's a resolution. There's a direction to it. There's a purpose to it. So you get this idea of cosmic history; of using our skills for story to explain how the cosmos is unfolding through time. It's a radical idea! So why is it radical? Well, notice the difference here (The Continuous Cosmos). This this is not an open future. You are condemned to repeat! So cultures where cyclical time is still prevalent - Eastern cultures for example - the repetition of the cycle is onerous. It's horrible. People think reincarnation, for example within an Indian context, is a wonderful [idea]: "I'll be born again!". No! That's horrible. What you're trying to do is get free from those cycles because doing this again and again and again and again and again is terrifying.

[uninteligible word]. You want freedom - Nirvana! You want sessation. You want release from the cycle because there is no purpose to it. But here (Modern World) the future is open. Your actions now can change the future. If you four figure out how to participate - remember that participatory knowing - if you figured out how to participate in the story, your actions can change the future. There isn't 'the all at once' creation at the beginning. There is an ongoing creation through history and you can participate with God in the ongoing creation of the future. How? Because... How do stories operate? They operate in terms of meaning and morality. How you make meaning - the moral content of your action - decides how things are going to go.

This is why the god of ancient Israel is such a different God. You look at the gods of the Pre-Axial world... Look, you've got a God and it's a god of a place. A particular function: here is the god of weaving, or here's the god of ancient theeves. The gods are located in place. They're tied to function. They have no significant moral arc attached to them. What's the God of the old testament? What he or she like? It's not bound to time and place. Think of the great story of the Old Testament; the story of the Exodus. Here you have the Israelites and they are imprisoned. They are imprisoned in the epitome of the Bronze Age world: Egypt. And God comes and liberates them and sets them on a journey towards a future that is promised - the promised land. This God moves through time and space.

The God of the old testament is the God of the open future. That's why at first he has no name because to name something is to locate it, to specify it, to tie it down and for the longest time this God has no name. And then, when Moses finally challenges, and he reveals his name he says - it's badly translated In the older versions of the Bible; it's often translated as "I am that I am". But it [actually] in Hebrew means "I will be what I will be", "I am the god of the open future and you can participate with me in this". This ongoing creation of the future because you can shape it; you can cause it to come to resolution but you can also cause it to go off course.

The idea - when I said "of course" to you, remember? The sense of time passing as a 'course'. We still take 'courses' in universities. This is what we have here and you're looking for turning points where the course turns. And of course that's what you're looking for in a movie. You know at some level that none of that is how the real world works. You know at some level, come on you do!! ...that your life doesn't unfold like a movie. Yet you love it! You love going to a movie. You love seeing this structure and participating in it and there's the great turning point where something is learned or problem is solved and there's resolution and the future is now made.

So, this God is interested in... becomes progressively...

Now, again you can't point and say "there! There is where it changed!" in the Bible! But you can see there's aspects of a Pre-Axial God. But as you read through the old testament God becomes more and more axial. He becomes more and more the deity of something that you now take for granted: Progress. The idea - for us it's not just an "idea", right? - it's in the life blood, it's in the very bones of your sense of self and your life. Is your life progressing? Or are you stuck? Is it moving forward? This is this idea. History progresses and it can degenerate and it can improve. God becomes more and more a representative of that.

Now, there's a technical term for these turning points: Kairos. It's developed by the theologian Paul Tulloch. This is this sense of the crucial turning point. Getting things at the right time and the right place to turn things. Either back on course or to further develop them. Now let's talk about that because, again, we're gonna go back to talking about these senses of knowing that we've lost touch with. (Important is this sense: "DA'ATH".) So people sometimes note, and often humorously, that the Bible will talk about sex - sexual intercourse - with the verb 'knowing', so you'll get things like "Adam knew his wife Eve" and it's like "What? What does that mean?" ...and it means has sex with. Its "DA'ATH" in this sense. And it's like "What? Why? We don't use sex as a metaphor for knowledge!" You'd be surprised how many cultures actually do! Because this is, again, this is a participatory sense. There's a course here and you're participating in it. Now what do we mean by participating. You don't know it from the outside just having beliefs about it or just having skills. You know it in this way: you know it by identifying with it. You change it while it's changing you and you're changing it while it's changing you. You are immersed in it like a stream, like a course of a river. You are participating in it. When you're making love with somebody you are participating in them. You're identifying with them, empathizing with them, resonating with them. You are changing them as they are changing you and it - Forgive me the pun - to a climax! To a turning point to a resolution.

See in ancient Israel, "faith" - this term has become useless for us now - but "faith" didn't mean 'believing ridiculous things for which there is no evidence'! That is a recent idea; that is not what it meant. Faith was your sense of "DA'ATH". Faith was your sense that you are in this reciprocal realization: you're "in course". You're "on course". You're involved and evolving with things. It's your sense "Ah! I'm on course" or even your sense "Ah! This is the turning point and I, I know what to do. I know who I need to change into." ...I knew how to turn myself in things.

Notice you have this in your relationships. You'll often be asking yourself "How is this relationship going? Is it on course? Is it progressing? Is it growing? Is this the kind of person I want to be? What's my... Am I becoming? What's my sense of how I'm changing? Is this all going well?" That's "DA'ATH".

Now, of course, you can get it wrong! You can think you're on course, when you're actually dramatically off course. You're trespassing, to use older biblical language. You're walking off the path. You're no longer on course. That's the basis of a word that we can't use anymore again because of our biblical literacy and the fact that we've lost touch with this sense of knowing. In fact this word - many people treat this word almost like a comical word - sin. Sinning isn't just doing something very immoral. In the New Testament the word that translates [to] this is when you're shooting a bow and arrow. So, if you've done archery, you can't shoot for where your eye tells you to look because you'll actually miss the bullseye. You have to have a kind of faith to sense where you need to actually shoot. So you don't miss the mark. So the idea here is [that] I'm trying to sense the course of things and, if I'm self deluded or illusory, I'm actually dramatically off course without realizing it.

That's the original meaning and so the idea is that human beings are thrown into this universe in which they have the option - because it's an open future - of participating in the creation of the future. But of course human beings sin. In the sense that they are self deceptive. They go off course. So notice what the Hebrews are doing. They're taking this movement from the "everyday world" to the "real world" and they're turning it into a historical story. The way you go from the false world to the real world is you start 'now' and you move towards the promised land. They understand it historically. But human beings sin: They make decisions that steer the course of history away from its culmination. And so the idea is [that] God has to intervene periodically. God has to redeem. God has to do something to wake people up. To remind them. To help them to sense how they've gone off course, and so that they can come back on course. And so what you have is you have - in the old testament - you have the creation of the prophetic tradition: prophets. Here's another thing that we've lost the sense of. A prophet is not somebody who tells the future like some sort of psychic. Prophecy isn't about telling you what's going to be happening 200 or 300 years from now. Prophecy means "a telling fourth". The job of the prophet is to wake you up right now to how you are off course.

So a better analogy isn't the psychic - So, when you go to the psychic and "oh you will meet a tall dark stranger" or some crap like that. That's not a good analogy for a prophet - a better [analogy for a] Prophet is when you and your loved one go into therapy and the therapist says something and it wakes you up to "Holy crap. This is how I'm going wrong. This is how I'm off course. This is how I need to get back on track." That's the job of a prophet. And what you have in the prophetic tradition is you have an increasing emphasis on the morality of human decision making. More and more - and again it's not perfect; there's all kinds of pre-axial stuff that's still woven in there and mixed up with it and mashed up with it - but you do have more and more this discussion, this exhortation to wake up to your moral responsibility for helping everybody to get back on track and to turn things back towards the promised land. This idea of justice and righteousness and waking up so that we get back on track become endemic.

Now think about how much - and I've tried to show you through examples - how much this is just how you naturally think of yourself. You think of yourself as somebody who's on a journey. You're starting here and you're trying to make a better self, and you're trying to make the right decisions, and trying to steer things. You want your life to progress. You want your culture to progress. Try to think about how you would understand yourself, how you would judge yourself, and you couldn't make use of this notion of progress...? So what starts to happen is a commitment to more and more trying to cultivate the wisdom of deeply remembering God, which doesn't mean reciting beliefs. It means participating. Participating in the ongoing creation of the world. Shaping the future. Helping yourself, your neighbors and your society to progress where that progress is measured mostly in terms of moral improvement, Increasing justice, increasing flourishing, increasing sense of people living up to their promise.

And this is what I ask you: Do you feel like you're living up to your promise? Is it an important thing for you? If it is - and I feel it's probably the case that for many of you it is - that very way of thinking, that's part of the grammar that we have inherited from the Hebrews. It's part of the very way we think. It's part of the warp and woof of our cognition.

Now we're going to come back to this strand. We're going to come back and look at a particular way of understanding Kairos that became central in Christianity because what Christianity did is it made a really radical claim: It claimed that this Kairos was found in a particular person and what that's going to do is it's going to personalize all of this in a really dramatic way. But before we do that I want to switch back over to what's happening at a similar time in ancient Greece.

So as I mentioned, the psycho-technology of alphabetic literacy is taken to the Greeks but the Greeks do something that's very important and it helps to explain some of the differences we see in the Greek Axial revolution from the ancient Hebrew Axial revolution. Now the Greeks do something that again seems inconsequential now, but they add vowels to the alphabet. And it's like "oh WAW, so what?" Well the thing is, when you add vowels you really again increase how easy it is to process information. So let's stop here because we need to do a bit of Cognitive Science because this ease of processing really matters. So I want to introduce you to an important idea from cognitive science. This is the idea of cognitive fluency.

We've got increasing experimental evidence for this basic kind of fact: when you increase the ease at which people can process information, regardless of what that information is, they come to believe it is more real, they have more confidence in it etc.. That can be something very simple. It can be as simple as changing the font contrast between the letters and the page. So, consider two individuals Tom and Susan. Tom is reading words in which the color contrast between the letters and the page isn't as good as the color contrast that Susan's reading. They're reading exactly the same thing. They can both clearly read it. It's just the font difference makes it easier for Susan than for Tom.

They read the same thing. If you ask both of them "well how true is what you read?" Susan's more likely to say "that was true!" She's more likely to have confidence in it regardless of the content. The fluency of your processing actually increases your confidence in it, your sense of how real the picture it's giving you is. Now it's not really easy in some simple sense because it has to do more with how well your brain is accessing information, applying it... It's very complicated. But what I'm telling you is when I do something that increases your cognitive fluency, your brain generates an enhanced sense that you're actually in touch with things. We'll talk about this later. That turns out to be a good policy your brain is using. It's a very good idea for your brain to try and use the fluency of its own processing as a measure of how much it's in touch with reality.

By the way, when you get a lot of fluency you of course are going to get into the Flow State. So when the Greeks introduced vowels they improved the fluency of alphabetic literacy. They ramp up how powerful it is. They also introduced something else. They introduced a standardised reading from left to right which you now take for granted. Many of you know that other languages go the other way. Hebrew's read this way for example. That has an impact on your cognition. First of all it's standardized - that improves the fluency. Why does it improve your fluency? When this is standard - if you look at Egyptian hieroglyphs they can go up. They can go down. They can go this way. They can go that way - when you standardize things, that increases the fluency of the processing. So they ratchet up this power of literacy to enhance cognition.

They're also developing something else. So the Greeks don't form a unified nation state. They have individual city states that are in competition with each other and in Athens in particular - and Athens is going to be the hotbed of the axial revolution in Greece, although not the only place - in Athens you have, slowly, the emergence of democracy. Now, it's a particularly problematic form of democracy - it's direct democracy. We'll talk about stuff like that later. But what this does is this puts a premium on argumentation and debate. So, the Greeks start to speed up the axial revolution in their own cognition. They enhance the effects of alphabetic literacy. They enhance the use of reason and reflection and so they start to do things that, again, don't happen before. Lots of cultures were doing arithmetic. But the Greeks invent mathematics. They invent geometry. They start to create abstract symbol systems for their own sake. Now that's what's going on, what's basically being invented, in ancient Greece, is this capacity for rational argumentation. That's the psycho-technology. Again you think of this - now, I want to be clear here: I'm not claiming that other groups or people are irrational or [they] can't be reasonable. I'm not being ethnocentric - but you get the explicit training of rational argumentation as a core psycho-technology in ancient Greece. Now that is going to have very important consequences.

Now what's interesting is how this comes in to ancient Greece. I'm going to introduce you to two individuals who are sort of the epitome of the Axial Revolution in Greece: Pythagoras and Socrates. You know Pythagoras, of course because of an important mathematical theorem: the Pythagorean theorem. Now Pythagoras is a very interesting person because he belongs to - Cornford makes this argument very well - he belongs to a group of individuals that are just coming out of that dark age around 600 BCE. These individuals were called "The Divine Men" it's pretty clear that these men seem to represent a rediscovery of shamanic psycho-technologies. They seem to... they have a lot of associations with capacities for healing, for flying through the air, and so a lot of this is legendary. It's mythological. It's not literal, but Pythagoras is a real person. Now of course, there's lots and lots of legendary material around him but the legend even points towards these important aspects. He seems to have gone through shamanic training, engaged in something called "The Thunder Stone Ceremony" which involved him isolating himself in a cave and going through some radical transformation and then coming out of it. He seems to have experienced soul flight because he talked about the capacity for the psyche to be liberated from the body. He was very tall and he dressed like a god but no one found it offensive for him to do so, at least not the people that followed him. He discovers the octave. He discovers that there's mathematical proportions in the world. He comes to this realization that the new psycho-technologies of rational reflection and mathematics give us access to abstract patterns that we are not directly aware of. We all take it for granted that we know what an octave is and we know that it can be expressed by ratios but that was his discovery. So what he does is he takes this idea about realizing, through music and math, these abstract patterns, and then he links them to the "project", the shamanic ability to engage in self transcendence.

He comes up with the idea that we're somehow trapped in this world, but we can learn to fly above it; we can fly free! Like the Shaman. But he's allied it explicitly to the Axial "project" of self transcendence, of getting in touch with the rationally realized patterns because that will liberate us. That will change and transform us. Pythagoras gives us a lot of the words that we take for granted. I said earlier that I didn't like calling the Pre-Axial world the "cosmos" because Pythagoras actually invents this word Cosmos. He's the first person to describe the universe as a cosmos and many of you probably treat those two terms as synonymous: Universe - the one verse - and Cosmos. They're not! Try to think of a word it's actually related to Cosmos that you're familiar with. So the word that might not come to mind is the word cosmetic. Cosmetics come from cosmos.

What did cosmetics do? They reveal the beauty of things - how beautiful and ordered they are. So Pythagoras has the idea that if we can use music and mathematical thinking and practices that engage in this altered state of consciousness and he's integrating them altogether, it's not quite clear how, but what we can do is we can transcend and see the world as beautiful.

And we're going to come back and talk about this: How when people have awakening experiences they suddenly experience the world as a cosmos, as radically beautiful. Now remember Pythagoras because he's going to have a huge influence on somebody we're going to talk about: Plato. But there's somebody who had an even greater influence on Plato and somebody who really epitomizes the Axial Revolution in ancient Greece. In fact he has a revolution named after him. This is called the Socratic revolution and the person we want to talk about is Socrates. I'm going to argue how Socrates epitomizes the Greek form of the Axial Revolution and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna see how Plato takes Socrates and Pythagoras and puts them together and how Socratic and Platonic your cognition is. How it's part of the grammar of how you think. But once again, even though that's the grammar of how we understand meaning and wisdom and what a "self" is and how we grow, how we self transcend, how we get in touch with reality... We are no longer in the world view of Pythagoras! Do we... Do you actually - I mean seriously - do you actually experience the universe as a cosmos.

We'll take a look at that the next time we're together. Thank you very much for your time.

Other helpful resources about this episode:
Notes on Bevry
Summary and Transcript on awakeningfromthemeaningcrisis.com

Welcome back. I'm John Vervaeke and this is a video series on awakening from the meaning crisis.

So last time we were beginning our historical examination of the origin of this capacity for meaning making to try and get a clearer picture of what it is. And today I'd like to continue on with that. We were talking about the connections between meaning making, enhancing cognition, altered states of consciousness, wisdom. And we were talking about that in connection with the Upper Paleolithic transition in which human beings seem to have gone through this radical change which was not so much a biological change but a change in how they were using their cognition.

We talked about important ideas such as cognitive exaptation and psycho-technology and we talked about how the upper Paleolithic transition was probably driven by the way shamanism was a set of pscyho-technologies for altering states of consciousness to cognitively exapt the enhanced abilities that trade rituals and initiation rituals and healing rituals had already been creating.

And we talked about the way that shaman engaged in various disruptive strategies to try and alter their framing of reality because how we frame reality is both the source of our adaptivity - our ability to find patterns - but it is also how we can get locked in, or how we miss frame reality and how we are in need of insight. And then we talked about that in connection something like the nine dot problem. And that led us to realize that there's kinds of knowing that are independent from the knowing that we capture in our statements of our beliefs. There's knowings about knowing how to do something; what it's like to have a particular perspective and what it's like to know something by identifying with it and participating in it. And I was starting to show you how the Shamen's altered state of consciousness was also enhancing and altering meaning making, affording insight and improving the ability of the shaman to help in hunting and healthcare to things that would radically improve survival. I want to continue now and talk more about that and more about what's going on in shamanism in order to get more explication of this meaning making, wisdom, altered states of consciousness, different kinds of knowing and how they're all interrelated together.

So typically the shaman engages in practices that are putting significant changes in their attention. As we mentioned there's often significant disruptive strategies: sleep deprivation, sex depravation, social isolation, the use of psychedelics, extended chanting, dancing. All of these things are designed to bring about radical changes in the way in which the brain is operating. Now part of what a shaman is doing is, I would argue, also getting into the flow state.

So the flow state has become something that has [been] discussed both academically and in the popular culture. It was made famous in work by Csikszentmihalyi. His book "Flow. The [The Psychology of Optimal] experience" brought it to the forefront in 1990. So what is the flow experience? So the flow experience is experience people get into; they often describe it as like "being in the zone". So you are involved in a task that is very demanding. In fact it has a particular structure to it. So... These are your skills [presentation]. And these [are] how demanding the situation is. And the flow state is one in which the demands of the situation just slightly go beyond your skill abilities. And so you get what's called [here] Csikszentmihalyi represents this by the "flow channel". When my skills can just through - we'll talk about this through insight and restructuring - when I can just enough exapt and extend my skills to meet the demands - so I have to put everything I've got into it - then I get into the flow channel. If my skills exceed the demands, I fall into boredom. If my demands exceed the skills, I fall into anxiety.

Now of course the thing about you is you are very good at learning in situation. So you need a kind of context in which, as your skills improve, your environment also improves. So one of the things we've created in our culture... We have created flow induction machines because what those machines have are a situation where your skills are constantly improving and the demands of the environment are constantly improving and these flow induction machines have other properties that are very important in them. There is a very tight feedback between what you do and how the environment responds. You're getting very clear information and failure matters. At least symbolically because you can die. And of course some of you probably realizing that I'm talking about video games.

Video games are one of the most reliable ways of inducing the flow state in people. In fact part of the reasons why video games are addictive - and they are now being considered to be a bonafide addiction by the World Health Organization - is precisely because they engender the flow state. Addictions - and we'll talk about this later when we talk about addictions - addictions run off machinery that is evolutionarily adaptive. That's why it's compelling. So the flow state: what are other things that people do to get into the flow state? They play jazz. They do martial arts - I'm a martial artist! One that's particularly interesting because there's no other explanation for why people do it other than they get into the flow state is rock climbing because rock climbing, other wise, [is] like some sort of torture from Greek mythology, right? You presented it like "here's a rock face! What I want you to do is, I want you to go up that! It's going to be really physically demanding. It's going to hurt you. You might fall and harm yourself. And once you get to the top you come back down!" It would seem like a tortureous thing to do. Well we know why people rock climb - they rock climb because they get into the flow state and the flow state is deeply deeply positive for people.

It's not the same thing as physical pleasure. In fact the flow state is much more connected to meaning in life. In fact the more often you get into the flow state the more likely you will rate your your life as meaningful. The more you will experience well-being.

And what's interesting also about the flow state. And remember we're doing this because I'm talking about that shamanism is probably a practice for practicing getting into the flow state. So remember that. The thing about the flow state [is] it's a universal. People across cultures, socioeconomic groups, genders, language, environments, age groups, report being able to get into the flow state and they describe it in detail almost exactly the same way. That's a universal and universals are important in cognitive science. You pay attention to the universals because they give you profound insight into the machinery.

What's it like to be in the flow state? Well when you're in the flow state you feel like you're deeply at one with things. So for example I'm a martial artist and when I'm sparring it's like my sense of connectedness to my opponent is really enhanced and I'm really at one. And that comes with this kind of spontaneity. So when a strike is coming to my hand, I don't [mock instruction] "raise your hand now John!", it flows out of me - hence the word - and the block is there! The hockey player, the goalie, just puts out his hand, the gloved hand, and the puck is there. There's this tremendous sense of "at-onement" and then closely allied to it is this: At one level you know, like the shaman dancing or chanting, that there's tremendous metabolic energy at work. Effort! You're making at one level all this effort but at another level it feels effortless. That's the spontaneity. Again it just seems to flow from you. Your sense of time is passing differently. Your sense of self is being dramatically altered. So when people are in the flow state, a kind of self-consciousness disappears. That self-consciousness we carry around. That self-consciousness that's always doing this sort of thing. It's constantly doing our autobiography. (How's my day going? How am I doing? Who am I? What am I doing?) And it's also checking (how do I...?) "image management". How do I look? What are people thinking of me? How am I doing? Am I under threat? All of that nattering - "all my feeling... Was that... I knew about it..." - and that, of course, that can get out of hand.

Like when you're in depression you ruminate on all that stuff and it overwhelms you. But we all carry that burden around. It's taxing. And in the flow state, it's gone because there's no space for all of that because you're so engrossed in the task. The other thing about the flow state is It's super salient. It's like the kind of brightness and vividness you get in a videogame. The world seems more intense and people really like this experience and not only do they like it, it seems to be where they do their best work. So the flow experience is an optimal experience in two ways: Many people regard it as the best experiences they can have. But it's also where they're doing their very best at what they want to excel at. That's why it's so motivating to get into the flow state. So, why is the flow state so good? So, this year - 2013 - I published some work with Adrian Bennett and Leo Ferraro, in which we tried to argue for what the cognitive mechanisms are in the flow state. See, Csikszentmihalyi tells you the environmental conditions - what you need in order to get into the flow state - you need skills and demand to be matched. You need for there to be a very tight coupling between you and the environment like in the video game. You need very clear information - it can't be ambiguous or vague. And failure has to matter - it has to be costly to you in some fashion. He specified all of that. He also specified the kind of training that helps enhance you, to get you into the flow state. And, think about this, think about what I said last time - and we're gonna explore this more - training in mindfulness. The more people have training in mindfulness increases their capacity to get into the flow state. Now can we come up with a unified explanation for all of this? I think we can, both for the phenomenology - why we're experiencing what we're experiencing when we're in the flow state - and why is it improving your cognition and therefore why would the shaman be enhancing their cognition by getting into something like the flow state through their ritual practices?

Okay so think about the rock climber. The rock climber is climbing. Remember we talked about how you frame and find patterns last time. Remember the 9 dot problem. These patterns aren't just patterns in your mind they're patterns and knowing how to make sense of things. So you're rock climbing and if that breaks down you impass - you're stuck. And I don't mean just cognitively! You're physically stuck! Now if you want to be a good rock climber, what you have to do is you have to break that framing. You have to train yourself to break the frame. Restructure, change what you're finding relevant and salient and then change yourself to fit that. And then you refit yourself to the rock face. You refit yourself to the rock face. Then you have to do it again. And then you have to do it again and then you have to do it again.

Or the jazz musician. The jazz musician is playing. They pick up on a pattern they play with it but they can't stay with it too long. What do they have to do? They have to shift, they have to restructure. They have to shift into a new pattern and then play with that but they can't stay with it too long. They have to pick up on it they have to refresh again and again and again and again and again. Do see what's going on with the rock climber, the jazz musician, the martial artist, is this idea of a cascade of insights. You're having an insight that's leading to another insight that's leading to another insight. It's priming. So, you know when you have an insight you have an "Aha!" and you get that burst of energy and it's like a flash. That's why we put a light bulb over somebody's head when we want to show them having an insight. There that flash! Now imagine if I took that "AHAA" and I extended it: "AHAAAAAAAA..."! That's the flow state. It's an insight cascade. So the more you flow, the more you're training your ability for insight. And direct interacting with your environment. Now the trouble of course with the video game is the environment isn't a real world.

But in the shamans world, of course, the shaman's flowing in the real world, the real social world. The real ecological world. But there's something more. It's not just an inside cascade that's going on in flow. That in and of itself would be great. There's something else going [on]. This has to do with your capacity for implicit learning. Now notice what's happening here. Notice that, although even I'm doing the history, I'm always also doing the 'cog-psy' because while I've been emphasizing the history, the historical account, I'm starting to build what I need to give you the structural functional account. So implicit learning. This goes back to work led in the '60s by Arthur Reeber and a whole bunch of other people. So what Robert was doing is he was really trying to understand how people learn language. What he was doing was he was generating an arbitrary set of rules - completely arbitrary just make them up on the spot set of rules - for how you can link strings of letters and/or numbers together. Like the rule might be you can't have more than three vowels in a row or you have to have two continents and then you generate letter strings; eight [or] nine long.

These are so long that you can't easily hold them in your working memory. And then this is what you do: You can generate an indefinite number - you generate a huge number of these strings and you just show them to people. Here's one, here's one, here's one, here's one, here's one, here's one. That's the first part of the experiment. Then you do the second part of the experiment. Now you generate a whole bunch of strings, but two kinds. One set of strings is generated by that artificial set of rules and so follows the same rules as the first set. And then the second set is generated by completely different set of rules.

And what you do is you mix up the first and the second together. And this is the task you give people. Can you tell me the strings that belong with strings you saw before? Now we originally thought what would happen is people would [pshhhh?? shrugs unknowingly]. Because it seems so random. What he found was people score well well above chance consistently on this. People can tell you. "Oh no. Those strings. Yeah those belong with the old ones. No, that one doesn't, that one does that one does." Now here's what's interesting. You now ask people "why?" "How do you know that?" And they'll give you one of two answers. They'll say "I don't know. I don't know! I just I just 'feel' it!" Which is [woooooooo. makes spooky sound and gesture]. Or they say, they give you some explanation, they'll give you some rule or procedure. They're using - and here's what we know - they're deceiving themselves or lying to you because that rule that they're using wouldn't actually predict their success.

So you are picking up... you have this tremendous capacity outside your conscious awareness - to pick up on very complex patterns in your environment. You say "OK, why? What does this have to do with shamanism?" Well hang on, because we talked about the shaman picking up on patterns last time. Let's go back to this. Let me talk about an experiment that's really interesting. So there was some work done on this idea. That people have psychic abilities and there's this 'feeling' of being stared; at the people can tell when they're being stared at and people reliably report that they think "Oh I knew somebody was staring I could just feel it in the back of my neck". And so they ran an experiment in which they did the following: they'd have somebody in a room, blindfolded ear-plugged. They can't sense anything. Nobody's allowed to wear perfumes or anything. That person can't see or hear or feel and they're just standing in the room. Unbeknownst to that person people would come in and stare at them and then the person at the center of the room had report if they were being stared at or not. And people were reporting this well above chance. They were saying "I think I'm being stared at!" and there was somebody there. And of course first of all it's [woooooooo. makes spooky sound and gesture again].

But then it turned out that if you made a slight change to that experiment it wouldn't replicate. So what was going on? You bring people into the room and they say "I think I'm being stared at." and the researchers would tell them if they were correct or not. They would say "you're right" or "you're wrong". So what you say, so what. Well here's the thing: the researchers thought they were introducing people to viewers into the room randomly. But it turns out they weren't introducing them randomly because you know what's very hard for you to do? Random stuff! They were actually introducing people as viewers in a complex pattern. And the person that was blindfolded and earplugged was implicitly learning the pattern because they were getting feedback. If you take the feedback away - if you don't tell them whenever they say I'm being stared at or not, if you don't tell them either that they're either right or wrong, their performance drops to chance. See, a lot of what looks like psychic abilities are your ability to pick up implicitly on complex patterns in the environment without being aware of it. Hogarth, in his book on "educating intuition", makes a really, really cool claim; makes a very good argument in fact I think for this. He says that what we call intuition is a real thing but there isn't anything magical about it, in [the way] the psychics say, your intuition is the result of your implicit learning.

You pick up on all kinds of complex patterns not knowing how you have done that but you get an ability to detect patterns and you don't know how. That's why your intuition feels the way it does: you just sort of know. You know things! You're doing it all the time! To use a famous example from Dreyfus, you know how far to stand from somebody and what angle to stand - where you should stand how close you should stand what angle you should stand how as the conversation or the context changes you're allowed to move closer or farther away what angles you're allowed to be at. But if I were to ask you to tell me how you do that you wouldn't know! You would just say "I know how to do it". And yet when people don't know how to do it it creeps you out. It creeps you out!

So intuition. Hogarth points out - and this is something very common - Hogarth points out that we have two different terms and we don't realize we're talking about the same thing. We have intuition when we think it's going well - that Implicit learning. But we also have bias. And prejudice for when we think that implicit learning goes bad. The biggot has got intuitions about races that are wrong. Now how is it that implicit learning goes wrong? Well here's the thing. You have some complex pattern in the environment and your implicit learning picks up on it. The problem is that there's two kinds of patterns in your environment. There's correlations. There's correlation patterns and causal patterns. So what do I mean by that? Correlations is whan any two things are related to each other. So let me give you an example of a couple of correlations that you shouldn't confuse with causation. There is a correlation between how large your wedding is and how long your marriage will last. You have a bigger wedding; your marriage will last longer. Now you would be a fool to therefore think you should have the biggest possible wedding because the reason why bigger weddings predict longer marriages is not because bigger weddings cause longer marriages. It's because they're only correlated. It's because bigger weddings reflect a bigger social network more financial resources and having a bigger social network for the couple having more financial resources actually does cause a marriage to last longer.

Here's another one. So I'm old enough and I was brought up in a religious household when prayer was taken out of the schools and of course people were very upset about that. You're taking a look at "crime is going up as we've taken prayer out of the schools" and things like that. By the way crime hasn't been going up. Read some of Stephen Pinker's work. But let's say it was. That's only a correlation because here's another correlation: We know that greenhouse gases have been going up steadily and that's part of the environmental crisis we're going to talk about. You know what has been also consistently going down for the exact same time period? Caribbean piracy! Having pirates in the Caribbean and wooden ships with cannons and stuff. As that went down, greenhouse gases went up. Now I hope none of you think that we could solve global warming by bringing back piracy.

So there are many things, there are many patterns in the world that are illusory because they're only correlational. They're not causal. See the biggot has picked up on correlational patterns, not causal patterns. So what you want to do is you want to train your implicit learning to pick up on the causal patterns that are real rather than the correlational patterns that are illusory. Now here's what you can't do. You can't tell people to look for patterns explicitly. Go back to Reeber's experiment. If you put people into that experiment where they're looking at the letter strings and you tell them explicitly what they're supposed to do - try and figure out the rules! Consciously deliberately try to figure out the rules! - their performance doesn't get better it gets worse.

And Hogarth notes this in his book on "Educating Intuition". We can't replace implicit learning with explicit learning because it is precisely by being implicit that it works so well. What can we do explicitly then? What we can do is set up the right context, the right environmental factors. So that my implicit learning machine will tend more likely to get onto causal patterns rather than corrolational patterns. So I'll get good intuition rather than bad intuition. How do you do that? Well Hogarth says the way you would do this is the way you do science. You want to control the context. Because what science is, science is a way of distinguishing causal patterns from correlational patterns. You set up an environmental situation so that you can distinguish the causal patterns from the correlational patterns.

What do you do? Well in an experiment first of all I make sure that everything is very clearly measured. I get very clear information. Very clear information. I make sure I'm looking to see that the change in one variable is closely followed by a change in another variable. So I change your drug dosage till your symptoms get better. So I look for clear information. I look for clear feedback. And in science failure matters. You test a hypothesis. And this confirmation has to be possible. Failure matters. Now notice this. What Hogarth says is "Well what I want to do is I want to put you into an implicit learning situation where you get clear feedback like you do in science where there is a tight coupling between what you do and how the environment responds and where error really matters." Like in science. And he says "what we should do is we should try and do implicit learning in those kinds of contexts."

Well here's what myself and my colleagues argued: those three criteria that will turn your intuition into good implicit learning are exactly the conditions for flow. Clear information. Tightly coupled feedback. And error matters.

The rock climber is looking for/ needs clear information, tightly coupled feedback and error really matters. That context really means that there's a much greater chance that their implicit learning machinery is gonna pick up on causal patterns rather than correlational ones.

So. Notice what we've got going on here. The shaman is getting into the flow state; is developing all these techniques for getting into this deeply immersive, comprehensive, flow state and they're getting an insight cascade. And they're also getting enhanced implicit learning picking up on very complex real, complex patterns. Now this is intuitive. They don't know how they're doing it.

Now here's what's interesting too. These two are reinforcing each other because the insight gets your cognition to explore for new patterns and then the implicit learning picks up those new patters and then those new patterns enhance your ability to restructure. And then you keep exploring for new patterns acquiring the new patterns of implicit learning and you keep ratcheting your skills up. Getting into the flow state is deeply deeply enhancing of your cognition. Somebody who's an expert at getting into the flow state is going to be an individual you want to have around. Now that individual is going to have some really serious challenges facing them. They don't know how they're getting a lot of the information they're getting. They don't know why they're so insightful! They're experiencing this radical "at-onement" (oneness) with the world; this loss of sense of self when they're enacting the animal. You have to understand these insights aren't verbal insights! Like in the 9 dot problem, it's not words, not beliefs getting an insight in how the deer moves! It's getting an insight an intuitive insight in how to talk to this person to trigger the placebo effect to help them to heal right now.

So getting into the flow state: Notice what's going on here. Notice you're getting something that's almost like a mystical experience. It's a powerful, altered state of consciousness. It's enhancing your cognitive processing. And the shaman is making meaning. They're singing ,they're dancing they're telling stories they're altering people's sense of what matters they're altering people's sense of identity. They're healing and transforming people.

What does that mean? Why would that have powered the Upper Paleolithic transition? Well first of all this is enhancing your cognition. But - and this goes towards the work of Michael Winkelman and also Matt Rossano - what's happening in this state is your brain is learning to get areas to talk to each other that normally don't talk to each other. This is especially the case if you've gone through a massive disruption strategy - fasting, social isolation, taking psychedelics - because if you look at a brain scan of somebody who's having a psychedelic experience, areas of the brain that do not normally talk to each other are talking to each other now.

Now if I were just to do that to you, if I was just to get areas to talk to each other, you'd experience that as just noise. But if you've got enhanced insight and enhanced intuition, those areas are now talking to each other and you can bridge between them. You can connect them. And now this is an ability that you take for granted. You think it is just a normal part of your cognition. This is your capacity for metaphor. The word metaphor is itself a metaphor. It means to bridge, to carry over, to connect things that are normally not connected. And what you need to understand is how pervasive metaphor is. I showed you a little bit last time - the idea of a project. But I want you to reflect now - And notice the word reflect as a metaphor - On how your thought and language is filled with metaphor - by the way, that was a metaphor! I'll say for example "do you see what I'm saying?", "Do you get my point?" "Do you comprehend it?" "Can you grasp it?" "Do you understand it?" These are all metaphors!

How about "halfway through" this talk. I hope it's not "too hard" for you. Do you see? It's pervasive and profound - all of your cognition. This is work done by Lakoff and others. I have some criticisms of some of their theory but the idea that your cognition is filled and functions through metaphorical enhancement... that's just I think the case. Now why is metaphor so powerful? Because metaphor is how you make creative connections between ideas. Metaphorical cognition is at the heart of both science and art. When the shamans are enhancing this machinery they're connecting areas of the brain that normally do not talk to each other and affording a massive enhancement in metaphor. One of the ways in which your cognition and meaning and altered states of consciousness come together is in how your mind, your embodied mind, is generating metaphor in order to make insightful connections. There's a deep connection between how insightful, how good a problem solver you are and your capacity for metaphorical thought. That's why when somebody is facing a problem and they need to restructure how they think about it we tell them to use an analogy to think of a metaphor. So, this is the point: the shaman is developing psycho-technologies for altering the state of consciousness to get into the flow state and that flow state is already making them more insightful and more intuitively powerful. But it is also making them generators of metaphor. They're literally providing people with the forms of thought that will allow them to connect ideas such that making inscriptions on a piece of bone can track the moon. Carving this figurine can connect me to ideas of fertility.

So, we're seeing a lot of the themes that we're going to develop coming to the fore here. How much the shaman is weaving together, enhancing cognition, altered states of consciousness and improving our capacity for making sense of the world. Literally making more meaning.

If you are a hunter/gatherer group and you have a shaman, you're going to outcompete groups that don't. There's a reason why it's universal. There's a reason why the flow phenomena is universal. Because this exapts some of our most basic machinery [and] enhances it in a powerful way. The shamans have a very interesting kind of experience. They go through this transformation. They often experience what's called "Soul flight" as if they've gone to another world and they're flying through it. This is the origin - think of how we've come to this - but this is the origin of "getting high". In the shaman, does this.... The shaman experiences themselves as if they're flying above the world. Why? Why would the brain generate that? Well think about this. The shaman is getting a much more comprehensive grasp of more complex patterns. But they're experiencing it mostly intuitively and metaphorically. Where are you when you get a bigger picture of things? You're above them.

How do we often explain this even to ourselves metaphorically? You say you have "oversight". Somebody who is in charge of things has "oversight" of them or has "super-vision" of them. Do you see that? Those are metaphors. Those are metaphors that are little whispers little echoes of shamanic flight. Flying over things. Getting an intuitive, insightful grasp that is expressed metaphorically of a deeper connection to the world.

We're gonna pick up on all of these themes as we investigate more of the machinery of meaning making. They need to move forward now. So I want to talk about another revolution. This was the Upper Paleolithic transition. This is where the meaning making machinery, the altered altering consciousness, the self transcending, the flying above, the cultivation of wisdom associated with a lot of things that we consider spiritual and religious. You see them all together. That's the Upper Paleolithic transition. Now there's another important revolution that takes place around 10000 BCE. That's the Neolithic revolution. You get the invention of agriculture. Now agriculture is important because it adds to this machinery in an important way because now individuals are part of complex societies and for the first time, because of agriculture, people start to stay in one place for significant amounts of time. So their relationship to the environment, to each other because they're living with large groups of strangers now, and to themselves radically changes.

That goes through a very long period of development. This world then becomes the ancient world as stone gives way to metal and we get the Bronze Age. The period of the first great civilizations in Mesopotamia, in Egypt and there's a transformation that's happened in the way people are experiencing their world. Human beings are still doing everything we've been talking about. They still have rituals - of course they've developed them into very sophisticated, complex systems. They're still engaging in altered states of consciousness and that world is pervasive for a very long time. But our connection to it is very odd! If I were to ask you if you've read anything from the bronze age, chances are you haven't! Have you read the Epic of Gilgamesh? No, probably not. Have you read any Egyptian mythology? Probably not. Why the Sumerian, Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations are titanically important? Long lasting? But notice if I ask you if you've read parts of the Bible, or perhaps Plato, or perhaps some of the Buddha. Or Confucius. Chances are you you have read some of that. You somehow feel that those people are relevant to you in a way that people from the Bronze Age aren't! Now why? There seems to have been another great change comparable to the change of the Upper Paleolithic transition.

Again whether it's a one shot or more of a continuum... Again I don't need to decide that, and I'm not confident that the debates around that are actually very fruitful. But Karl Jaspers talked about the "Axial Age". Karen Armstrong has made famous "that" in a recent book. So around 800 BCE to around 300 B.C. there's this great change such that you will read, connect to, find relevant authors, systems of thought, ways of being from that time period. And yet back here - where the Bronze Age ends - you don't read this stuff. In fact - or at least most of you don't - you don't find it relevant. You don't identify with it. Something happened here that is formative of us. Just like the Upper Paleolithic transition was formative of us as human beings, the Axial Age is formative of us as Western civilization. Or at least world civilization, because not just in the West that the Axial Revolution occurs. It also occurs in India and China.

Now, what happened? Why this change? Well there's a bunch of stuff that happens; we don't quite know. There's a lot of discussion about it but we know! The Bronze Age collapses. There's some good books [about] this. A Book by Drews. There's a book by Klein 1177 B.C. Different discussions about why it collapsed - was it a change in chariot warfare? Is it general systems failure? Is a combination of changing military technology? Don't know! Doesn't matter for our purposes. What we know is that it's a collapse. Now you need to grasp the gravity of this collapse.

This is the greatest collapse in civilization the world has ever known. The fall of the Roman Empire is nowhere near as devastating as this. More cities go out of existence at this time - the Bronze Age collapse - than any other time in recorded history. More cultures disappear. Greatest loss of literacy. Greatest collapse of trade. This is the closest thing the world has actually experienced to apocalypse. The end of the world. What happens here is a dark age. So before this you have the Egyptian Empire, these titanic dinosaur empires, huge and powerful. Lasting for centuries. Cultures the last millennia and then they disappear. And what you would find is something like when the dinosaurs went extinct. When the dinosaurs went extinct the little mammals that had been scurrying about, they start to evolve. What you have once these dinosaur empires past out of existence in the dark age is you have a lot of little small scale societies. People barely hanging on. [A] Very tough time. Another time in which there's a demand made on cognition to adapt. Remember the bottleneck in Africa preceding the Upper Paleolithic transition. Here's another bottleneck kind of event. So people are more willing to experiment. To try new things than they have before in the past. They're willing to try new forms of social organization.

But importantly they start to invent new things and they start to invent new psycho-technologies. Remember the last time we talked about what a psycho-technology is. It's a standardized way of doing information processing that improves and enhances your cognition by linking brains together. Your brain to your own future states of your brain. Your brain to other people's brains. Something happens here in one of the areas that was hit hardest by the Bronze Age collapse. The area Palestine. Palestine and what's modern Israel, Jordan, places like that. It used to be the old... referred to as the land of Canaan. What seems to be invented here is a new kind of literacy. Remember we talked about literacy as a powerful psycho-technology. Now the Bronze Age world had literacy. The Egyptians had hieroglyphics famously. The Sumerians had cuneiform. Now the thing about those forms of literacy is they're very difficult to learn. You've to go to school for very very long time. And your job... You can have this job in the ancient world. This was your job - to be literate. It's called being a scribe. It's where we get words like scribble from. Your entire job was you were literate because it was a tough thing to be literate and it was a very valuable thing and it was a rare thing because literacy was hard. When it's ideoographic. I have some ideograms tattooed here. This means meditate. What gets invented here is alphabetic literacy. It seems to be invented in Kanan and then it's taken up by the Phoenicians and then they take it to the Greeks and then the Canaanite alphabet merges imperceptibly into archaic Hebrew and then gets taken into Hebrew. That's going to be important. These two groups of people are going to be very important.

Now why is alphabetic literacy so powerful? It's much more learnable. It's a more effective and efficient Psycho-technology. Remember when I said last time how much literacy enhances your cognition. If I give you alphabetic literacy you can learn it much more powerfully and more people can learn it. So your ability to learn and access and share with others the benefits of literacy gets magnified tremendously. So the number of people that can be literate expands. Now, literacy does something very, very important. Really, really interesting and its effect on your sense of self and your sense of cognition. As I noted before when I can write things down I can come back to my thoughts later and I can reflect on them. I start to become more aware of my own thoughts and noticed something else I can do: I can correct my thinking more readily because I don't have to rely on it being held in my mind. I can put it, I can externalize it, I can put it out there, I can reflect on it, I can correct it. I can store it independent of my memory.

So I start to get a capacity for what Robert Bellah calls "second order thinking". Now, we all have metacognition - we'll talk about this later - metacognition is your awareness of your own mind. I can ask you right now "what are you thinking" you can come become aware of it. "Do you have a good memory? Yes or no?" You'll say "I do or I don't". That's meta cognition. It's your knowledge and awareness of your own mind. We all have metacognition. But one of the things you can do with literacy - alphabetic literacy - is you can internalize literacy into your metacognition. So, notice I'm becoming aware of my own cognition here. I can reflect on it. I can correct it. I can enhance it. I can store it. I can share it with others. Second order thinking is when you internalize a psycho-technology into your metacognition and it improves your capacity to critically examine your own thinking and correct your own thinking. Second order thinking starts to emerge because of alphabetic literacy.

What else is being invented at this time? Well, you've got lots of armies moving around in this period because what's happening is empires are being rebuilt. Famously the Assyrian empire in the Middle East. Mobile armies are needed and so there is an invention here that's really important that we also take for granted. It's the stuff we carry around - well we used to carry around we don't carry around anymore; we'll talk about that - It's money! Coinage! Coinage is invented. Now coinage is obviously a physical technology. In one sense I carry coins around - although the sense in which money is now physical is very, very tenuous because most of us don't carry anything physical anymore - money is just a purely symbolic thing. And that's the point. Money teaches you to think in an abstract symbol system. You start thinking in abstract symbol systems and it also teaches you something else. Numeracy. You have to start thinking mathematically. At least arithmetically. So you now have abstract symbolic, logically rigorous thought being trained. It's being trained for practical purposes but is being trained. It's ready for exaptation. The alphabetic literacy is training this second order thinking. It's ready for exaptation. You say "OK, I get it! The psycho-technologies are training skills that are ready for exaptation!". Well, bring that second order thinking and bring that abstract symbolic thought - more logically rigorous together - and what are you going to start getting. You're going to start getting people having a very clear sense of two things about their cognition.

One thing is how much they can correct their cognition. How much they can transcend themselves; self transcendence. It enhances their sense of self transcendence. But what's it also doing? It's also enhancing their awareness of how self deceptive they are. How much error is in their cognition and they previously couldn't be aware of it but now with second order thinking with literacy an abstract symbolic thought and numeracy they can become aware of this. They put those two together: a tremendous capacity for self correction and tremendous capacity for self-deception. And Human Beings start to do something very differently. They start to change their sense of self and their sense of the world. They start to realize a more personal sense of responsibility which of course is going to change how people think morally about themselves.

What do I mean? Let me give you a specific example. If you look before this time, people think of chaos and warfare and violence as just part of the natural order. But after the Axial revolution with the advent of second order thinking with this increased awareness of self transcendence and self correction people start to realize "no no no!", we're responsible for the violence. We're responsible for the chaos. Not just in some vague sense but it's the way my mind makes meaning. That's why the Dhammapada begins "The Mind is the chief thing." People understand that - you see this in the Dhammapada - there is no enemy greater than your own mind. But there is no ally greater than your own mind. People start understanding this double edged sword of their own cognition. Undisciplined leads to violence through self-deception and illusion. But discipline, through self correction, and self transcendence leads to wisdom and the ability to reduce the violence and the suffering.

So in our next meeting together we're going to talk more about this actual revolution and this sense that people had of their capacity for self transcendence and their capacity for self-deception and how that changed, radically, their sense of self and their sense of the world. And how that changed what meaning meant and what wisdom meant. Thank you for your time.

Other helpful resources about this episode:
Notes on Bevry
Summary and Transcript on awakeningfromthemeaningcrisis.com