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Notes on John Vervaeke's YouTube lecture series,
"Awakening from the Meaning Crisis"
Notes by Peter A. Taylor
May 17th, 2020
It is possible to be happy even in a palace.
— Marcus Aurelius
"Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" is a 50 hour lectures series. This is an attempt to condense the first 25 hours into a concise, coherent timeline (the story of the rise and fall of Christianity, more or less). This has been frustrating and confusing. Beware that much of my characterization of Vervaeke's lectures is confused.
Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist, and there is a minimum of cognitive science background that I have to explain in order for his story to make sense. Part of this minimum background is that conscious thought takes place within mental "frames". These frames preceed conscious thought, and have to be generated by lower levels of the mind. There is pre-conscious "relevance realization" (RR) mental machinery that does this. Finding (or making) meaning in life depends on this RR and framing machinery. How is my life relevant to something I care about, and how is my environment relevant to me? Vervaeke likes to illustrate this machinery by talking about "toy" problems such as "the 9-dot problem" (draw four straight lines through a grid of 9 dots without lifting your pencil) and "the mutilated chessboard" (figuring out whether it's possible to use 1x2 dominos to tile a chessboard that has had two diagonally opposed corner squares cut off). People tend to try to simplify the 9-dot problem by mentally drawing a "box" around the 9 dots, and imposing a constraint that the lines have to start and end on a dot. In order to solve the problem, you have to break this frame: drop the constraints and think "outside the box". Similarly, if you frame the mutilated chessboard as a search problem, it is impossibly hard to solve, but if you frame it in terms of colors and parity, it is trivially easy.
One of my anonymous internet acquaintances, whom I will call "critic 1", took a very negative view of John Vervaeke based on some of my initial comments. Roughly, "critic 1" regards Vervaeke as a pompous waste of time. On the one hand, there are a number of reasons why I am sympathetic to "critic 1":
He uses a lot of foreign language terms without explaining them adequately beforehand.
He uses a lot of philosophobabble without adequately defining the terms first. E.g. "existential", "modal". The word, "modal", makes me think of Cholesky decompositions. What does he (or Jordan Peterson) mean by "reality"? If I walk into a door, is "reality" the door, or the sensation of pain that I experience?
Part of the philosophobabble is using adjectives as nouns. E.g. "the transcendent". I need nouns. One irony is that Vervaeke talks about "cognitive fluency", how people tend to trust information more if it is easy to understand, and how important this is. Using adjectives as nouns breaks the grammar, and interferes with cognitive fluency.
He uses long, run-on sentences, and too many pronouns. In taking notes, I often have to back-up several minutes to try to figure out what the noun is in a sentence. I am reminded of Mark Twain's essay on "The Awful German Language", where he complains about sentences that start on one side of the Atlantic and end on the other side. There are a lot of unnecessary words.
His speech is full of ambiguous lists. I often can't tell if he is saying that all of the elements in some list are supposed to mean the same thing, or if they are supposed to be distinct, and I am supposed to appreciate the subtle differences. The last two items in his lists are seldom separated by the word, "and".
He uses a lot of alliteration. This may be characteristic of the cognitive science community in general. It may be good in terms of making certain lists easier to remember, but I keep wondering how much hammering of square pegs into round holes has taken place.
All of these things are annoying and make me suspicious that there isn't any "there" there. More charitably, this lecture series wants to be a book, and I hope it turns into one, but he needs a good editor. The first thing his editor needs to do is to demand that he put a glossary in the front of the book.
On the other hand, "critic 1" is missing an important point when he writes,
"You know what makes me find new frames? New information. I know, shocking right."
The information you have when you realize how to solve the 9-dot problem or the mutilated chessboard problem is exactly the same information you had when you couldn't solve them. The latter problem in particular reminds me of a professor who used to describe problems as "plug and chug" problems vs. "think and grin" problems. "Plug and chug" problems are possibly tedious, but straightforward. "Think and grin" problems are not tedious, but require having the right frame. Vervaeke speaks at length about combinatorially explosive problems and having astronomical amounts of information coming in through our eyes constantly. We can't possibly manage this without being clueful about what information (and what regions of the search space) we can safely ignore. This is the framing problem. Is isn't that you need new information, it's that you need to do a better job of managing the information you already have.
If you've ever used Computer Aided Design (CAD) software, one of the common problems is that you're looking at a wire-frame perspective view of a box, and you get confused about which corners are in the front and which are in the back. You rotate the view with the mouse, but it moves in the opposite direction from what you were expecting. Sometimes you can make the image "snap" the other way in your head, but sometimes you have to toggle back and forth between wire-frame and solid views in order to really see what you've been looking at all along. The beauty of the solid view is that it hides information.
There are also those Magic Eye pictures (on flat paper) that are composed of myriad jumbled-up trashy little images. Up close, it is trash, but if you look at it just right (the right distance, eyes level, focused at the right depth), you see a Space Shuttle Orbiter, a satellite, and a planet in 3-D. There is no new information that makes the image pop out at you; you just have to look at the same poster you were looking at before in a specific, slightly odd way.
But the relationship between the mutilated chessboard problem and finding the meaning of life is still unclear to me.
Now let me set up some of the playground equipment so that the timeline makes some sense:
"Meaning" is a metaphor. There is something about life making sense that is analogous to the way a sentence has meaning.
The three orders: Modern cognitive science (Samantha Henselman) says that the three components of meaning in life are (1) a sense of coherence, (2) a sense of significance, and (3) a sense of purpose.
People want things to make sense. The more coherent ("nomological order": intelligible, well fit together) the world, the more meaningful your life.
Significance is how valuable, harmonious, and aligned with reality are the elements of your life ("normative order"). (I'm confused here. Is this about morality or agency?)
Purpose: does your life have a direction? Does it tell an interesting story ("narrative order")?
Vervaeke also talks about four kinds of knowledge: participatory, perspectival, procedural, and propositional. The first three blur together in my mind. There's propositional "head stuff", and then there's everything else. There's the guy who can talk about chairs, and then there's the guy who knows how to make them.
Update: Vervaeke explains this better in a 3-26-2020 Rebel Wisdom dialog with Iain McGilcrist.
Propositional knowing: I have a belief. I know that a cat is a mammal. Beware reducing religion to a belief system. Beliefs are only one part of finding meaning.
Procedural knowing: I have a skill. I know how to catch a baseball. A skill is not true or false, but well or poorly fitted.
Perspectival knowing: This is the knowing that you have because you are a conscious being. I know what it's like to be sober, sane, awake, or conscious. Salience landscaping, how things are foregrounded and backgrounded. Situational awareness. (I have an experience?)
Participatory knowing: Atunement, fundamental connectedness, being at home. You lose this in another culture. Agent and arena are not in sync. (I know the rules. I have a relationship?)
Elsewhere (e.g. talking to Paul VanderKlay), Vervaeke refers to the Norse myth of Odin having sacrificed one eye in order to gain a certain kind of knowledge and power. But now Odin is blind in one eye. The overfocus on propositional knowledge in order to pursue science and engineering is like that. We obtained power, but have trouble finding meaning. VanderKlay also uses the metaphor of a rifleman who shuts one eye so that he can aim better.
Vervaeke talks of "having mode" vs. "being mode", which are focused on different needs. There are "having" needs (e.g. water to drink) and "being" needs (developmental needs, wanting to get higher on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if I understand correctly). You need both. "Modal confusion" is when, e.g., someone needs to grow up, but he buys a car instead. We are stuck on Maslow's lower levels (?) by self-deception and foolishness.
There is no final developmental state. Human life requires continual adaptation to new problems. Development requires wisdom and frequent re-framing of how we look at things. Altered states of consciousness are useful for this. A large part of wisdom is "relevance realization", knowing what's important and should be "salient", and what to ignore. When a child matures, his "salience landscape" is radically changed. As adults, your life should not be oriented towards the super-saliency of candy and toys. I need continual self-transcendence to find meaning. Otherwise I'm stuck on Maslow's lower levels (?).
"Modal confusion" is also when I can't figure out how Vervaeke is using the word, "modal". Sometimes, he says things like that love is a "modal way of being", which seems to mean the same thing as an "agent-arena relationship". An agent-arena mismatch, e.g. being a tennis player in a football stadium, feels "absurd". Addiction involves a constricted agent-arena relationship. Vervaeke likes to talk about this in Buddhist terms (i.e. in Sanskrit).
If I understand correctly, the three orders are the stage (environment) on which meaning-making plays out. A favorable environment makes meaning-making easier; it's more obvious what's important. The more unfavorable the environment, the more I need special tools ("psychotechnologies" for altering states of consciousness) for finding/making meaning. (In episode 26, he says that neither word is quite right, and it's better to talk about "cultivating" meaning.) Traditionally, religion has provided these tools, as well as parts of the three orders. Religion is "an ecology of psychotechnologies" for enhancing wisdom.
I want to separate causes from symptoms. Is the problem that the scientific worldview is inherently unsatisfying, or that my toolkit for achieving altered states of consciousness is impoverished? But in several places, Vervaeke says that some phenomenon (e.g. Marxism) is both a cause and a symptom of the meaning crisis. Marxism is a symptom of people not being able to find meaning in traditional religion, but it is also a cause of them abandoning the meaning-making tools that traditional religion provided.
A greatly condensed version of Vervaeke's timeline:
Bronze Age (10,000 BC-1177 BC) literature (e.g. The Epic of Gilgamesh or Egyptian mythology) seems strange to modern readers; few people read it. Bronze age people experienced the world as "the continuous cosmos", with connections between the cultural world, the natural world, and the world of the gods. There are differences in degree between animals and men, and between men and gods, quantitative, not qualitative. Time moves in large cycles. Bronze age wisdom is about power.
Modern people still read and appreciate Axial Age (800 BC-300 BC) literature (e.g. Plato, the Bible, Buddha). Axial Age thinking includes metacognition (awareness of your own mind) and "second order thinking" (improved capacity to examine your own thinking). The "continuous cosmos" was split into the everyday world (the world of illusion) and the real world (the world of wisdom). The Bronze Age sense of self emphasizes how you fit in. Axial Age wisdom is that you don't want to fit into this world of suffering, violence, and illusion, you want to transcend it, and get to the "real" world.
Time is now a cosmic narrative, a story, not cycles, but with a purpose, and your actions matter. Reincarnation is horrible; you want to get free of those purposeless cycles. Bronze age gods have places and functions, but no moral arc. Axial age stories have meaning and morality.
The God in the Old Testament evolves from Bronze Age to Axial Age. Faith didn't mean believing ridiculous things for which there is no evidence. Faith meant being on course, participating. Axial age Israel is more and more about participating in the ongoing creation of the world.
Foreshadowing: The scientific worldview is destroying this system of myth, returning us to a continuous cosmos: there is only one world. How do we preserve Axial Age wisdom when we no longer inhabit its worldview? Socrates complained that natural philosophers gave him truth without relevance, and Sophists gave him relevance without truth. We seem to be returning to this state of affairs.
Plato (428 BC-348 BC) more-or-less invents psychology. Western civilization is basically Plato + the Bible. The parable of the cave is a parable of self-transcendence. We are chained in a cave so that we see only shadows, but we can get free and climb out. "Anagoge" is this ascent up from Plato's cave, towards wisdom.
Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC), building on Socrates (470 BC-399 BC) and Plato, sets up the ancient Greek worldview. A man's purpose in life is to cultivate his own character. Physical things are sort of alive: they also have innate purpose, natural places that they move towards. You know something by conforming to it, internalizing its nature. Buddhism is developing in parallel in India.
Sometime around here, Gnosticism is developing. Gnosticism is more of a style of thinking than a particular set of doctrines. Gnostic literature reads like an acid trip. Gnostics regard the gods of the existing mythologies in the cultures surrounding them as prison guards (they tend to be anti-semitic). They keep improvising new mythology. The point is not to have a final orthodox story or set of principles, but to rise above wherever you are now. The movie, "The Matrix", is a modern retelling of gnosticism.
Jesus (5 BC-33 AD) wants you to be "born again", radically transformed through agapic love. Agape is an agent-arena relationship, the love a parent has for a child. A newborn baby isn't a person. By loving it (agape), you turn a non-person into a moral agent person. Imagine that if you cared enough about a sofa, that it would turn into a Ferrari. It's that powerful. Christianity took over the Roman empire because they were able to say to all of the non-persons (women, slaves, non-citizens, etc.), "We will turn you into persons; persons that belong to the kingdom of God."
St. Paul (4 BC-63 AD) embraces the agape of Jesus, but Paul projects his inner conflict (law vs. agape, justice vs. mercy) onto God, and comes up with a theology to explain it.
Plotinus (204 AD-270 AD) developed Neoplatonism, the grand unified field theory of ancient spirituality. Platonic spirituality, Aristotelian science and theory of knowledge, and Stoic psychotherapy are mutually supporting and interwoven.
St. Augustine (354-430 AD) combined Christianity, Neoplatonism, and Gnosticism. Aristotle (via Plotinus?) provided a nomological order. Plotinus (Plato, via Plotinus?) provided a normative order. Christianity offers a narrative order, a story. (I gather that Gnostic-flavored Christianity plays better with Plotinus than the other flavors?)
Augustine says Christianity can put all of this together. The world is organized this way, so that it moves through history this way, so that all of us can self-transcend this way. This is the golden age of Christianity. It gave people a "sacred canopy". It lasts almost 1000 years.
But then the sacred canopy starts to get torn apart. The Crusades recovered some writings of Aristotle that gave Christians heartburn. People started focusing on propositional knowledge to the exclusion of participatory knowledge, et al.
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274); Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) and the Rhineland Mystics; and William of Ockham (1285-1348) try to fix problems with Augustine's system, but only make things worse. Aquinas changes the meaning of "faith" from participation to the willful assertion of propositions, and separates science from spirituality. As science becomes more and more successful, the supernatural world seems less and less real. Eckhard says spirituality means self-negation. Self-transcendence and wisdom disappear from spirituality. Christianity is starting to be less about love (agape) and more about will.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) convinces people that Aristotle was wildly wrong. But if the Earth being the center of the universe is an illusion, what isn't an illusion? Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) discredits Aristotle some more. "Galileo kills the universe." He convinces people that the universe is dead, an indifferent machine. The world isn't filled with beauty, value, and meaning; those are in your head, subjective. Good and evil are subjective.
Martin Luther (1483-1546) tries to fix the Catholic Church, but ends up destroying all of the wisdom institutions he gets his hands on, and wrecking what's left of Christianity. You are saved by faith alone. Humans have no agency. Wisdom institutions are replaced by political institutions. He inadvertently promotes democracy and separation of church and state. He and Calvin (1509-1564) also promote anxiety about not being able to tell if you're saved. Luther presents a double bind: you have to rely on your conscience (he recognizes no higher authority), but your inner world is riddled with self-deception. Protestantism undergoes perpetual fragmentation. Now God is nothing but arbitrary will in a battle of wills.
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) thinks anxiety is caused by uncertainty, and tries to pursue certainty through math and science. Descartes' attempt backfires. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) radicalizes Descartes, and "kills the soul" by proposing that a mind (artificial intelligence) can be made out of non-living matter. Descartes thinks this AI is impossible because it lacks purpose. The scientific revolution has taken all the consciousness out of matter. Descartes has given us an unstable grammar of realness. We careen back and forth between (A) math tells us what's real (empiricists, positivists; objective) and (B) mind touching itself in consciousness is the "touchstone" of reality (romantics; subjective). We don't have a mathematical way of talking about purpose. But how is pure subjective experience in touch with reality?
All three orders are getting hammered. Nomological: The mind and the physical world fit together poorly. Narrative: It isn't clear if a mind has a purpose. Normative: It isn't clear if I have any agency. Do I have free will? Do "I" even exist?
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) also breaks things while trying to fix them. Kant says math works because our brains filter out information that doesn't make mathematical sense to us. The more sense an idea makes, the further it is from reality. The Romantics run with this, and seem to believe that we make our own reality. Romanticism takes over some functions of religion.
Georg Hegel (1770-1831) says reality, "the thing in itself", is completely unknowable, and may as well not exist. Hegel wants to make a secular substitute for Christianity, in which he replaces God with human collective consciousness ("Geist"). He is "the godfather of totalitarian ideologies". Again, someone tries to repair the sacred canopy, but only breaks it further. His "Geist" is disconnected from reality. And where do morals come from?
Arthur Schopenhauer (1747-1805), Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), and Karl Marx (1818-1883) all complain that Hegel has not captured the core of meaning-making. Kierkegaard says it's just head stuff, with no method for cultivating wisdom, connectedness, or agapic love. He also says that transformative experiences require a "leap of faith"; you can't reason your way through them because we exist before we discover the essence of who and what we are (existentialism).
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) "destroyed Heaven" (Paul VanderKlay). Before Darwin, you could be a Deist, but atheism wasn't intellectually respectable (see Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker). Now it is.
Marx completes the secularization implicit in Hegel, but brings participation back by proposing that we identify with our socio-economic class and participate in violent revolution to bring us to the promised land. There are also elements of will. Now we get warring political ideologies as the way in which spirituality is to be understood. Some other ideologies have been emerging at the same time, e.g. commercialism.
My comments: Marx offers pseudo-science (nomological order); offers moral guidance and agency (normative order); and tells a story (narrative order), but his moral guidance is violently insane.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) inverted the psyche and put the will on top (will to power). This is basically postmodernism. He tries to repair the normative order, looking for transcendence without God, but breaks it further because he has no mechanism for suppressing self-deception.
Germany is unified (1870). Nationalism is emerging as an alternative to class as a source of political identity. The nation-state substitutes for God as a source of participation and meaning. The Germans are trying to play catch-up with the other European powers.
WWI (1914-1918) is a disaster, especially for Germany. What was supposed to take the place of God has drenched the world in blood. All the spiritual problems in Germany are exacerbated by the Great Depression. Everything from the collapse of the three orders is spun by Hitler to create a response to the meaning crisis in Weimar Germany. Naziism incorporates fascism, racism (especially anti-semitism), myth, mysticism, nationalism, romanticism, gnosticism, will to power, and imperialism into "a tsunami of bullshit". It's part religion, part political ideology, and part Hitler's personal mythology.
Vervaeke's timeline ends with the Battle of Kursk (1943). We now have two great pseudo-religious, totalitarian ideologies, Naziism and Communism, opposed to one another, infused with mythologies of grasping and driving history towards the promised land. They fight in WWII, the "titanic struggle" of the Eastern front, exemplified by the greatest battle of all time, Kursk, incomprehensibly huge. We have the complete politicization of the quest for meaning. Perspectival knowing has been reduced to your political viewpoint. Participatory knowing has been reduced to your political identification. These pseudo-religious ideologies are not only symptomatic of the meaning crisis, they also contribute to the meaning crisis, feeding back, exacerbating the crisis.
Ideologies are attempts to create meaning, but they fail because the meaning-making machinery is not occurring at the level of propositional knowledge.
The only thing in the past that has created the necessary psychotechnologies is religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, we tried to create alternatives to this, pseudo-religious ideologies that have drenched the world in blood. We need a religion that can't be any kind of religion at all, a god beyond all gods. To politicize this or present it as being about beliefs is to misrepresent the meaning crisis.
My comment: Never bring a political ideology to a religious crisis.
Christianity has given us expectations of love, transformation, growth into personhood, and relief from inner conflict, which are not well met in a post-Christian worldview. We carry the grammar of God, but many of us no longer believe any of the things we say with it.
The current state of play, as I understand it:
We have lost much of the religious "psychotechnology" that our ancestors developed, which we need to overcome self-deception and meet our developmental needs (the upper parts of Maslow's hierarchy of needs).
We are overfocused on propositional knowledge (head stuff). This is good for science and engineering, but bad for finding meaning.
We are cut off from our roots ("domicide"). For example, I followed a career halfway across the country with little thought about being far from any of my family.
Our modern worldviews (the "three orders") don't play well together, and therefore provide an adverse environment for finding or making meaning. Science ("nomological order") doesn't play well with morality or good storytelling, my life doesn't fit within an interesting story arc ("narrative order"), and the people claiming to provide moral leadership ("normative order") seem to be largely con men and the criminally insane. Co-creation of the world with God has degenerated into an intersectional victimhood holiness spiral.
A recurring theme in my attempts to make sense of Vervaeke's history is the sense of theologians and philosophers making "unforced errors". Philosophers like Kant try to fix one problem, but in the process, they create two more worse ones. Why did people accept this as "progress"? Some of the philosophical changes were forced by scientific discoveries; these would be "forced errors". But the other philosophical and theological innovations need more explanation. Politics explains some of these innovations: German princes found it politically convenient to support the Protestant Reformation. Another explanation for unforced errors would be that the standards of logical coherence kept rising; people got better at spotting logic problems and/or they became increasingly bothered by them. I think I see some encouragement for proposing this idea in an article by Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making. The cognitive dissonance of unresolved logic problems became more disturbing for people than the loss of the psychotechnologies of meaning-making.
Christian theology was always problematic. (Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained, Someone whom I can't remember argues that theology consists of attempts to reconcile different people's incompatible intuitions about the supernatural, and is inherently futile.) My impression is that people at the time of St. Paul had little expectation of humans being able to second-guess God. Thinking you can second-guess God would have been seen as obvious hubris. But by the time of Descartes, people seem to have accepted that God is bound by mathematical logic, which is knowable by man. People also seem to have become increasingly willing to apply human moral standards to God's supposed acts. As Voltaire said, "Every man is guilty of all of the good that he didn't do." Why doesn't a loving God meet this standard?
Update, 7-22-2021: David Sloan Wilson offers a possible explanation for these "unforced errors" in Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society: There are conflicts between "factual realism" (including philosophical plausibility) and "practical realism" (including the ability to motivate people). Christianity may have evolved under the leadership of people like John Calvin to be better at generating social cohesion, including on the battlefield. At the time, making philosophical sense may not have been as important as the ability to win battles. The changes to Christianity were thus adaptive on some level, but not on the level Vervaeke is looking at. Meanwhile, the printing press and the industrial revolution have radically changed the environment.
I kind of left some things hanging at the end of the above.
Vervaeke has been interviewed several times by Paul VanderKlay (CRC minister). They get along scary well. Vervaeke is careful to be respectful of religion in general. VanderKlay has made thoughtful observations about his "religion that isn't a religion" project (e.g. the need for a religion to work both at a child's level and an adult's level, which is a non-trivial problem). If there are comments in the above notes that are disrespectful, they are my fault, not Vervaeke's, and I apologize for them.
VanderKlay likes to talk about "the Storyverse". A human being is a story. The universe is a story. Asking where God is in the universe is like asking where J. R. R. Tolkien is in The Lord of the Rings. On one level, he's not in it at all. On another level, the whole thing is him. From VanderKlay's perspective, a lot of my theological questions are like asking, "If the point of The Lord of the Rings was to end up with Frodo, Gandalf, and Elrond sailing away on a boat, why didn't Tolkien just put them there on page 1?"
You cannot shelter theology from science, or science from theology; nor can you shelter either of them from metaphysics, or metaphysics from either of them.
— Alfred North Whitehead
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