Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

Typically, a legal person can sue and be sued, own property, and enter into contracts.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_person

If a fetus is not a “person”, courts have no business interfering. Courts cannot make law affecting the behavior or treatment of a viral infection. Viruses are not persons.

Why is legal standing important?

In short, standing keeps courts in their constitutional lane. Standing also has important implications for people seeking access to the justice system, because if someone lacks standing, the courthouse doors are closed to him.Jun 29, 2021

I’m listening to EP 12 part two, a second time now. It feels long winded and lordie 50 episodes, wish I did, but I don’t have that kind of time. My life is full of commitments, and chores, spring garden chores, transition from wood burning to water catching, etc., etc., and then a Friday a phone call, come Tuesday AM I was off to South Carolina and the grandkids again, with a young puppy into the mix, and household fix-it items to schedule in-between. So I’ll spare the commentary, (okay, couldn’t resist a few shots), still it’s not an easily digested fluff piece like some VOX articles I’ve read. :wink:

It was a trip this is pretty much the 4th anniversary of my first getting to know little two week old Li’l B. No more bundle of sacred miracles, he’s a kid with an ego, his own ideas, places to go, and orders to give out, and I love that he still wants to spend his time with me, with Li’l G doing his best to keep up with us and now the little pup nipping at our heals. :v:

His depth of knowledge is, um, deep, so yeah. He could just make his case and let you do the comparative philosophy part, but so far it’s worth it for me. I hope I’m doing the forum a service with my summaries. His has a book from 2019 too.

Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis https://a.co/d/0wQdMHi

That’s a great age. Like when the understand the pattern of jokes, but don’t know what punchline is, just what one sounds like

Interesting. I went camping with a young family decades ago and around the fire they had both kids tell their ‘story of the day’ a regular habit that these kids have been nurtured with from an early age to telling their story of the day they had and anything they wanted to talk about, I mean they were young, 5 & 7 seems to my memory, and it was captivating and amazing listen to these two little squirts telling tails as good as any of us could have mustered. It’s not exactly like that here, a loving modern suburbia sports loving household, not some hippy family out in the mountains with tons of “spare” time for focusing on raising their two children, hippies, but degree holding hippies, don’t you know. :slight_smile:

Still I know what you mean by watching the cognitive jumps, since it’s months, up to half year between seeing them these days. There’s a lot of stuff I’d love to write about, but between no time and sense of privacy and such, don’t. It certainly gives me more reason to live and look toward the future. Too bad I don’t see anything grand that direction, I am at the treasuring the days, months and years - a decade doesn’t compute, more the one day at a time attitude anymore.

It’s all about this day, right here, right now and doing the right thing and, why not, being good at doing the best with what ya got, and enjoying the doing of it. Because, besides me, they too will be taking a little bit of me and these moments right now, with them for the rest of their lives, I want to give them the best these 67 years have to offer.


I have had a chance to watch a bit of Verbeke’s series. I’m a little confused about the “Meaning Crisis” and would love a little clarification. In fact, I commented over at his introduction video and want to share that over here, even started a thread, but recalled you already started one, so here goes.


I want to see if there’s a conversation in this “Meaning Crisis” because I don’t understand what he’s going on about, so I’m busy constructing my responses, as Vervaeke goes on and on. I’m an unschooled busy regular guy, so I don’t have the time for excessive verbosity, yet that seems the life blood of too many academics. But that’s just me, an outsider to the academic universe, which is why I like hearing some of you folks out there who are from that world.

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

John Vervaeke - YouTube

Awakening from the meaning crisis?

Are you discussing the crisis of people not knowing who they are?

Who am I? . . . Who are you?

If you were to ask me,
I have an easy answer, though it’s taken 60 some years to ripen.

Who am I?
Most fundamentally I am an evolved biological sensing creature.
My mind is the product of my body, and my body is a product of this Earth’s Evolution.
A self-aware filament in Earth’s ongoing Evolution.”
And it feels really good. No meaning crisis anymore, at least not for me.

I’ll shut up right here, for now, and hope for a little dialogue . . .

Did you listen to the first interview I put up? The one about Domicide? That one is more about current applications of his work.

Or, go to the end of Episode 6 (52 min). He lists some common phrases like “personal growth”, and “potential” and then says, “blah, blah, blah”. Those words have lost meaning in this world, because so many have hijacked them. The series is about where those ideas came from, and also how they get lost, co-opted, and abused. And, how do we rediscover them?

Unlike your theme, that is inspired by deep time, he is seeking the general rules for finding that inspiration. At any moment, we can find something to improve our current circumstances. The skills to do that; self-reflection, noticing the patterns of the natural world, feeding back those insights, increasing the variation in our options, determining our best options, all of that works together to allow us to flourish. All of it is available to our species naturally.

I did start that video, but too late and faded out. Am listening to it again, discovered I quoted some highlight in a comment I started but never completed.

28:45
Reconfigure transcendence-ness.
Transcendent only means something when you have a sense of the sacred.
Sense of the sacred = I’ve encountered something more real (the really real) than my day to day.
Transformative Experiences.

Some sense of sacredness.

Need for transcendence.
the really real

Stop thinking of the sacred as completion & perfection

Living systems aren’t after maximization, they are after optimization.

Fitting yourself to reality, rather than focused on maximizing value.

33:45 Are you really well connected to yourself and other people, (and dare I add other creatures?)

That harmonizes quite well with my notions.

You missed all the context. “Meaning Crisis” is the key concept in that musing.

Sorry that was written a bit klutzy, what I’m not understand is what specifically is this “Meaning Crisis”?

What Meaning Crisis?

Can you offer a definition?

The answer to what meaning is not laid out in this course yet. I don’t know if he has a short answer to that anywhere. He keeps saying things like, “we need to know this so later we can understand the modern meaning crisis”.

I’m done for today, but here’s a spot where he states the goal of finding out to fix the crisis. It just takes a few minutes

Okay, having coffee now, so I won’t dodge it.

There are a few ways we are confused about meaning in this crazy world. We confuse having and being. Our gods are labels that we defend, without knowing what their words mean. Whatever ancient wisdom is in the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita, we don’t really care anymore, we make up a story about it and claim our way is better. I’m not pointing at anyone in particular here, it’s pervasive enough to call it a crisis.

If you do try to find meaning outside of religious practice, good luck. We are social animals, so we need others to practice the skills and reciprocally grow. Instead of supporting each other in growing as a person, search for self-help, and you will find exercise, diets, public speaking, and finances. Those are all fine, but they are things to have, not things to be.

At the end of 16, he talks about the two times he brought home a baby from the hospital and looked at it and saw this was not yet a whole person, not something with which to build a friendship, but he knew that his love for it would bring it into that fullness of being and in turn, it would pass that on. Parents, most of them, get this today, but we have cordoned that off, we look at it as something cute. Instead of making it the sacred ground on which to build the world, we fight over words they can read and what clothes they should wear, as if those purity codes are where the meaning lies.

It’s nice reading that, as I’m spending time with Li’l B & G. Thinking back on those first hundred days of sacredness. Seeing our easy affection, and the relating to one another, that mystery of family and love and the ties that bind* and that enfold our lives as life unfolds with the passage of time.

I don’t have a hard time finding all sort of ‘meaning’ on all sorts of different levels.

*Ties that bind don’t need to be based on blood, even as I can also appreciate the special bond that blood creates.

I find meaning in living out my life, the people around me, I’m especially high right now, since a moment ago the door cracked open with my little pal peeking in to give me one last hug and good night kiss, … and I thought he went to bed two hours ago. :laughing:
You see after our hike and a bunch of playing around in yard with his bro, I kinda faded out with a headache, etc, and went off to bed, so we didn’t have a proper “Good Night” moment. Apparently, that didn’t set right with him. :slightly_smiling_face:

So much meaning in there, cup runneth over.
But it’s not only my connections with people.

It really comes down to my connection with myself, having explored myself, and the world around me. Challenged, failure, fortunately more successes.

Spent all my life thinking about these grand questions, wondering about (I reckon) the same mysteries others have spent their lives on and some who’ve been able to write endless floods of ideas wrapped in endless verbiage that’s been dead to me since I was a pissy high schooler.
Not the ideas, they weren’t dead, the self-certain verbiage is what repulsed me, I wanted to get out and live life, see it and experience it, and by golly I did. There’s a saying about walking a mile in someone’s shoes, I took that to heart and have I amassed a collection from peeling bark to heading shrimp, to 18-wheeler, to building homes, feeding people and hosting parties, to diaper changing, and quite a bit of stuff in between. It’s been a blast and each has taught me something, sometimes many things.

I guess that’s why I keep trying to share what I wound up with, because for me and my set of questions, I’ve arrived. Sure plenty of room of mortal blood, sweat and tears, but an awareness of who I am, a mind produced by a physical body, a biological body, a living echo of billions of years worth of evolution, and a filament in the flow of Earth’s creation.
I also have a deep understanding of this planet I exist upon, guess that’s another fantastic mystery many aren’t even aware of, too overwhelmed by the flood of massive media manipulation, to have the time or ability to learn about it.

I can’t help but believe that there are people out there for whom this stuff makes sense. People who’ll appreciate what I’m trying to get at, we’ll see.

And that it can be explain with way few words. The actual achieving requires each to do, to learn and experience and become self aware for themselves.

51:ish minutes - Vervaeke: … means noticing this is your perspectival awareness and meta means a beyond this means a radical transformation in your salience landscape a radical transformation of right what it’s like …

to be you it’s this deeply perspectival and participatory transformation and Jesus is saying . . .

This is an excellent example of what I’m calling being lost within one’s mindscape - that Abrahamic Self-Absorption.

At 43:10ish, he talks about going forward “to live within a scientific framework” yet not a mention of evolution follows, not a hint, because to them, all that is irrelevant.

Instead it’s back into the myths that is our mindscape constructions. How can that add any actual transcendence?

It’s back to the self-obsessed Abrahamic mindscape.
It occurs to me, this mindset is totally dedicated to “figuring out” the universe, every bit of it.

Seems to me, that can only take us so far.

Beyond that we need to satisfy ourselves with learning how to observe, and then recognize things as the way they are.

I’ve done that, I’ve absorbed the reality of deep time and myself actually factually being a biological creature, with my mind being a product of the body I inhabit along with the circumstance I’m existing within.

gotta run, excuse the inevitable typos . . .

Trees instead of forest.

I’m still listening to these, not so much for myself, although I have had a few insights, where I see something I’ve thought about (put into his technical language) and how it formed in history then got passed down to me. We don’t really need to know the name of everyone who came up with an idea about the human psyche for us to have access to those ideas, but when meaning has broken down, been co-opted by propaganda and distorted by media, it sure helps. It’s like understanding the results of the scientific study without being an expert, versus being the person who wrote the study.

The Jesus section is a good example. He covers the insights that thinkers had at the time. They came about because the Greek ideas had reached a limit, and had been broken apart by Alexander’s quest for power. Israel had also split and their narratives were failing.

You’re seeing the Abrahamic mindscape in that history because that is one of the tools that they had. They didn’t have Darwin or neuroscience. They were being told to worship the Roman gods or lose their land and possibly their life. Claiming a new view of the universe is exactly how you started a movement back then, and they were successful. In 381 AD, the emperor was a Christian. It was the worst kind of fundamentalist, make all other religions illegal, brand.

You’re right, so far, he is only alluding to and dotting the lectures with comments about including science in our thinking. He’s teasing out, salvaging, the valuable insights throughout history. Each could only gain so much traction without the scientific methods of experimenting with them and additional insights of biology and brain that came much later.

Maybe skip ahead, see where he’s going

Ep. 30 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Relevance Realization Meets Dynamical Systems Theory - Meaning Crisis Collection

Ep. 42 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom - Meaning Crisis Collection

Add: When he mentions modern science, he’s usually doing it to show that it has confirmed something from ancient wisdom. This is distinct from the BS we see from those who pull out an ancient verse and claim science has confirmed their entire religion because the verse sounds similar to an aspect of a complex theory. Vervaeke is building a model for finding wisdom and meaning and citing both the modern science that supports it and the ancient breakthroughs that led to our modern understanding. He is drawing from the sum of human knowledge, not making claims about how a certain ritual for a certain God will bring you riches.

Thanks for letting me bounce this off your head, so to speak.

I should be outside, but he started talking about Averroes in Ep 19, and that’s where my own journey began. Religious Deviant: Atheism for the Religious and/or Spiritual 3

My struggle with the CC mindscape/reality divide is it starts out as a description of some facts about reality, then switches to a narrative, while simultaneously dismissing narratives as a tool for knowing. There’s something about appreciating the physical, and your personal story of how you came to that. But there’s no acknowledgment of how others do that, or how your story fits with other stories. So, you say things like “sober assessment of physical facts is out of fashion” as if that is actually what people are saying, either out loud or in their heads. It certainly appears that way for many, but what is driving people to say they are skeptics, or that others should do their own research when they are the ones not using skeptical tools, or doing any research?

Vervaeke identifies that. Try the last 10/15 minutes of episode 19, or 20. At 40 minutes in ep 20, he says, “Galileo kills the universe”. All the thoughts of humans on what the world is before that time included some agency of inanimate objects. Purpose was in everything, in the wind, and in the march of time. But no one had done simple experiments like rolling balls down inclined planes. As Vervaeke says, you (all people) became “little islands of purpose in a vast island of purposelessness. Alone. An ontological castaway. You’re weird and strange and don’t belong. The universe is an indifferent machine.”

It’s a powerful moment in human history, when we could begin to assert propositions and express our will on the world, without a religion validating it. We could get control of the government’s power instead of it being used by those religions. The problem is, we put things like love in the supernatural because we didn’t have a scientific explanation for them. Feelings in our heads were no longer real in the way they had been. We still have the physical world, but we know it’s an illusion (something we’ve known for a long time), but there is no path through the illusion anymore. There is only this tiny sliver of math, which has become increasingly complex.

well they certainly display some incredible mental gymnastic to dismiss simple no brainers like climate science, or a woman’s right to sovereignty over her own body.

As for narrative, I have nothing against narrative, it’s simply I see these religious narratives at a dead end,
and repetition doesn’t help to improve them,
especially if that repetition never works on recognizing and absorbing the fact of your mind inhabiting an evolved biological sensing creature, one that was created by Earth’s evolution.


If I have an intended audience, it’s not the god fearing anyways.
I’m looking for the young students who find wonder and true epiphanies within scientific understanding, and who believe they have a right to claim “sacred for their world view” - a sacred that flows from intently observing and learning about the actual factual physics reality we are embedded within.

Both of those are good examples of how difficult it is to figure out what is moral in the modern world. The entire engine of modern civilization chugged along while scientists pointed to the dangers. Science isn’t designed to make a moral or political pronouncement. Abortion is a choice between the mother’s life and the promise of the child’s life. I don’t know very many people who have made that choice and said it was easy.

The example in the course is Copernicus. There was some science on heliocentrism in this time, but it wasn’t developed well enough for it to be common knowledge. Copernicus stepped into the discussion of planetary motion and said, “The math is easier if you put the Sun at the center”. We are accustomed to scientific breakthroughs that alter our perception of the universe now, but at the time, this wasn’t just a new discovery, it was an entirely new way of thinking. Instead of viewing the heavens as something controlled by gods or some mysterious force, there was this new way of figuring things out, and it meant everybody in the world was wrong. We still say the sun rises and sets, even though we should say the earth rotates, which tells me we still haven’t adjusted to this.

These things are only “no brainers”, if you have used your brain over years of study and adjusted your sense of self to understand that you are deceived by your own senses, that you are incapable of knowing the cosmos, and that you need experts and massive databases with computers to run the calculations and tell you how a tiny amount of carbon will make the oceans rise. That’s modern thinking, and we have not done a very job of teaching it.

More to come. Not sure when.

Of course religion is a dead-end. But it’s not just religion, it’s how it was integrated into politics and into the worldview of so many for so long. What I don’t understand is that you seem to separate the biology of the mind from the evolution of thinking. Art, shamanism, the Buddha’s realization that the Hindu gods don’t exist, the Hellenistic era, those are all part of the progress of humans. Scientific thinking didn’t just spring into being overnight.

From Aristotle, on through Aquinas, the philosophies tied theories of how the physical world works tightly with the supernatural explanations of what drives the whole mess. With meditation, or just some reflection, they saw that everyday reality had illusions, and there must be something behind it all, or above it, or some kind of spirit within it. As progress moved on, a new insight into either the physical world or into the human psyche would shake up the whole system.

We have everything in silos now, so it’s sort of the opposite problem, an insight into cognitive science doesn’t tell us how to love each other better. Information about the environment doesn’t tell us what to eat or buy, not directly anyway. People who don’t believe send their kids to church to learn morality. Ask someone how they know if a headline is true, and they don’t have much of an answer.

That’s a good point. I don’t agree with the critique,

We appreciate that fundamentally, awareness and life’s “consciousness spectrum” started over a couple billion years ago with the invention, then prospering, of the unbelievably complex organization of Eukaryote cells (some suggest guided by microtubules).

Consider that in due time these cells created colonies of cells that demonstrated a sense of place and order and purpose or the organism would have dissolved into a chaotic blob. Increasingly complex creatures depended, at every step, on increasing awareness, sensing, data processing, physical systems growth & maintenance, internal communication along with improving and refining manipulatory abilities.

By and by, along came one particular clade the eutherians, small nocturnal insect eaters who gave birth to the class of mammalian animals, which begat the primates, which begat hominids, which begat our modern humankind species.

Every stage required new refinements and developments within the complex sensing/body/brain system and the mind they collectively produce - refinements that are dependent on previous refinements and lessons. Your Being is the sum total of all the days of Evolution that went into producing the human form you possess and live through, while your mind reflects the sum total of all the days you’ve lived and experienced.

I believe a genuine understanding of oneself starts with the realization that we are an evolved biological sensing creature, and that our consciousness is fundamentally the inside reflection of your body/brain dealing with itself and the environment/circumstance it is embedded within.

This understanding leads to another inevitable realization, namely that our “Gods” are in truth creations of our minds, tailored by our self-serving egos. Which is okay, if one doesn’t take their God, or themselves, too seriously.

That said, it’s the single sentence that’s most worth chewing on, so far as my project is concerned.

Thank you.

Listened to most of #16 and it felt more like Sunday School than anything, but I’ll hang in there and give #17 a try, seems to me you’ve mentioned that few times.

I didn’t mean the no-brainer literally, I meant a sober intellectual examination:

A sober examination of climate science is easy and clear cut - it only gets complicated when we toss in the “immortality of taxes” into the mix. Go back and look at all the contra-“arguments” (deliberate fraud) and the anti-science propaganda machine’s starting point has consistently been fundamentally, “NO more Taxes” (it’s never been what’s the science really saying!) - that’s what made climate science into the enemy - it’s the idiots war against taxes & the glorification of personal greed - that “we” must stand firm on. Even if it means destroying our children’s future.

With woman’s rights it’s the same thing - it’s a no-brainer to figure out - until the morality of misogynist and control over woman come into the deliberations. Heck just listen to Guy’s creative rationalizations.

.

EP. 17, 13:15

a transformation of the whole framing process

I like that. I like that because it totally described what this little ditty holds within it, in my experience and I can’t help but think in certain others also.

Attaining a deep appreciation for the Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide.
along with,
Appreciating oneself as an evolved biological sensing creature, created by and part of Earth’s process.

Okay, back to chores, accompanied by Vervaeke.

==========================================

48:00
… so we have the two worlds, right? Seriously!

In Plato in the Platonic and even in the Augustinian here’s the everyday world, right, and then here is the real world.

but what Aquinas does is he changes that he says - this world is real too, there is real knowledge of this world possible, this is knowledge that we can get through reason and science. So reason in science study this world this world and they can discover real truths about that through reason through science.

But, this world up here is still somehow more real. How do we do that? Well he invents a distinction that we tend to anachronistically push back on. People before …
…but the idea is this is the natural world that can be studied by reason and by science, this is the world above the natural world, what’s the word for above, super so this is the supernatural world, and this is not a world that can be studied by science or reason. This is a world that is only right accessible by faith so there’s now the two worlds have been made sort of fundamentally two separate kinds of worlds and there isn’t a continuum between them now there isn’t a way of moving through them by love and reason.

United together what now happens is the following and what’s going to happen is the notion of faith is going to be changed to reason is down here and love is up here and the idea for UGG for . . .

This devolves into dancing to dark age understanding, tune.

Yes there are two worlds but the most succinct (and I dare say accurate & intellectually profitable) way of phrasing it, is the Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide.

Nothing to do with Universal Love and Carnal Reason.

Those are the tales of youth, made with too little understanding and too great a self estimation. Factual knowledge of our physical Earth in all it’s magnificence requires an entirely different framing, it’s like trying to hammer a 1934 Jaguar SS 100 3.5L Roadster into a Ferrari Formula One Racer.

We’re somewhat talking past each other, although, on the same page. I got lost in your “that” references sometimes, like, “that’s most worth chewing on”. I had a bad feeling about your reaction to Episode 16. He spends a lot of time describing Christianity from a very charitable point of view. It’s only near the end where he places it in the broader picture of the evolution of human relationship to gods and how that fits in with psychology and science.

I’m not trying to make a diametric choice between your Mindscape/Physical divide and any other model of the view of the universe that humans have come up with. The “two worlds” view that Vervaeke keeps referring isn’t a choice for him either, it’s a description, terms that have been used historically. All of them, including yours, recognize that we are limited in our individual ability to determine what’s real.

From the beginning of acquiring the basic skills of artistic representation, and later language, we have had a sense, a mental/mindscape sense, of something being there that we can’t sense physically. Accidents, like being deprived of food for too long, led to rituals that helped alter our consciousness and led to insights. A lot of those were mistakes, so we got gods, and came up with words like spiritual. Despite them being terribly off the mark, they provided meaning and bound us together in ways that supported our survival.

By “off the mark”, I don’t mean completely wrong. As we’ve discussed on the forum many times, Christianity is a Rorschach test, with many possible interpretations, from which each person can take what they want. Some people take good stuff. It’s also bound up with historical chance and political power. All of that has made it a confusion; of the characters and myths, with reality. Science ripped into that, but religion has a 10,000 year head start.

So that’s one part of the meaning crisis, people believing that meaning still resides in mythology, not that myth is a way to open the mind to meaning. Another part of the crisis is the non-believers. There are those who can’t find meaning at all, those that think the basis of morality is gone so they don’t need meaning, and those who find meaning in the pursuit of knowledge itself, or the mystery, or whatever. Some of those are better than others, but the lack of shared meaning is the cause of a lot of trouble.

And in the ending to #19 he sticks with the historical, thereby turning his back on scientific understanding. Lip service to science is not enough. New findings need to be absorbed and so far he’s kept it historical.

Nice way of putting it.

Lack of shared goals doesn’t help.

True enough. And I’m trying to do my clumsy part in helping science along.

I left this comment at the end of Ep. 19 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Augustine and Aquinas:

I’ve been doing my best to listen and absorb, but I’m sorry at 49:00 ish you fall back into the Middle Ages and faith based thinking that I can’t let go of because it’s moving backward away from contemporary scientific understanding.

First we need a deep understanding of who we are. (We are not characters born out of the Bible or philosophical reasoning.)

We are evolved biological sensing creatures, created by Earth’s processes.

Our bodies & brains are the sum total of billions of years of ongoing Evolution.

Our Mind, (the only place where all this meta-physical stuff plays out) is the product of our evolved body/brain system interacting with itself and the world it is embedded within, the here & now.
From there the jump to a profound visceral appreciation for the Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide opens up.
By and by that most fundamental of observations provides a genuine transformation of one’s (well at least mine) “whole framing process” as Vervaeka puts it.

But I’m done with the painting and ready for a break from listening.
Have a good day Lausten, thanks for the conversation.

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