Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

Philosophy
21

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.

22

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:

image
image414×612 89.7 KB

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.

23

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 . . .

24

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.

25

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.

26

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.

27

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.

28

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.

29

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.

30

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.

31

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.

1 Like
32

FB_IMG_1668907402097

2 Likes
33

On the way to Verkaeke I ran into this. I was rather enamored in Jung in my twenties when I read all sorts of books and biographies on early 20th century science, and scientists, particularly the pioneers in physics and psychology, philosophy. Couldn’t resist a peek.

Listening to it now, it all sounds so primitive and it was - considering biological and evolutionary awareness was minimal, and human self-absorption and arrogance was at its peak and god was dead, or not.

These thinker never truly escaped the base presumption that God exists, in one form or another. That’s why I harp on the “Abrahamic Mindset” with it utter self-absorption. Everything had to be understandable through a rationale that we were created to be great, or something like that. Rather than, we were simply created, and we’re basically simply elements in Evolution’s Pageant. Self-awareness is the gift our body bestowed on us.

Carlos Farias

I couldn’t resist leaving a comment:

All this is good for what it is, but it feels like there’s an unrecognized presumption that humanity came out of a Bible, or philosophical texts. Seems to me we need to explicitly recognize we are evolved biological sensing creatures busy surviving upon this Earth, whose processes created us. Our bodies are the accumulated result of billions of years worth of Earth’s Evolution.

To understand our selves (and consciousness in general) we need to recognize that our minds are the product (the inside reflection) of our bodies dealing with itself and its living changing environment.

This leads to a clearer recognition of the Human Mind ~ Physical Reality divide. Along with a realization that all these wonderful thoughts and institutions humans have, self-reflection, remembering, learning, religion, science, psychology, art, music, etc., all are the products of our living mind; which in turn is a product of our body/brain; which in turn is a product of Earth’s Evolution.

Now we have something that can incorporate all that modern science has offer and begin on the path to a genuine appreciation for the stories our consciousness tells us. Jung lived in the pre-scientific era of the past half century, a veritable dark age of biological, evolutionary understanding.

34

Episode 21 covers Luther, so religion, right? Not really. Too often we view history from the perspective of one man. This course covers trends over centuries. Luther said they should close the monasteries (where he had been a monk). He said God saving you is arbitrary, there’s nothing you can do. He took all reason away from God but said he still could validate us, while also highlighting our own self-idolatry. This is basically narcissism. The scientific revolution led to this by taking away any agency in the cosmos, giving the individual the authority over their own spiritual life. Sounds good, but how do we then align ourselves with reality? The study of motion, geology, and the mind had barely begun.

Universities had been a place of knowledge, but now the monasteries were pushed aside, leaving a vacuum for the pursuit of wisdom. Knowledge gets linked to politics, to power structures. Luther did not predict the “Narcissism of Small Differences” that created all the denominations, as each sought some special insight to prove they were saved, that they were right. Science wasn’t offering much more, just that if you know the ways to control reality, you’ll have power, and if you can’t understand it, then believe the powerful.

I see this today all the time. I express a preference for science over faith, and I’m told I have faith in science, that I want certainty. Religions, or any philosophy of a Cosmos, of a way to conform yourself to reality, had been the path to certainty for thousands of years. Today it’s more of a fundamentalist thing. Mainstream religions welcome you for “being on the path”, even if you have doubts. This started with Luther, then Descartes, who put things on a graph and said we can be certain about reality. If you had lived then, the vacillation from accepting God without reason to accepting the absolute truth of science would have been starker. Both are pathological, and some of us can see that in extremism of all kinds.

Now we have Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but it’s not commonly understood. People know Newton’s F=ma and know that Einstein somehow challenged it with E=mc2, but few have internalized that. So, they go church on Sunday, and don’t apply that thinking at work on Monday. We drive our cars with plastic kayaks on them to a protest against the oil industry.

35

So, should I listen to it*, I’ve been eyeing it, after all, I was a devout little Lutheran (Missouri Synod ! - that always seemed important) inspired by a small class room and teachers (6th & 7th grades) that cared. Not knocking Chicago’s Audubon, still it was no place for a kid like me to thrive, though I was doing okay skating around the edges, but that’s a long story. *{think I will, gives me an excuse to leap frog a couple episodes.} :wink:

I do like the way you framed your progression and I couldn’t disagree with anything you wrote up there.

Back to Jung, that previous video left me sort of depressed, so I decided to watch another, that was good, it helped me remember why I was such a big fan back in the day. He made more sense than most, over years Jung receded and faded into the long gone past. This video helped remind me of why he impressed so much as a young adult and now I can see his lessons took root and thrived.

So with that in mind, here are 8 ways to realize your full potential in life
from Carl Jung -

  1. Don’t let others define you
  2. Understand your passions
  3. Focus on who you want to be
  4. Give up your addictions
  5. Be honest about your capabilities
  6. Make strengths from your weaknesses
  7. Find a connection to the infinite
  8. Make time for deep reflections

source: Philosophies for Life

Along the way I discovered things like how our worst natures seem to be intimately related to our best qualities, and it was a question of balance, not certainty, or control.

I will have to give my Carl Jung Standing Stone a closer mediation when I get home.
This was inspired by his autobiographical comments about his property and erecting stones as part of his mediations, or something like that.

image
image1228×1674 477 KB

It always seemed like just the coolest sentiment, unattainable by my hippy ways, then holy lordie lordie I wound up finding myself in a time and space where I was able to follow through on, what for me seems like, a celebration of having arrived. Little did I realize what epiphanies were waiting for me just down the road.

image
image1080×1684 488 KB

:v: :slightly_smiling_face:

36

Yes. It ties a lot together and gets closer to things you can see happening today

1 Like
38

Had it ready to go, then the day went into an unexpected direction.
Although the title: “Death of the Universe,” is pretty provocative so may have to wade through that first. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

39

Or, skip ahead to 40 minutes into Episode 22. Sorry, they just keep getting better. He finally describes the meaning crisis. Descartes made the mistake of using historical cultural elements in “I think therefore I am”. His notion of “I” comes from all the mess of thousands years before. If matter doesn’t contain meaning, then we only have this mind adrift in infinite space. We’ve fallen back to Socrates, who had some scientific knowledge but no way to translate that into wisdom.

The errors of Descartes are debated poorly today because we don’t get this. So people like Ken Ham can go interview kids on campus, asking them how they know what’s true if they evolved from matter and matter doesn’t know what truth is. We tell these kids to be rational without discussing what “rational” means. We don’t teach the difference between psychological doubt and logical certainty so we get bigots who are sure of themselves.

Edit: I tried “looking in the back of the teacher’s edition” for the answer. I found a decent critique, and not surprisingly, that there isn’t an answer.
Vervaeke’s Solution to the Meaning Crisis | Grim Tidings (medium.com)

That atheistic, humanistic, naturalistic truth is indeed alienating, and as Vervaeke says, that perspective contributes to what we can helpfully think of as a modern meaning crisis. But the crisis isn’t that we’ve lost our grip on ancient wisdom. On the contrary, the true crisis is that ultimate knowledge is alienating because there’s no absolute agreement between life and world, agent and arena, symbol and fact. There are only temporary, accidental, or illusory such agreements.

40

I got there the long way and listened to the previous couple. I got past 44:00 and had to vent, hopefully constructively. Am going back to it and hope for something that makes me kick myself for commenting so soon, we shall see.

40:00 's Why is Descartes constantly treated like some ultimate authority? He was born in the 16th century, knew nothing of Evolution or Biology, let alone Neurology, or even Electricity. Today, experts know where our minds come from, they come from the insides of our body/brain in action. The physical portion of our body (not just our’s but any creatures) needs a feedback system. It’s like being confounded by magnets and rotors creating electricity. Today, we are recording the traces that our thinking minds produce, you can’t assert there’s nothing there anymore!

Experts in the field tell us (Solms, Damasio, etc) that our minds are fundamentally the inside reflection of our body in action, (inside and outside). It’s inescapably fundamental to living organisms, or we’d have never gotten beyond blobs. Why do so many refuse to explicitly recognize and acknowledge as much? Then process those implications.

I believe we should stop spending so time blinded by history - instead start thinking about the implications of a deep appreciating for our Human Mind ~ Physical Reality divide - and the little matter of coming to terms with being an evolved biological thinking creature, with billions of years of engineering and tinkering invested. A creature of Earth’s processes.

We should be looking forward using the best science has to offer, and stop paying so much reverence to ancient notions, and this endless wrangling about God. - Each of us creates our own God from within our mindscape, based on our unique experiences and lineage.

Descartes I Think Therefore I Am.
“What is the I?”
Actually 45:ish was interesting, dare say I’ve tasted that space.
Pascal sounds interesting, I haven’t the a chance to learn much about him yet.
“loss of finesse”
‘loss of perspective’

Then we wind up right with religion:

49:44
Nevertheless Pascal is onto something to my mind when he argues that the loss of the spirit of finesse has left us bereft of the capacity for transformative truth transformative knowing and so we’re now stuck where Socrates was at the beginning …

51:30
in the West today we face these undeniable at least that we’re being rational crises environmental economic socio-political cultural Wars we need deep fundamental transformation transformations of cognition consciousness culture community but we have lost the psycho technologies the spirit of finesse the traditions in the institutions for affording that because what the thing that used to do that was religion but we’ve lost religion and as I’m going to show you next time we tried secular or pseudo religious alternatives and they drench the world in blood thank.

Okay my comment stands. :v: :wink:

41

He took us out of the entire history of human thought that had tied religion and politics together. He was just lying in bed one morning and created the x,y,z graph that we all now associate with science. He separated mind and matter. Isn’t that what you are doing?

Today, experts know where our minds come from…

But there are millions of connections in there that we are just getting to know. Those experts led us into a world where emotion was shoved aside, and considered bad for logic.

Why do so many refuse to explicitly recognize and acknowledge as much?

First, there is no physical sensation that tells us what is going on in our heads. That’s why we still have words like “gut feeling” and “follow your heart”. Second, there is no consensus among these experts, and very few people know who they are anyway. When I was thinking about what to buy today at the grocery, I didn’t watch a Solms video to help me.

stop paying so much reverence to ancient notions

I’m also reading some Dalai Lama. The interviewer is asking about happiness and Mr. Lama, or Dalai, or whatever you call him talks about compassion and control. But, then he asks, well, if that’s it, why don’t we get happier as we get older? We can get better at other things, why not happiness? Dalai pauses, and the interviewer wonders if he just asked the stupidest question ever. The Lama calmly explains (I’ll paraphrase) that we are complex creatures who have just got out of the jungle. Until recently, we mistrusted anyone outside of our little groups, we threw rocks at them. Our knowledge is not acquired simply to make us more clever, we should be using all these new facts to improve how we discipline our minds.