**Ep. 25 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - The Clash — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/awakening-from-meaning-crisis-clash/

Episode 25 of John Vervaeke's series traces Hegel's absolute Geist and how Marx, nationalism and other secularized ideologies turned religious impulses into political conflict, leading toward the mode

## Key Takeaways

- Hegel's absolute Geist is a secularized God emerging through the self-realization of reason in history.
- Hegel's system is criticized for omitting will, participation, and transformative existential knowing.
- Marx replaced Hegel's ideas with economic class conflict, creating a powerful secular pseudo-religious ideology.
- Nationalism, imperialism and political ideologies attempted to replace religion but culminated in catastrophe.
- The collapse of these secular projects leaves modern people in a meaning crisis, setting the stage for cognitive science inquiry.

## What the video covers

- Recaps Hegel's rejection of the thing-in-itself and his view that reality consists of developing patterns of intelligibility.
- Explains Hegel's dialectic as ideas opposing, being sublated into higher integrations, and culminating in absolute Geist, a secularized God.
- Presents Hegel as a Thomas Aquinas of Protestantism, synthesizing Judeo-Christian ideas of God into a philosophical system of history.
- Summarizes criticisms of Hegel: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the missing will, and Kierkegaard on missing participatory and existential knowing and transformative experience.
- Describes Marx's materialist inversion of Hegel, where the dialectic becomes class conflict and revolution, influenced by Feuerbach's critique of religion as human self-projection.
- Argues Marx supplies participatory identification with class struggle, which Hegel lacked, but wedding totalizing ideology to violent political change becomes powerful pseudo-religion.
- Discusses nationalism as a secular substitute for God, with the nation-state demanding devotion and self-sacrifice.
- Traces how secularized progress through science, technology, nationalism and imperialism collapsed in the First World War.
- Connects the collapse of German idealism and Romanticism, and the rise of will-to-power philosophy, to a philosophical vacuum after the wars.
- Links these developments to the later Soviet collapse, the postreligious fragmentation of modern individuals, and dangerous amplification via social media and the internet.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Recap of Hegel's Dialectic and Absolute Geist
2. 03:33 Hegel as a Secularized Theology and Criticisms
3. 07:47 Marx, Feuerbach and Materialist Dialectic
4. 10:54 Nationalism and Secular Political Religion
5. 14:57 The First World War and Collapse of Progress
6. 23:40 Historical Roots of Modern Pseudo-Religions
7. 32:46 Transition to Cognitive Science

Answers

## Questions about this video

How does Hegel's absolute Geist relate to God?

The episode presents absolute Geist as Hegel's secularized, non-religious version of God: the co-development of meaning and being, in which the rationality of reality and reality itself unfold together. Hegel understood his philosophy as translating religious experience into conceptual structure.

What did Marx change from Hegel's system?

Marx rejected the idealist dialectic of ideas and proposed that history is driven by economic class conflict. He drew on Feuerbach's critique of religion, arguing that religion projects human attributes and alienates people from their own agency.

Why does the episode say nationalism is a pseudo-religion?

The episode argues that the nation-state takes on roles once held by God: it demands patriotic devotion, self-sacrifice, and participation in a historical destiny that precedes and outlasts the individual.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00

Speaker A

[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis this is episode 25 last time we took a look important developments that are centered upon the figure of Hegel and again I said last time I can't give a comprehensive

00:33

Speaker A

analysis of Hegel's thought it's too complex and sophisticated I was trying to do the best I could to capture that within Hegel's thought which is directly relevant to our understanding the genealogy of the meaning crisis and we saw how Hegel proposes how to move

00:54

Speaker A

beyond Caunt and the romantics by rejecting const notion of the thing in itself and saying look reality is just the patterns of intelligibility there is nothing above and beyond that a form of idealism and that as our ideas are being realized as

01:11

Speaker A

patterns of intelligibility are being developed reality is also simultaneously being developed and we took a look at this notion of write a system a living you know a quasi living system of these patterns of intelligibility in development called Geist and that Hegel

01:32

Speaker A

proposed that that development can be understood as a process that he called dialectic echoing Plato but I think severing the notion of dialectic from an agog a which figures in some of the criticisms of Hegel that we looked at

01:50

Speaker A

towards the end this dialectic is a process in which ideas again not just things in the head these are patterns of intelligibility patterns of the way reality is realized in both in the sense of being known and being actual there's

02:10

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this pattern in which ideas articulate and differentiate from each other one idea is opposed by another contrasted to distinguished from and then it is taken up in a higher order integration and then that serves as a new idea that

02:28

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be contrasted with other ideas and this dialectical process complexify x' the pattern of intelligibility we get it emerges and develops and becomes more and more so the the irrationality the failure to understand is being slowly transmuted actualized into deeper

02:47

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patterns of understanding deeper aspects of being and then the idea is that this reaches a state in which a system of ideas emerges that grasps the dialectical process itself as found exemplified Hegel believed in his own philosophy and this is the culmination

03:15

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the state of 'absolute Geist and if we remember that for Hegel the real is the rationale the rationale is the real what we get is that this development of the rationality and intelligibility of reality is also the development of

03:33

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reality itself and so this Co development of meaning and being is absolute spirit absolute mind this is Hegel's version of God a secularized non religious God we saw how much Hegel understood his philosophy in religious terms but that he was always

04:01

Speaker A

pursuing that understanding by translating religious terms and religious experience into philosophical conceptual structure and he advocates for a new mythology a mythology that is integrated with philosophy a mythology of Reason which will be the last and greatest work of mankind the culmination

04:24

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of all of history I took you through an example of how understanding right there the ability to make sense passes into this moment of self-realization in reason as mythology passes to philosophy we did an example of that showing how Hegel secularized the

04:46

Speaker A

Trinity in a historical process of the self realization of rationality and in that sense Hegel is the Thomas Aquinas of Protestantism he was proposing this grand synthesis this grand secularization of the whole Hebraic Christian idea of God at work in history

05:11

Speaker A

and God working through human beings and in there a gothic processes to co-create the real future the utopic but real future we took a look at the main criticisms of Hegel we were we reminded ourselves of the criticisms made by

05:32

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Schopenhauer about the will to live was missing and then how Nietzsche takes this up in the will to power and this whole the centrality of the will I took a look at the other great existential forerunner kirkegaard and his criticism

05:49

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basically using some of the terms we've developed that Hegel has reduced everything to propositional conceptual knowing he has left out the perspectival participatory knowing he has left out an agog a he's given us only epistemic transcendence he hasn't given us

06:05

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existential ethical self transcendence personal transformation and transformative experience that are necessary for returning to making deeper contact with reality has been left out and we noted that this is also consonant with the work of La Paul about how we

06:29

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can't reason our way through transformative experiences that are so central to the cultivation of wisdom we then looked at another person who emphasized this lack of will and participation in Hegel system and this is the work of Karl Marx and Marx was

06:50

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great proposal great and terrifying proposal is that history is not driven by reason the man in Plato system but by the monster and Marx is deeply influenced by Feuerbach and for abouts critique of religion as the projection of our own

07:09

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humanity and that religion is not the arena in which spirituality is working itself out religion is the the projective distortion that distracts us from how we are the authors of spirituality in history it is a vehicle of self alienation so Marx takes the

07:36

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Ford Ibaka in critique and he rejects the theistic resonances within Hegel the idealistic and he says no the dialectic is not a dialectic of ideas that's playing itself out religiously it is a dialectic of economic forces that is

07:54

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playing itself out politically the dialectic is not between ideas that are in contrast but between socio economic ways of life classes that are in political conflict with each other but are Neth nevertheless systematically related and as that historical process

08:13

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of class conflict unfolds this dialectic will work out all the self contradictions in our socio-economic system our current one being capitalism for example until the contradictions are resolved in a socio-economic state in which peace and freedom have been

08:34

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achieved because all of the internal contradictions that drive the violence will be resolved this is a completely secularized version the the judeo-christian model of God working himself out in history to bring us to the promised land Marx offers the

08:58

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participatory knowing that is missing in Hegel by proposing how we identify with class we identify with the struggle and we participate in the Kairos the turning of history by engaging in revolution and so the totalizing the totalitarian kind

09:21

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of ideology that Hegel is proposing is being being wedded to the idea of violent political change within revolution and so this is very very powerful pseudo religious ideologies so what started in romanticism has now come to fruition in that we have the proposal

09:45

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of secularized political socio-economic ideologies in conflict as the way in which spirit and spirituality is to be understood and pursued pseudo religious ideologies we should mention a couple of other ones that of course are emerging at the same time have been emerging

10:10

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since the disruption in the socio-economic life of Europe following the the Bloch death we've caught of course we've already seen the rise of commercialism but we are also going to see write the conclusion of this idea that the political arena is the place in

10:33

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which ideas struggle with each other and meaning is made that the secularization of course is going to be understood in terms of your participation not necessarily in your class like you have in Marx but in other ways in which

10:54

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people are going to declare their political identity and this is nationalism nationalism is the idea that the nation-state can take the role in many ways that God has taken in the past that the nation-state and your patriotic devotion to it your canoe your

11:19

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commitment to it you're willing to sock Feist for it your participation in its historical development that precedes you and will follow you upon your death right is trying to do many of the things that religion had done for people in the past and you get

11:36

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the fierce nationalism that is emerging in the 19th century around the same time as Marx and Nietzsche and right and kirkegaard are doing their seminal work so nationalism when it is understood this way and when it is understood in

11:58

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terms of will of course gets very clearly wedded to the emerging socio-economic and technological power driven by the scientific and industrial revolutions in Europe and that nationalism very quickly gets wedded to imperialism so nationalism and imperialism become ways in which people have secular pseudo

12:25

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religious ideologies and identities that they pursue as a way of trying to fill the gap that has been vacated by the erosion of the Christian framework now a place in which this is all fiercely happening in a really intensified way as

12:47

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Germany so all of this work all of these people who are talking about when will not kirkegaard but you know Nietzsche Schopenhauer Hegel Marx they're all in Germany right and again Germany is the place of Luther where you get the first

13:01

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big you know change towards secularization Germany isn't a cut Germany as a country as younger than Canada it doesn't come into existence until I believe 1870 and the work of Bismarck the Germans had been fragmented as a nation they were not a nation-state

13:27

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they've been fragmented for centuries and through powerful realpolitik meaning you know ethics be damned bismarck helps craft and unite the nation of Germany into a nation state and so nationalism is fierce in Germany because Germany has finally gone from

13:57

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being just a cultural leader to becoming a political entity with tremendous economic industrial power and scientific production in its grass nationalism is fierce and Germany sees itself in competition with the other nation states that have got a head start in their

14:23

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imperial self promotion Germany sees itself lacking lagging behind France and England in the creation of world empire so nationalism and imperialism become paramount in Germany and then disaster strikes and it's a disaster that actually reverberates around the world because

14:57

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this whole attempt to secularize progress in terms of material advancement scientific advancement technological advancement nationalism imperialism comes to a crashing disaster in the first world war in which all this machinery that was supposed to bring us to utopia was seeming to take the place

15:29

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of God and our spiritual traditions drenches Europe in traumatic tidal wave of blood and destruction an entire generation is decimated so Europe itself is traumatized by this but Germany is especially traumatized because it is defeated all that's national and

16:01

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imperial and cultural ambitions are thwarted and the victors France and England especially Treat Germany very very poorly they weaken it a konami Klee they [ \_\_ ] it militarily all of this has taken up in a lot of careful history

16:35

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and I can't go into this in great detail what we need to know is let's gather this together this is this is Germany in the state those were one the by our republic this state of right the collapse right of German idealism right

16:55

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the the thwarting of the dreams of nationalism and imperialism Germany as remembered is the country that has Ben I don't know what the right were tainted by Luther's horrible anti-semitism the anti-semitism we talked about like in his work you know

17:19

Speaker A

the Jews and their lives in which he proposes a genocide genocide of policies towards the Jews we saw that Germany is the home of the rhineland mystics there's been a under current running through Germany that helped fuel the

17:35

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Protestant Reformation but there's this undercurrent of the mystical tradition it comes to fruition for example in people like Boheme who's a German Lutheran mystic and and and a Protestant mythic mystic a very odd thing in some ways but this undercurrent in Germany is

17:58

Speaker A

very Neoplatonic very Gnostic we've seen as I said the collapse of German idealism under the critique of the alternatives by Marx and the existentialists the German idealism also seems to fail because of the critiques that are coming out of positivism and a

18:25

Speaker A

philosophical position that is wedded to the tremendous success of scientific materialism scientific materialism Marxism is arising in Germany as a real threat we saw of course that Germany was the home of the powerful Romantic tradition good is one of the important

18:52

Speaker A

generators of the Romantic tradition and we saw how romanticism is also becoming decadent in Germany we have the ongoing fragmentation caused by the partisan Reformation the Germans have developed an explicit form the idea of will to power this is this resentment this

19:22

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undercurrent of gnostic mythology anti-semitic religious traditions the collapse of German idealism leaving this philosophical vacuum the collapse of the Romantic tradition also leaving philosophical vacuum the thwarting of nationalism and imperialism the advocacy of a will to power as the way in which

19:58

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human beings can recapture the lost self transcendence and of course that nationalism and that anti-semitism very quickly integrate with a racist interpretation of history to try and replace Hegel's idealistic interpretation of history or Marx's socio-economic interpretation of history

20:25

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and all of this is drawn together in the autodidactic vortex of Hitler's mind we talked about the dangers of a fragmented autodidactic approach to the meaning crisis the meaning crisis is being driven to a fever pitch in the vom our

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republic and all of these forces are being spun in a romantic and I mean that at a decadent sense a romantic willful autodidactic manner reading mind Kumpf is a difficult thing to do not just because of the opponent moral stance of

21:17

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its author but because it verges on incoherence because of the attempt Hitler has of of trying to articulate all of this personally see and and and this is not a coincidence I think Hitler is like Luther be careful of this analogy and

21:41

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not claiming an identity I'm not trying to insult all Lutheran's but what I mean by that Hitler sees his own personal struggle mine Kampf my struggle as representative of in emblematic symbolic of all of Germany and beyond that of all

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of Western civilization and he exemplifies this chaos and he articulates this weird mythology you see you misunderstand Nazism if you understand it only as a political system if you understand it only for example as fascism or racism it is those things but

22:26

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you want to understand that the fascism and racism are actually in service of a gnostic nightmare I mean you can feel like the currents of you we have our true self we're born with it well that's you know it's in our

22:52

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blood you know you can hear decadent Romanticism and and then you can hear the Gnostic you know here we are we are that we are actually a master race but we're trapped within a worldwide conspiracy right that is keeping us from

23:11

Speaker A

knowing our divine heritage and only by opposing and trying to thwart the evil overlords can we come to our true divine heritage as the master race that is in our blood and in the soil of our nation DC it's it's it's and and of course

23:34

Speaker A

Luthor's Luthor's anti-semitism is mixing up with a strand of Gnosticism that says if you remember you know the people that worship the Demiurge is you know the people who worship the God of the Old Testament are the Jews and this

23:48

Speaker A

is all this all makes a weird twisted kind of sense it's a Gnostic nightmare in which Hitler is crafting something that hangs between a religion a totalitarian ideology and a personal mythology that he he exemplifies and people are attracted to

24:07

Speaker A

it this is a you shouldn't understand and you can't respond to Nazism as if it is just a political movement you're not getting it it is a pseudo religious ideology at a totalitarian proposal that confuses and distorts myth mysticism

24:39

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nationalism infuses this with decadent Romanticism decadent gnostic mythology the will to power of nietzsche that's why the great propaganda film about the Nazis is actually entitled triumph of the will triumph of the will it's being late to imperialistic racism

25:09

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do you see what I'm trying to show you Nazism is a tsunami of [ \_\_ ] in which all of these currents these the currents these that are emerging out of the collapse of the three orders are being

25:35

Speaker A

spawned by Hitler in order to try and give people a brutally powerful response to the exigent intensity of the meaning crisis in vimar Germany and Hitler Luck's out because that whole socio-cultural process is intensified by the socio-economic collapse of the Great

26:04

Speaker A

Depression what seems to vindicate his gnostic nightmare it seems to vindicate his dream of dealing with the collapse of meaning through a mythology of imperialistic racist twisted decadent romantic Gnosticism that has gathered together the shards of this whole historical process in of the

26:53

Speaker A

place in which they were often originating which is Germany so we have now these two great pseudo religious ideologies Marxism and Nazism and of course they are diametrically opposed to each other and Hitler proposes his history of race against communists

27:32

Speaker A

proposal of the history of class and these two pseudo religious ideologies that both propose a totalitarian ideology infused with mythologies of grasping and driving the Kyros of history towards the utopia of the promised land they meet they meet in the

27:57

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most titanic struggle to use the term to both Marx and Hitler use the titanic struggle of the Eastern Front in World War two you see the the the the thing about many of us is we we tend to

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understand World War two largely from the perspective of the British or the American or the Canadian viewpoint because we're British or American or Canadian right we forget that the Western Front while significant and I do not want to in any way denigrate the

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tremendous sacrifice that people made or undo endured on the Western Front but the Western Front is dwarfed by happening on the Eastern Front 19:43 these two Titanic forces and the historical socio-political socio economic forces that they have marshaled

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they meet at the Battle of Kursk in 1943 on the Eastern Front there's nothing like it anywhere else in world war ii there's nothing like it anywhere else in world history this is the biggest battle ever literally this battle involves

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millions of men tens of thousands of pieces of equipment thousands and thousands of Tanks thousands of airplanes it goes from Horizon to Horizon it's brutal and vicious it it somehow there's there's individual acts of tremendous brutality set within this

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huge technological machine of mass destruction the battle of kursk and eventually in a Russian victory so militarily it spells the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime and the ascendance of the Soviet Union into the post-world War - military superpower

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dominating Eastern Europe so of course it has all of that historical significance but the Battle of Kursk points to write it the literal what do I wanna say the it's overwhelming it's literally sort of beyond comprehension in terms of its size and its scope and

30:56

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the depth and and and and that and and the sheer amount of Technology and material this also has an impact you see on on the genealogy of the meaning crisis I want to point to what this leads to and of course and then I of

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course I've alluded to the cold war that comes after it right see that this tremendous struggle right is of course it is symptomatic of the meaning crisis what we have is a fixation at the level of beliefs both

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sides are fixated on belief systems to Tollett Aryan ideologies and attempts to create secular alternatives to religion totalitarian systems of ideas that are supposed to explain history reality and how we can achieve utopia how could we can recapture the axial legacy we have

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the complete politicization of the quest for meaning mythology is being confused with politics confused with politics in powerful ways the perspective of knowing has been reduced to your political viewpoint the participatory knowing has been reduced to your political

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identification and it marshals tremendous physical resources and a titanic struggle of wills confrontation of ideologies now what does that what does all of that legacy mean for us because of course eventually the Soviet Union also collapses well this whole secularized political process

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of the pseudo religious ideologies is not only symptomatic in the meaning crisis it also contributes to the meaning crisis it's not just a result it causally feeds back into exacerbating the meaning crisis okay how well we face right the matter crisis

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Thomas Bjorklund it's called it that talked about it you know this is the intertwining you know ecological socio-economic and spiritual crisis existential crises of our time the mental health crises etc now the meta crisis right which in which the meaning

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crisis plays a significant role I was injured interdependent with these other crises to address this this is going to require comprehensive we have to have comprehensive change in our consciousness cognition because I've shown you the deep history of all of

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this if they have a comprehensive change in our consciousness our cognition our character we cultivate virtue wisdom compassion soft transcendence or culture how our community structure distributed cognition together create systemic psycho technologies now the only thing that in the past that has created

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Speaker A

systemic sets of psycho technologies that transform cognition consciousness character and culture in an interdependent way is religion that's the only thing that we've created that does this now in the 19th and the 20th century we tried to create

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alternatives to this the pseudo religious ideologies that have drenched the world in blood so what do we do we need to respond to the meta crisis but we have been traumatized by right the pseudo religious ideologies so don't no longer seems like a viable

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Speaker A

option one thing of course that some people are pursuing is a nostalgic attempt to return to religion an attempt to ignore all this history and of course this leads to various kinds of fundamentalisms and I do and do include

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Speaker A

certain forms of atheism as being pseudo religious fundamentalisms read Chris Hedges book on this I think he makes a good case for it this of course can interact with how everything has been politicized there we go when those

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interact of course we get the potential for terrorism and so many people rightly are very doubtful of this as a response many people find themselves stuck here their post religious they reject this but they also reject this the pseudo

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Speaker A

religious ideologies their post religious and they find themselves as we said fragmented autodidactic and these responses right of course dangerously interact with this facilitated by things like social media and the internet I also dangerously interact with these pseudo religious

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ideologies see what I'm showing you here is we seem to need a religion that cannot be any kind of religion at all we seem to need a religion that cannot be any kind of religion at all we can't

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deal with the meaning crisis by pursuing pseudo religious ideologies trying to deal with this as a political issue this is why I steadfastly refuse to build an argument for this work that I'm trying to share with you as on the back of a

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political controversy as a confrontation of political ideologies under stuying to frame or understand the meaning crisis as I struggle between political ideologies as a political thing about as a political process of using violence potentially or argument to change belief

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is to miss represent the meaning crisis there is no political solution to our troubled evolution to quote the police we somehow need a religion that is not a religion at all we need a God beyond all gods for many people this seems I think

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reasonably enough to be a dilemma to be a contradiction and we are not just being stuck on the horns of a dilemma we are being gored and ripped apart by the horns of the dilemma so the clash the adversarial clash of

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pseudo religious ideologies is not only symptomatic of the meaning crisis it contributes to the meaning crisis by locking us in - or at least contributing to the way in which we are locked into this dilemma this aspect of the meaning

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Speaker A

crisis in which we need a religion that is not a religion at all so I mean I could continue on this history I could talk about great works of literature that struggle with this dilemma I think a fruitful way of understanding

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Speaker A

one of the great novels I consider one of the the greatest and certainly one of my favorite you know Moby Dick is about this dilemma I think you could make a good case for that you could talk about different

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Speaker A

aspects of popular culture you could see the zombie mythology as an articulation of this and aspects of the meaning crisis but we'll come back to that because it's now time to move from the historical analysis from understanding the genealogy the collapse of the three

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orders the noma logical the normative and the narrative the dilemma that emerges out of the attempt to deal with the collapse to the creation of pseudo religious ideologies it's time to pass from that historical analysis because we could continue it we could carry it like

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I said into an analysis of popular culture important works of art and literature we could talk about Dostoyevsky or as I've mentioned Melville or Conrad and that that of course and it's not in any way an exhaustive list right

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but it's time I think now to turn to the other side of the argument that we need to make we need to turn now to not a historical analysis of the genealogy of the meaning crisis but a cognitive

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scientific analysis of the machinery the cognitive machinery of meaning making itself because if we want to respond awaken from the meaning crisis in a way that does not amesh us inexorably in this dilemma that gives us a way of

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recovering the axial legacy without trying to do that through utopic to Tollett aryan ideologies I propose that what we do is try to understand using our best science the machinery of meaning making and use that as a way of trying to build a

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theoretical structure for recovering and salvaging what we can of the axial legacy and hopefully that science that science of cognition that cognitive science will also afford the engineering of new systematic sets of psycho technologies practices of self-transcendence that can be

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coordinated with the science such that we are not just talking about responding to the meeting crisis and the historical forces therein we are affording and providing people with the means to begin the process individually and hopefully collectively of creating systemic sets

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of psycho technologies that bring back the connectedness lost in the three orders and bring back the sappy ntral pursuit of self-transcendence so the way to begin that is to just talk about what cognitive sciences antennae and of course I mean I'm a cognitive scientist

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Speaker A

I teach cognitive science at the University of Toronto I teach the introduction to cognitive science I teach many courses I teach a course on Buddhism in cognitive science some of you may know about that I teach upper level courses on the

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Speaker A

cognitive science of consciousness and I teach also cognitive psychology where I do a lot of work on the MIS machinery of meaning-making and the machinery the cognitive machinery at work and wisdom and self transcendence so what I want to

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do is present to you I mean I I'm laughing because I'd like I have entire university courses in which I do this but I want to try and present to you or introduced you what is cognitive science or a particular vision of cognitive

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science because of course academics will disagree as to what cognitive science is and I'm going to present what cognitive science is for me not in terms of my personal proclivities or taste but my argument for what I think is the best

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vision of what cognitive science should and can be doing and I want to present that in a way that is deeply interrelated with the meaning crisis okay so cognitive science is a fairly recent discipline it really emerges only in the

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late 70s as an explicit academic discipline the early 80s and it's and it's born out of an important idea that we actually have multiple disciplines that are studying this thing called mind the organ of cognition so for example there are some people

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let's organize this this way we can talk about sort of levels of reality or levels of analysis right to keep contact and then we can talk talk about different disciplines all dealing with this phenomena and I want to show you

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how as the science is advancing its also contributing to the meaning crisis in the way it's fragmenting the sense of mind and attendant senses of identity and self so what do I mean so you have right the understanding of mind by

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understanding the brain and people should be more careful when they criticize this the brain is a terrifically complex and sophisticated thing but what you do here is you're gonna try and understand the mind by studying the brain studying patterns of

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neural activity and of course the discipline that studies this is neuroscience and right they talk about entities like neurons they neuroscience they talk about neurons neural processes they use you know FMR eyes perhaps EEG right new new technologies for observing

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the brains behavior but of course there's another discipline that is talking about the mind cognition at a different level this is where you try to understand the mind in terms of information processing and here you're not so much talking

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Speaker A

about neurons you might be talking about neural networks but you're talking more like about like programs algorithms you're talking about ways in which we could potentially make artificial intelligence because you know computers and neural networks aren't made of

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neurons they're made right out of different kinds of matter and so what we're not talking about the brain level now we're talking about information processing and you know this is sort of computer science but especially in the project of artificial intelligence

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especially and we'll talk about what this means later artificial general intelligence where the what I'm trying to do is not just make machines that can do sort of sophisticated things but I'm trying to make machines that actually are cognitive agents and we're gonna

50:56

Speaker A

talk a lot about AI and of course we know that AI is the potential to radically transform our self understanding and exacerbate the meaning crisis and it is doing so already but of course another way I study your

51:14

Speaker A

mind is I study your behavior now notice here I'm talking about what do I do here I don't cut out brains and slice like slice them under microscopes or run F MRIs III make simulations actually create programs or neural networks or

51:36

Speaker A

various combinations so notice what I'm showing you each discipline is directed to a different level and it's using different language and it's using different methods of Investigation and it's amassing different kinds of evidence so what's the what what's the

51:59

Speaker A

discipline that studies behavior of course well that's psychology or discipline that I I'm privileged to practice at the University of Toronto and we talk about different things I mean psychologists sometimes talk about brains and they sometimes talk about

52:16

Speaker A

this because cognitive psychology is very influenced by cognitive science but generally psychologists are trying to understand behavior and we talk about things like working memory and long-term memory right we talk about those kinds of things and what we do is we use

52:32

Speaker A

experimentation on human beings and we gather statistical data demographic data etc and we try to understand so again a different level using different language different methods and different kinds of evidence is that enough no there's another discipline that talks about mind

52:52

Speaker A

because of what I'm doing right now I'm making noises come out of my face wall and you understand my mind language language seems to be in a really important way in which mind operates and mind communicates it's through language

53:11

Speaker A

that mind minds are linked together until you get language here and this of course is studied by linguistics and here you don't talk about working memory and long-term memory you might if you linked them together in psycholinguistics and notice how there's

53:32

Speaker A

this is constant wanting to link the levels together in these new hybrid disciplines but generally in linguistics you talk about things like tree structures you talk about transformational grammar you do something like experiments but it's more right where you're testing people's

53:49

Speaker A

judgments about whether or not a certain uh pterence is grammatically acceptable makes sense so again different level different language different methods different kinds of evidence and as I've said before long before the internet networked computers together culture was

54:08

Speaker A

networking minds together because most of our problem-solving is done with distributed cognition and the discipline that studies that of course is anthropology an anthropology uses a different method it uses participant observation because listen to that language because culture

54:33

Speaker A

is something you have to know in a participatory knowing fashion you have to go through the transformation of enculturation to know what a culture is and uses participant observation it generates ethnography so what am i showing you I'm showing you right that

54:51

Speaker A

this term doesn't refer in a univille fashion it's equivocal when I'm saying mine it's not clear what I mean science is fragmenting what the word mind means and therefore it's fragmenting you who and what you are now here's the idea right we have a problem

55:23

Speaker A

here we'll come back and about this if we don't get clear about how we can integrate these various different meanings of mine we're going to engage in it lots of equivocation I'll come back and talk about that but here's the

55:40

Speaker A

other idea it's highly unlikely and already we've seen that these different disciplines want a hybrid together it's highly unlikely that these various levels are not culturally I'm sorry are not causally impacting and constraining each other in fact it's highly plausible

55:59

Speaker A

that these various levels causally interpenetrate and deeply influence each other so we need to capture the causal interaction between the levels how do we capture this causal interaction that is not being captured by any one of the individual disciplines will we follow

56:24

Speaker A

that impulse to hybridization but we pursue something more what we want to do is we want to get all of these disciplines talking to each other not in an equivocal fashion but in a meaningful fashion talking to each other we

56:37

Speaker A

a kind of theoretical integration because that integration of right these different languages and ontology z' for each one of these disciplines is how we're going to capture the missing causal interaction between the levels and avoid equivocating and it also holds

57:00

Speaker A

this potential because if we can get a discipline that does that then we will also not only have a theoretical scientific advance we will start to be responding to the fragmentation of the mind now a discipline that helps to

57:21

Speaker A

bridge between different ontologies discourses methods ways of theorizing bringing evidence together the discipline that does that is philosophy right so what you want is you want some philosophical training in how discourses and I mean it's very deeply how

57:46

Speaker A

disciplines ways of theorizing observer observing studying reality these different levels of the reality of the mind right you need a discipline that is capable of trying to bridge between those vocabularies and that's philosophy now if I take this philosophy and I so I

58:09

Speaker A

get training in this and I get training in these and I start to try to bridge between the disciplines to avoid the equivocation and to facilitate grasping the causal interaction then I'm doing cognitive science so next episode we'll talk a lot more about

58:33

Speaker A

the nature and practice of cognitive science but I hope you can see already how it's going to be relevant to trying to understand the machinery of meaning-making and the fragmentation of ourselves and our identities that is at work within the Scientific Revolution

58:52

Speaker A

thank you for your time and attention [Music] you you [Music]

Topics: Hegel absolute Geist dialectic Marx Kierkegaard secularization pseudo-religious ideologies nationalism meaning crisis John Vervaeke

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