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Ep. 13 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Buddhism and Parasitic Processing

Vervaeke examines Buddhism through cognitive science, addressing the interpretation crisis between insider and outsider views and reframing dukkha and awakening as agency and transformation.

Key Takeaways

  • Awakening experiences can be justified as practical guidance through cognitive and existential analysis, even without propositional metaphysical claims
  • Both insider-only and detached academic interpretations of Buddhism are inadequate for grasping its transformative content
  • Suffering is better understood as loss of agency tied to automatic processing and identity-assignment than as simple desire-driven craving
  • The Eightfold Path is an interdependent system for cultivating wisdom and agency
  • Understanding Buddhism is inseparable from the contemporary search for meaning

What the video covers

  • Recaps prior episode: higher states of consciousness as flow states that optimize sense-making, learning, and problem-solving, justifying their guidance role
  • Frames the Buddha's awakening as a participatory, existential transformation rather than an intellectual belief change, linked to sati (deep remembering) and seeing through systemic illusion
  • Draws on Stephen Batchelor's work (Awakening in the West, Buddhism without Beliefs) on how the West has misinterpreted Buddhism
  • Identifies an interpretation crisis: insider (tradition-bound, subjective) versus outsider (academic, detached) approaches, both problematic for grasping transformative truth
  • Argues that understanding Buddhism requires transcending both approaches, in a way relevant to meaning in life, paralleling the Socratic project
  • Discusses how automatic, parasitic processing (habits, addiction) erodes agency and causes suffering, with addiction described as loss of agency
  • Critiques the standard reading of the Four Noble Truths, where 'suffering caused by desire' is replaced by a view centered on agency and identity-assignment
  • Explains the Eightfold Path as a self-organizing, interdependent system rather than a sequential checklist
  • Uses the 'all is burning/tall' and ocean-taste metaphors to illustrate non-relief-based descriptions of enlightenment
  • Connects cognitive mechanisms such as salience, context memory, and predictive processing to the lived experience of suffering and liberation

Chapters

  1. 00:00Recap of Higher States of Consciousness
  2. 04:00The Western Misreading of Buddhism
  3. 07:17The Interpretation Crisis: Insider vs. Outsider
  4. 10:52Transcending Both Approaches
  5. 17:58Enlightenment, Metaphors, and Agency
  6. 25:45Parasitic Processing and Addiction
  7. 38:50Reframing the Four Noble Truths
  8. 50:10The Eightfold Path as a Self-Organizing System

Answers

Questions about this video

What is the 'interpretation crisis' Vervaeke describes?

It is the conflict between two approaches to interpreting Buddhism: insider views that say it can only be understood through practice within a tradition, and outsider academic views that claim objectivity by avoiding practice. Vervaeke argues both are limited and that understanding Buddhism requires transcending both.

How does Vervaeke explain suffering in Buddhist terms?

He reframes suffering as a loss of agency caused by parasitic, automatic processing and identity-assignment, rather than simply desire. Addiction is presented as a clear example of this loss of agency.

Why does Vervaeke cite Stephen Batchelor?

Batchelor's books argue that Western interpretations of Buddhism have been systematically mistaken, and Vervaeke uses his critique as a starting point for examining how Buddhism should be understood in a way relevant to modern meaning.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00
Speaker A
[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening for the meaning crisis so last time what we did is we finished up a cognitive scientific exploration of higher states of consciousness awakening experiences these kinds of mystical experiences that bring about massive transformation we
00:36
Speaker A
saw how we can give a psychologically active description of these processes that explain both the experiential profile that people are having and some of the features that they find therein we were also able to talk about this at
00:56
Speaker A
the level of machine learning and information processing and at the brain level and what comes out of this is a picture of a state of consciousness that in which we are getting a flow state that is improving our optimal grip on
01:12
Speaker A
the world optimizing our performance for making sense of things and enhancing our overall capacity for learning and problem-solving and we saw that that in fact provides a very good justification for the states being the guidance for the transformation of life and that what
01:36
Speaker A
they do is they give a brain state that is highly optimized processing things in a way that gives us a tremendous sense of a plausible grip on the world and that is making use processing that is absolutely indispensable and
01:58
Speaker A
foundational for us it is it has a kind of important priority in all of our processing and what I suggested from this is that while it doesn't give us any good theories in a sense of propositional claims about the
02:17
Speaker A
metaphysical structure of reality these states do justify the their claim to give us guidance so although they are not rational in the sense of providing good argument and evidence for beliefs they are rational in the sense of wisdom in that they optimize some of
02:40
Speaker A
our core processing for being in contact with the reality in a way that is coupled optimally to our own processes of self transcendence and the cultivation of wisdom so the buddha awakens and that awakening gives him this state that is guiding him to a
03:07
Speaker A
fundamental transformation in how he understands the world and how he understands not just intellectually because that's what I've been contrasting here but in a participatory fashion in an existential fashion himself in the world we talked about how this is brought up bringing about a sati
03:25
Speaker A
deep remembering of the being modes so that he is seeing through the frustrating futility modal confusion but there is more than going on this higher state of consciousness is not only helping him remember the being mode and helping him to transcend through
03:44
Speaker A
systemic illusion and go through something deeply analogous to a developmental shift we can also see it in terms we can see what's going on in his claim to enlightenment and its relevance to the cultivation of wisdom and the enhancement of meaning in terms
04:03
Speaker A
of the pronouncements he made from this state now talking about this is very problematic because the attempts by the West and to understand some of the central tenets of Buddhism have has not had a very good history I recommend to
04:21
Speaker A
you Stephen bachelors book awakening in the West for how the West systematically misunderstood and Batchelor makes a current argument in a series of his books I've got to meet Stephen at a conference and we had dinner together I recommend all of his works
04:39
Speaker A
very strongly and very highly to you and so from his works and in discussion with him he argues that the West is still in the grip of a problematic way of trying to interpret Buddhism so let's take a
04:58
Speaker A
quick look at that and then we will return to what the central claims of Buddhism are and I want to show you why even that way of putting it is proper perhaps incorrect so Bachelor in one of his books along with others and he folds
05:15
Speaker A
it up with Buddhism without bu-but beliefs and then later on this was followed up by even a more radical after Buddhism in which he's taking the position of somebody who's post religious very germane to many of us he
05:29
Speaker A
but he does argue in alone with others that we face an interpretation crisis when we're trying to understand Buddhism we have two approaches that people give us for how we should try and interpret Buddhism of course this will not be
05:45
Speaker A
relevant just to Buddhism but for any position that exists in a different culture or history that we're trying to understand via Buddhism or stoicism or Neoplatonism for example so he says we are confronted with two different positions one is the claim that you can
06:04
Speaker A
only interpret Buddhism from within a tradition and we have seen good reason why you might argue that that this is right the kind of stuff we're talking about here wisdom and self transcendence this is not largely a matter of altering
06:19
Speaker A
your belief this is about going through transformation and your perspectival and participatory knowing it's about fundamentally altering your the agent arena relationship your existential modes etc and so if you are not engaged with in the transformative practice then
06:35
Speaker A
of course you do not understand what what Buddhism is it has to in that sense be understood from within and this is a general property of wisdom per se wisdom is something that must be understood from within the problem with that of
06:51
Speaker A
course is the it's myopic right there are very many Buddhist traditions and they are relative to certain times and place in particular historical contexts and to claim that that particular interpretation a particular sect or tradition is the sole pathway to
07:18
Speaker A
understanding or interpreting Buddhism is of course myopic it's narrow-minded and often parochial it claims things as fundamental which are often very contingent so what's the alternative the alternative is well what the alternative says is the problem with this is this is
07:40
Speaker A
very subjective I don't know if that's exactly the right word but the idea here is right this is the problem with seeing things from the inside is that tends to be very subjective and of course that means you're not understanding the
07:54
Speaker A
phenomenon as is but you're only seeing it through your own particular bias so the alternative outside any tradition and this is typify Din the academic study of Buddhism for example like within religious studies or something like that and then the main argument
08:16
Speaker A
here is and this will often happen it's not always the case but if you meet people in religious studies and you'll say are you studying Buddhism and they'll say yes yes I'm studying Buddhism and then oh and then you'll ask
08:27
Speaker A
them well what practices do you engage in and they'll say oh no no I don't engage in any practices that would be a mistake if I got in too involved too close to this material I would lose my
08:39
Speaker A
objectivity I would lose my ability to critically reflect on it critically compare it to other traditions other approaches so the idea here is what we will have right is an objective account now although Steven doesn't mention this in his book bachelor this bachelor
09:05
Speaker A
doesn't mention in his book this is very reminiscent of the problem that Socrates faced because what we have here is transformative relevance and here we have some attempt to get at the truth and like the Socratic project I would
09:31
Speaker A
put it to you and this is what I think Bachelor is saying is that Buddhism is about both of these it's about trying to find transformative lis relevant truths but that means we have to transcend both of these ways of interpreting Buddhism
09:50
Speaker A
so he points out that we have to get beyond both of these in some fashion how do we do this well he points out that we need to do this in a way that is going to be relevant to issues of meaning in our
10:08
Speaker A
life so this interpretation crisis where we have these two competing and diametrically opposed ways of trying to interpret and import Buddhism is actually interacting with the meeting crisis in society because we're not doing this just in some empty cultural vacuum we are
10:31
Speaker A
precisely interested as I've been suggesting throughout this series of lectures where that we're doing this precisely because we're deeply involved with the project of trying to recover how we can cultivate wisdom and enhance meaning in our lives in a cultural
10:52
Speaker A
historical context that is not supportive and in fact often dil Asterius to those existentially necessary endeavors okay so what do we do we have to break out of all of this in some fashion and what he does is he
11:08
Speaker A
tries to see where these are both fixated and what he argues is that this will become my Opik because it will get fixated on the particular propositions of a tradition it will get fixated on beliefs and this is in fact
11:29
Speaker A
what you study over here objectively you study of course the texts and the beliefs that have been propositional II rendered by a particular tradition it's this belief fixation that needs to be broken through this is why he entitles
11:51
Speaker A
the book that came after alone with others Buddhism without beliefs because he tries to argue that part of what is preventing us from really getting both sides of Buddhism is that both of these are fixed locked like being locked
12:11
Speaker A
inside the box in the nine dot problem I'm trying to understand Buddhism as a set of beliefs we have gotten so used to this way of thinking and we'll see later why it is a post-christian way of thinking that these traditions for
12:31
Speaker A
cultic these axial legacy traditions for cultivating wisdom and self transcendence are to be understood as Creed's as systems of beliefs that we now even will equate right the word belief with these practices we'll talk about it as a belief system or will you
12:50
Speaker A
even use the word belief as a synonym for faith etc so we have gotten so oriented towards this reduction of all of what we've been talking about here all of this transformational process to the possession and the assertion of
13:07
Speaker A
beliefs and again we'll see historically why that's the case that we can't break out of this interestingly although I won't be able to do it in this video we're going to see that breaking out of right trying to understand
13:24
Speaker A
in terms of belief systems is also going to be needed to address the meeting crisis I have been pointing you towards that repeatedly belief systems namely ideologies are attempts to create meaning but they fail for the deep reason and you've already seen a lot of
13:42
Speaker A
argument and evidence for this is that a lot of your meaning-making machinery is not occurring at the level of your propositional knowledge your your beliefs or and and your assertions of which beliefs you adhere to so he proposes instead what we need to do is
14:02
Speaker A
we need to look at Buddhism ultimately existentially now you remember existentially has to do with these modes he also invokes in along with others the distinction between the being mode and the having mode and he proposes that Buddhism is remembering the being mode
14:18
Speaker A
and I've already talked about that in a previous video and so he says look traditionally what the Buddha said and now we're returning to what the Buddha said is in order to try and get more of what his enlightenment was about
14:34
Speaker A
traditionally what the Buddha said is presented as the Four Noble Truths and these are four statements or propositions that are usually presented to our ears as claims to be believed and that what makes you a Buddhist is if you
14:48
Speaker A
believe them the problem with this of course is that it is taking place at this very level that Batchelor argues we need to get beyond it's not of course that people don't believe things within Buddhism is that what we've been talking
15:03
Speaker A
about here these processes of transformation are taking place at the level of perspectival knowing at the level of transforming of states of consciousness and at the participatory level transforming the fundamental machinery of the self of the agent arena
15:20
Speaker A
relationship and the modes of existence so we need to understand these Four Noble Truths as things that could help afford the kind of transformations we've been talking about the point about these is not to believe the point about them is to get them to
15:38
Speaker A
help you reenact the Buddha's enlightenment if you're not doing that if you cannot enact enlightenment then you are not getting the Four Noble Truths he proposes therefore that we should not call them the Four Noble Truths we should call them the four
15:58
Speaker A
ennobling Truths I then proposed to him in person that we shouldn't even call them truths anymore because truths truth is a property of propositions actually I said what you should call them is the four ennobling provocations you're trying to provoke
16:13
Speaker A
people into change so let me try and go through the four noble truths but restating them in turn as for ennobling enabling that means affording self-transcendence provocations by doing that I think we can get back to if that's the right verb what the Buddha
16:38
Speaker A
was conveying about what's going on in enlightenment what kind of transformation is being brought about by the awakening experience and what is it alleviating okay so let's go through these one by one okay so I'll present the the standard
17:05
Speaker A
way of representing the truth and then the reformulation in order to deal with bachelors I think astute criticism and in order to interconnect with all the argumentation we have been developing throughout this video series so the first one is typically stated as all is
17:31
Speaker A
suffering or all of life is suffering now that's first of all if that were the this statement to be believed it's false because suffering is a comparative term and comparative terms can't be extended to everything that would be like saying
17:58
Speaker A
everything is tall that doesn't make any sense things are only tall relative to other things being being shorter so first of all it doesn't really mean all is it's something more like all is threatened by well what's the all
18:18
Speaker A
doesn't mean everything in existence should we interpret it metaphysically well I mentioned last time that we should be careful about giving metaphysical interpretations to what people bring out of these awakening experiences and the Buddha himself will Verret was famously reticent to give any
18:35
Speaker A
metaphysical interpretations to his statements so let's try and follow that in order to get at that let's note what this word means okay because again we've tended to allow a word to go through a process of trivialization and reduction
18:56
Speaker A
and we've lost part of the meaning let me give you first of all that an analogy okay so the original meaning of this word is insane but it has come to be synonymous with angry I'm mad at Agnes
19:13
Speaker A
it doesn't mean I'm insane right it means that I'm angry at Agnes how did that happen well one of the ideas is anger is a state that can rent and render you if it becomes extreme extreme anger can render you temporarily insane
19:31
Speaker A
and therefore temporarily mad anger is a cause a pertinent cause of madness okay so suffering people usually hear pain distress when they hear the word suffering that person is suffering but that's not actually what the word means to suffer means to undergo it means to
20:01
Speaker A
Lu's agency so you can actually suffer joy you can have so much joy that you sort of have lost control of yourself you can have so much pleasure it is not oxymoronic to say I'm suffering pleasure it means I'm having so much pleasure
20:19
Speaker A
that I've sort of lost control of the situation of the situation right now pain is a very powerful way of losing agency why first of all that's highly disruptive and secondly pain is associated usually with damage and damage is a state in which we're often
20:39
Speaker A
losing agency so right don't here just pain the Buddha is not saying everything's painful that's ridiculous because if everything was painful nothing would be painful even all of your experiences can be painful doesn't mean anything particularly because many of your experiences can't
21:00
Speaker A
be painful in and of themselves right because again this isn't an absolute kind of claim instead pay attention to this connection rather than this one do you remember last video gave a parable of this suffering it's the monkey that
21:27
Speaker A
grabs the pitch and then tries to free itself and then the other hand gets stuck in both paws and head and then it gets killed there is nothing in there of pain most of the buddha's metaphors are not paying metaphors there entrapment
21:45
Speaker A
metaphors being fettered losing your freedom losing your agency that's why the Buddha doesn't describe enlightenment in terms of relief but he would famously say just like wherever you dip into the ocean it has one taste the taste of salt no matter where you
22:06
Speaker A
dip into my teaching it has one taste the taste of freedom okay so what he seems to be saying is that all of your life is threatened with the possibility of losing your freedom so let's go from all is suffering to a
22:31
Speaker A
provocation realize that all of your life is threatened with a loss of freedom a loss of agency and there's a word for this kind of loss that's often translated as suffering which is dukkha dukkha again does not mean pain
22:58
Speaker A
what does dukkha mean well the etymology is imagine you have a wheel and it's off-center on its axis so the axle is not properly going through the center of the wheel and as the wheel is turning it's destroying itself there's a
23:17
Speaker A
self-destructiveness or you have your arm is out of joint it's disjointed like when and when Shakespeare has Hamlet says the time is out of joint right it's out of joint and as you're moving your arm it's destroying itself so it means
23:36
Speaker A
like an empty gap that's sort of dirty so that as things are moving within it they're destroying themselves so the idea of something that's engaged in a process of self destruction which of course is one of the powerful ways you
23:52
Speaker A
can lose your agency is through self destructive processes it's what's going on here so realize that all of your life is threatened very really threatened existentially threatened by a capacity for self destructive behavior self-deceptive self-destructive behavior so now you see what he's doing is so
24:18
Speaker A
situated very firmly within the actual tradition so what what does he mean you how can we try and understand this a little bit better so this is work based on some stuff I published with Leo Ferraro and then I'll
24:38
Speaker A
talk about some additional and important new work by Mark Lewis I want to try and trace a kind of pattern in your cognitive processing that can very often occur and and the core of the argument I want to make is the very processes that
25:02
Speaker A
make you adaptively intelligent and we've been talking about this from the beginning also make you vulnerable to self deceptive self-destructive behavior okay so let's say you encounter an event and you interpret the event is bad okay now one of the adaptive machines you
25:31
Speaker A
have is your brain immediately is trying to predict and anticipate are there events like that the point of right you encountering something potentially even painful or distressing is not just to uh it's to make you sensitive in anticipating what's going to happen in
25:52
Speaker A
the future okay so your brain now tries to assess the probability of another event like this happening now well go tuned we'll get into this in more detail later although we've talked a bit about it already with ideas about salience is
26:08
Speaker A
I can't take it in all of the information available to me if I was to try and calculate the actual probability of event I would have to track all the variables in my environment that's astronomically vast even a supercomputer
26:25
Speaker A
cannot possibly do this right it's the thing the seeing is when we do probability problems in school we are given all the variables by stipulation but the real world doesn't work that way the real world has an indefinitely large
26:40
Speaker A
set of variables interacting in an indefinitely large number of ways so what do we do well we use what are called heuristics we use shortcuts that try and help us cut through and zero in on the relevant data the relevant
26:57
Speaker A
information because we've said before the zeroing in on relevant information is crucial so one of the things we do is we use the representativeness heuristic you judge how probable an event is by how prototypical it is how salient it is
27:18
Speaker A
how much it stands out in your mind right and that will often interact with another heuristic the availability heuristic this is you judge how probable an event is by how easy you can remember a similar event occurring or how easily
27:37
Speaker A
you can imagine another event occurring so these are these are actually very adaptive for you now the problem is you're in a bad state because you've just had something bad happen to you now that that trigger is a
27:53
Speaker A
thing called encoding specificity when you're sad it's very difficult to for you to remember events in which you're happy it's very easy for you to remember events in which you're sad because that's because your memory doesn't just store the facts it stores all that
28:08
Speaker A
perspectival participatory knowing it also stores the state you are in this leads to very sort of paradoxical things if you lose your keys when you're drunk one of the things you should do if you want to get your keys back is get drunk
28:22
Speaker A
again because chances are it will improve your memory if you're studying for a test and you have a headache and you take some aspirin when you're actually doing the test take the aspirin because it will improve your performance
28:33
Speaker A
I mean so there's classic experiments on this in one experiment right you have a bunch of people learning a set of words right in the same room Group A and Group B and then in the second part of the
28:48
Speaker A
experiment Group A does it in the same room group B does it in a different room that's the only difference in them Group A will remember a significant greater number of words than Group B just because they're in the same room
29:01
Speaker A
okay now this is very adaptive you may say that's great no it's not because your brain is trying to always fit you to the environment so it doesn't just store information it stores how you were fitted to the environment or the context
29:16
Speaker A
it's very adaptive so now what's happening here well you you're in a bad state so it's easy for you to remember bad things that means it's easy for you to remember bad things and that means you judge the
29:32
Speaker A
probability of bad things happening to be increasing this bad thing just happened to you so it's very salient that makes you judge that it's much more probable it's going to happen and these are reinforcing each other now all of
29:45
Speaker A
this is interacting with what's called the confirmation bias we'll go over a lot more of this later when we talk about problem solving what this is is an adoptive strategy you use where you tend to only look for
30:02
Speaker A
information that supports your current belief because very often trying to find this confirmation is takes too long and it's very difficult and complex so we tend to look for what confirms so now the confirmation bias now as I'm going
30:25
Speaker A
through my memory in my imagination I will tend to look for things that confirm my forming judgment that this event is highly probable now all of this machinery can go awry right all of these heuristics will mislead you it's because
30:41
Speaker A
of this heuristic that people make mistakes when they take loved ones to the airport and things like that right because we can imagine planes falling from the sky and when it does it's very representative for us as people describe
30:54
Speaker A
it as a tragedy it's in the news and so we judged air-crane airplane crashes to be highly probable even though they're very low in probability but then we turn and get into an auto or automobile which is the
31:09
Speaker A
North American death machine without paying any attention to it so we misjudge probabilities because of these heuristics now we can't do without them it's like when we talked about hyperbolic discounting you can't do without them they're adaptive you need
31:23
Speaker A
them let's continue this so these are all reinforcing each other the confirmation bias so now what do you do you judge the probability to be great okay now notice how most of this is happening automatically in an self-organizing fashion that's again
31:49
Speaker A
because imagine if I had to do everything fully consciously okay I'm gonna pick up the cup now I no need to start tensing my upper bicep I need to start moving my if I had to move everything caught I couldn't pick up the
32:02
Speaker A
cup I need my cognition to be inherently self-organizing we've seen that throat the way in which your processes need to be happening simultaneously bottom-up and top-down like when you're doing reading and you're reading both the letters and the words your cognition
32:20
Speaker A
needs to be self-organizing it needs to be largely automatic these are adaptively indispensable for you okay so you judge the probability is great well what effect is that judgment have on you it's not emotionally neutral okay that makes you anxious when your brain starts
32:39
Speaker A
to conclude that the probability of negative ents is high you get anxiety what does think got anxiety due to you well you lose cognitive flexibility you're framing on things becomes very narrow very rigid very limited what does that do
33:06
Speaker A
well that reduces your ability to solve problems the ability to solve problems goes down okay what does active for you okay as that goes down you start to make lots of mistakes and fail what does that do well of course that increases your
33:35
Speaker A
anxiety and that reinforces right that bad events are happening to you what does all that do well all of this starts to gather in your mind is I'm doomed you get fatalistic well if you're living in a fatalistic world you're going to
33:58
Speaker A
start interpreting more and more events even neutral events as bad and the whole thing starts to feed on itself the very things that make you so intelligently adaptive the fact that your cognition zeroes in on relevant information makes
34:15
Speaker A
it salient the fact that it's so complex a fiying itself in organising itself the fact that it is trying to fit you to the environment and process information in a way that's doable within the real world all these things that make you so
34:32
Speaker A
adaptive simultaneously make you vulnerable they're self deceptive self-destructive behavior that's what it means to say all of your life is threatened realize that all of your life is threatened by dukkha it's not that everything you're doing is painful or distressing that is
34:55
Speaker A
ridiculous that is a meaningless claim it's that every process you're engaging every time you're exercising you're intelligent agency you're making yourself vulnerable the self deceptive self-destructive processing we called this and then we published parasitic processing it's not just about bad events this is
35:20
Speaker A
just one example we get into all kinds of these spirals we'll put up on this on the video a recent schema for what depression looks like that was released by some MIT researchers very complex like this we call this parasitic
35:37
Speaker A
processing because it's like a parasite in that it takes up life within you and it right takes life away from you it causes you to lose your agency it causes you to suffer and here's what's important this capacity for your
35:55
Speaker A
cognitive brain to be self-organizing heuristic using right complexified to create complex systems and functions with emergent abilities has a downside to it look this is what you know when you're in one of these spirals you'll know it oh no where I go oh no knowing
36:22
Speaker A
it what does it do for you what does your belief do it's like knowing you knowing that I should go outside the square they go side the box doesn't do anything why this is a complex self-organizing adaptive system if you
36:35
Speaker A
try and intervene here the rest of the system reorganizes itself around your attempted intervention it can adapt and preserve itself as you try to destroy it why because it's making sure it's making use of the very machinery by which you
36:54
Speaker A
adopt and make use of the things that are trying to destroy you it's that's how it works no matter where I am this is a perennial threat no matter what I am doing this is always liable to happen now what's
37:18
Speaker A
interesting as I said my colleague and good friend Marc Lewis we're talking about comparing this to other work that he he's recently been doing so some of you may know Marc Lewis I highly recommend you take a look at his work
37:35
Speaker A
Marc has been deeply influential in my own thinking my ideas about dynamical processing self-organizing systems development he is one of the four most important neuroscientists about addiction and how addiction works in the world I strongly recommend reading his
37:50
Speaker A
book memoirs of an addicted brain so Marc was himself I'm not disclosing anything confidential because it's right in the book Marc was himself an addict in his youth and then he overcame his addiction then and he went into
38:04
Speaker A
neuroscience to try and figure out why what is addiction how does it work now that's important because addiction right his addiction is primarily the loss of agency it's not I mean addiction is distressing and painful but when we're
38:25
Speaker A
talking about somebody somebody being addicted the way we finally diagnosed them is by how dysfunctional they become how much they lose their agency right so you are a video game addict if you are playing video games to the point where
38:43
Speaker A
you cannot pursue the goals you want to pursue in your life you cannot establish and cultivate the relations you want to establish in your life you cannot cultivate the kind of character or identity you aspire to if the video
38:59
Speaker A
gaming is robbing you of those agenting processes then of course that is what we mean by addiction addiction is a loss of agency now when you take a look at Marc's work Marc challenges Marc Lewis he challenges right I just saw him give
39:16
Speaker A
a talk I've been having lunch with him that I also saw him have just a really good talk at the Society for psychology and philosophy or philosophy in psychology we'll get the order right just this past year and it he was not the only person
39:33
Speaker A
making this point but he articulated it with his own particular explanation which is his so the point that many of people are making is the standard model of addiction is incorrect fundamentally wrong what's the standard model the standard model is we have a biophysical
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chemical dependency and when the chemical is removed we get an overwhelming compulsion to have to seek out the chemical and if we don't get the chemical then we suffer similar to as if we were starving from a lack of food and
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if we and so that's what addiction is and the problem with this is it sounds very commonsensical and the media likes it it has the one unfortunate feature of being almost completely false because first of all you can get addicted to
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processes that have no biochemical basis like gambling for example secondly if the if the overwhelming compulsion model was correct you have a great deal of difficulty explaining some very very pertinent facts most people spontaneously give up their addiction in
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their 30s we of course get focused on the people who remain addicted and therefore we come to believe that addiction is an overwhelming compulsion but if you actually track people many people spontaneously stop being addicted here's a great historical example you
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have soldiers in Vietnam during the Vietnam War getting addicted to opioids in Vietnam the opioid crisis not that it isn't a crisis but we tend to think that certain chemicals are intrinsically addictive so they get addicted to heroin
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when they return to the United States the vast majority of them spontaneously stop using the drug but but why chemical not in the body what's going on isn't there a biochemical lack and therefore a huge compulsion well think about it think
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about it in terms of existential learning see when they were in Vietnam they had a particular identity they're a soldier and they're in a particular arena war they're in a particular existential mode when they return to the United States they become a citizen
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right and a peaceful country the relationship between the agent in their arena is what is fundamentally being altered in addiction so mark proposes a model that he calls reciprocal narrowing so here's your agent and here's the arena and what happens is the drug use
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is a suit is is associated with a particular agent arena relationship and what happens is and we talked about this before remember this is always Co identification we're always assuming an identity and assigning identity in a Co defining
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interdependent manner what happens is you start to lose a little bit of your cognitive flexibility perhaps due to something like this as you lose your cognitive flexibility the number of options in the world starts to decline right as the number of options start to
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decline you lose the variability for your agency as you get a tighter narrower less flexible cognitive agency the number of options in the world goes and what happens is these two things worse typically narrow to where you have no
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options as to who you could be or how the world can be and that's addiction it is an it is a learned not propositional II learned perspective early participatory learning of a loss of agency I pointed out to mark that if
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this is the case there must be an opposite if there's a spiral down there must be a spiral up and in personal communication just recently he said yes yes totally and you know what that spiraling up would be what would be the
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agent arena relationship in which the agency and the world are expanding that's Ana GOG a that's the move towards enlightenment what I want you to understand is dukkha is these two things because they're inter penetrating this loss of agency because this this is your
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agency as you're simultaneously doing parasitic processing within you're doing reciprocal narrowing without those are totally reinforcing each other that's dukkha and no matter where you turn this is always threatening you can't get free of that you can't run
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away from it you can't deny it remember the Buddha tried self-denial this is like trying to hop over your shadow you can't do it because it is endemic all of this is endemic this is the agent arena relationship you can't
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do away with this this is indispensable to be you being a person this is self organizing relevance realizing complexified processing you can't get away from that because that is what makes you adaptive so what do you do that's what the buddha meant
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when you realize that all of your life is threatened by dukkha he didn't mean believe that all of life is suffering so what we need is how do we address this well once you realize it as a provocation once I should like the point
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is you should feel threatened you should feel threatened because if I can make you feel threatened by what I've just done here how close and intimate this threat is to you then you're starting to enact the process of
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moving towards enlightenment rather than just asserting some propositions that are largely inert so what's the standard way of presenting the second truth suffering is caused by desire and that gets you into all kinds of problems because then well don't but don't I
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desire their enlightenment but then you should not desire to do any you can just get into all these weird loops and write a better way of thinking about it is realize that dukkha can be understood realize that dukkha is caused by the way
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in which you can become attached which doesn't mean right that you just really like something it means this sense of a narrowing of yourself and the world so that agency and options are lost the way the addict is attached to their drug
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which is not a compulsive desire although they will experience it that way it is better understood as a parasitic processing that has led to a reciprocal narrowing so that no alternatives are available to you the third the traditional presentation
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is the cessation of suffering is attainable but realize a better way of putting that is realize that you can recover your agency because this narrowing down can also you can use the shame machinery to anagogical e ascend out of the cave towards the Sun of
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enlightenment realize that this machinery this complex machinery this dynamical system can be exact 'add in a way that reduces your capacity for self-deception why how how do I address this by a psycho technology the buddha offered a psycho technology of practices
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you know how you deal with a complex dynamical system that is operating against you by cultivating a counter active dynamical system that is operating for you you cultivate a dynamical system that doesn't intervene just here or here one at a time like
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your efforts I'll try this oh that doesn't work I'll try this because every time I intervene it just reconfigures and I'm doing the damn same damn thing again Here I am in this fourth relationship doing the same damn thing
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again and I know I'm doing it and yet when I try and not do it I find myself doing it that will not work that's why people end up in therapy but what if I could create a dynamical system that
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could interact intervene here here here here here here here here here simultaneously and I've made a coordinated fashion what have I created a counteractive dynamical system and that it operates didn't operate just at the level of my beliefs but operated at the level of my
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states of consciousness and my traits of character that's what the Buddha offered he offered the Eightfold Path the Eightfold Path is a counter active dynamical system that counteracts parasitic processing and does reciprocal opening beyond the ego self and beyond
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the everyday world so it's represented by an eight spokes wheel it's supposed to be a self-organizing system that rolls itself in which each part is interdependent on all the other parts you might have heard it the Eightfold Path is to cultivate
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right understanding right thinking there's various translations of this right sometimes right aspiration right thought right speech right action Right Livelihood and then right mindfulness and right concentration we already talked about this saying there's right mindfulness and right concentration
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means there is incorrect to one thing this right is not moral righteousness this is right like right handedness it means getting an optimal grip because that's what my right hand is an expert in doing it means getting an optimal
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grip notice this is about your cognition this right is about your character and this is about your consciousness and it deals with ethical aspects existential aspects central aspects it is the attempt to give you a counter active dynamical system that can deal with
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parasitic processing and that can help you reverse the reciprocal narrowing until you get an agogic awakening that takes you beyond the prison of the ego and the everyday world so we see what's happening here what I'm trying to show you is this
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higher state of consciousness this awakening is set into a context of helping you do important transformations it helps you to remember the being mode to get out of modal confusion it helps you counteract parasitical processing and reciprocal narrowing it helps
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thereby to open you up to self transcendence in a reliable and powerful way this is what the Buddha was offering people and I've tried to explain it to you in a way such that both you should feel threatened by what he is trying to
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provoke in you and you should be encouraged both of these are enactment statements you should be able to enact of the threat and enact the courage encouragement enacting the courage that you can respond to the parasitic processing and the reciprocal narrowing
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in your own life to the modal confusion in your own life part of what we need to understand is how we can properly integrate this into what we have been learning about wisdom and meaning in the Mediterranean cultural historical
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context and how all of that can be integrated within a current scientific worldview thank you very much for your time and attention [Music] you you [Music]
Topics:Buddhismawakeningmeaning crisisJohn VervaekeStephen Batchelorinterpretation crisisagencyaddictionFour Noble TruthsEightfold Path

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