**Ep. 10 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Consciousness — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/awakening-meaning-crisis-consciousness/

Vervaeke explores altered states of consciousness, the global workspace theory, and how transformative experiences can address the meaning crisis.

## Key Takeaways

- Consciousness's function remains an open problem, distinct from its nature.
- The global workspace model suggests consciousness selects and integrates relevant information to solve the frame problem.
- Altered states can produce insight and transformative shifts by reframing salience and realness.
- Integrating cognitive, computational, and neurological accounts is needed to explain why these experiences are transformative.

## What the video covers

- Continues the series on mindfulness and how it can produce modal, systemic insight that transforms the agent-arena relationship.
- Recaps the machinery of attention: scaling down to break inappropriate framing and scaling up to form better gestalt framings.
- Introduces transformative experience, drawing on L.A. Paul's work on experiences that change who one is.
- Frames the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers) and the question of what consciousness is versus what it does, noting the function of consciousness is also unresolved.
- Presents the global workspace theory: consciousness acts like a desktop where unconscious information is selected, brought together, transformed, and broadcast back.
- Connects the global workspace architecture to the frame problem, i.e. zeroing in on relevant information.
- Discusses Tononi's integrated information theory and its relation to function.
- Describes insight as a sudden brightening of consciousness and explains why altering consciousness can help reframe problems.
- Explains the salience landscape and depth landscape, including moving from correlational to causal pattern detection.
- Argues altered states give a heightened sense of 'realness' and that research such as Taylor's interviews and Jayden's work suggests lasting life improvements afterward.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Recap: Mindfulness, Attention, and Insight
2. 03:33 Transformative Experience and the Hard Problem of Consciousness
3. 06:24 The Function of Consciousness Question
4. 09:37 Global Workspace Theory and the Frame Problem
5. 13:49 Insight, Salience, and Depth Landscapes
6. 18:45 Altered States, Realness, and Life Transformation
7. 25:05 Toward an Integrated Account of Transformation

Answers

## Questions about this video

What is the main problem this video tries to address?

The video focuses on why altered states of consciousness can produce radical, transformative experiences. Vervaeke frames this as part of the broader hard problem of meaning rather than solving the hard problem of consciousness itself.

What is the global workspace theory as described here?

It compares consciousness to a computer desktop: unconscious information is activated into a workspace, where pieces interact and transform, and the results are broadcast back. This selective integration helps solve the frame problem by zeroing in on relevant information.

Why does the speaker say the function of consciousness is a mystery?

Most of our cognition, including speech and complex skills, happens unconsciously, so it is unclear what consciousness adds. Vervaeke notes there is no consensus on what consciousness does even though people deeply value it.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00

Speaker A

[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis last time we were talking more about mindfulness and trying to get an account of how mindfulness can bring about an insight not just a single insight but into a single problem but a

00:34

Speaker A

modal insight a systemic insight that is fully transformative of the agent and arena relationship and bring about the alleviation of existential distress and the affordance of enhanced meaning and we took a look at that by getting into the machinery of attention and seeing

00:57

Speaker A

that attention involves two kinds of attentional scaling attention and evolve zan ability to engage in a transparency opacity shift and also breaking up gestalt into features scaling down the kind of thing we can enhance the meditation but it also involves an

01:15

Speaker A

ability to scale up to move from featural to Gestalt and to go from looking at something to looking more deeply into reality and that in mindfulness and meditation we're practicing the scaling down to break inappropriate framing and scaling up to

01:31

Speaker A

Train making better framing and that if we can optimize by learning how to fluently flow between the two bringing in an aspect of fluency and flow that we've already talked about then we could optimize our capacity for much more

01:50

Speaker A

comprehensive insight and we could take it if we could take it to the depths of our self like we do in the pure consciousness event and adapts of reality and the resonant at one minute and we could integrate those optimize

02:06

Speaker A

between them we could bring about Praja a kind of non-duality that would be potentially transformative of the whole agent arena relationship dissipate modal confusion enhance meaning in life by bringing about one of the most powerful kinds of mystical experience give people

02:23

Speaker A

a sense of enhanced realness that will challenge and courage and empower them to transform all of their existence and bring about a tremendous increase in meaning in life talked about some recent cognitive science including some of my own

02:42

Speaker A

theoretical and experimental work that seems to be supporting the claim that these higher states of consciousness can bring about these quantum changes these radical kinds of transformative experience so today I want to talk about that I want to talk about transformative

03:01

Speaker A

experience and the pivotal and really brilliant work of La Paul on the notion of transformative experience but before I do that we have to step back and talk a little bit about altered states of consciousness by an altered state of consciousness

03:17

Speaker A

what we mean by this kind of transformation and that I mean that gets us into one of the most difficult problems David Chalmers famously called it the hard problem of consciousness Arthur Schopenhauer called it the world not trying to explain consciousness is

03:34

Speaker A

like trying to explain God right it is one of the hardest problems I'm not going to endeavor to do all of that although I'm going to try and make use of some of the work that myself and Anderson Todd and Richard Wu have put

03:48

Speaker A

into trying to understand at least some of the important functions and properties of consciousness and why altered states of consciousness can be so a40 of radical transformative experience so one way to do this is to look at two sort of questions we can ask

04:16

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ourselves one is what is consciousness how does something like consciousness emerges Hort of the nature of consciousness and a lot of people are doing a lot of work on that and then we can also ask questions about what's the

04:28

Speaker A

function of consciousness what does consciousness do those aren't the same question because you may be surprised to hear that we don't have a consensus on what consciousness does most people know that consciousness is a mystery but most people don't realize that what

04:45

Speaker A

consciousness does is also a mystery I mean think about it this way you love your consciousness and you identify with it you don't just and you don't know your consciousness the way you know other things you know your consciousness

04:58

Speaker A

by being conscious like if I ask you if you're conscious right now you are how did you do that you just are conscious and you know that you're conscious knowing and being remember Aristotle conformity and I are the same you

05:13

Speaker A

participate in your consciousness but and what would you what would you give it up but what have I said to you you could have unlimited power and wealth all you have to sacrifice is any consciousness of it would you take the

05:27

Speaker A

deal of course not but what does it do well you say well well it's uh no it's not obvious because you can do and you do most of your things without consciousness I have no understanding no conscious awareness I should say at some

05:48

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scientific understanding I have no conscious awareness of what my brain is doing that is allowing me to generate speech do you you don't this complex sophisticated thing that we still can't get artificial intelligence to do well it's happening almost completely

06:07

Speaker A

unconsciously what's my consciousness for what does it - so two really important questions how does something as mysterious and strange arise out of matter that's the nature question and what does it do again I am NOT going to

06:23

Speaker A

presume or dare to try and answer these comprehensively I don't need that for what we're doing here because I'm not trying to solve the hard problem of consciousness I'm trying to solve the hard problem of meaning one hard problem

06:36

Speaker A

at a time please but what I want to do is show you how a convergence of work that some of the best work that's being done on consciousness points towards something that will tell us why altered states of consciousness can be so

06:49

Speaker A

valuable to us so what about one of the best accounts for the function of consciousness is called the global workspace theory so the idea is that your consciousness functions very much like that desktop of your computer so here's the idea you

07:13

Speaker A

have your desktop and then you have all your files right and what you can do is you can activate a file you can bring that information into the desktop and you can activate this file and bring it into the desktop and then these pieces

07:28

Speaker A

of information can interact with each other and then you can broadcast back to any or all or just one file the changes you brought about that's how your desktop works that's how you use it well what's the analogy the analogy is here's

07:43

Speaker A

all of your unconscious processing in your brain and what you do is you retrieve it bring it into a space something like working memory you activate it so that the pieces of information can interact with each other and then you broadcast it back right to

08:04

Speaker A

any and all of the existing files why do you want to do that why do you do it on your computer well you don't want all of your files active at the same time because that's a disaster you want to be able and notice

08:23

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what's going on here you want to be able to select certain pieces of information that are relevant bring them together transform them in a way that's relevant and then broadcasts that changes back that are needed so the global workspace

08:41

Speaker A

theory says this is and it's gaining a lot of empirical evidence to support it says this is what consciousness is functioning to do now this is very general so more specifically and so this theory is associated with bars and then

08:59

Speaker A

there was a paper by bars shanahan and bars that more specifically trying to answer the question about yeah but what what why this machinery bars also published an attempt to answer that question more specifically in the Cambridge handbook

09:19

Speaker A

of consciousness what it comes down to is the idea that what what what this architecture is helping to do is to solve a problem that's called the frame problem now I'm going to talk much later in specifically what the frame problem

09:34

Speaker A

is to put a pin in it we're going to come back to it but the basic idea here is right what this is doing is helping you to zero in on relevant information and that's very very important because

09:46

Speaker A

there are wait there I mean there are sort of three areas in which this is a huge issue one is all of the information that's available to me right now we have to talk about this later but technically mathematically the

10:00

Speaker A

amount of information is available in this room is astronomically vast and I can't I can't make use of all of it I get overwhelmed by it so part of what I have to do is select out of all of that

10:13

Speaker A

information what information I'm going to make use of I also have a huge amount of information in my memory overwhelming its vast and the possible ways it could be connected I have to select from some of that and then I have to put those

10:37

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pieces of information together in all the ways I can put together the information and from out there and the information about here also vast and overwhelming later on I'm going to give you mathematical arguments about this right now I just need you to get it

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intuitively so what consciousness is doing right is it's helping these problems it's helping you zero in on the relevant information the relevant of information from out there the relevant information from in here and the relevant information that will help put those pieces of

11:11

Speaker A

information together for you in the way that it's needed just like you do that you do that with your computer you search through your memory you select what's relevant you bring it on to the desktop you put it together in a

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relevant manner right and then you use it in a relevant way but we can't use a homunculus planation there's no little man running inside what's doing all of that in a self-organizing fashion is your consciousness this helps to explain

11:46

Speaker A

why consciousness is so tightly associated with working memory and working memory is so tightly associated with intelligence okay so the core function of consciousness seems to be to help you realize become aware of actualize put into action relevance

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Speaker A

relevant information we're going to come back to this in more depth there's a more neuro scientific and psychological account by people like Bohr and Seth that say when we measure when people are conscious it seems to correlate with

12:33

Speaker A

certain kinds of brain activity what kind of brain the brain activity that seems to be involved when people are chunking information or when they are restructuring it like an insight I've already shown you this this ability to manipulate attention to afford insight

12:56

Speaker A

that's that they're arguing that that's one of the key functions of conscious but what does what is all of that doing the same thing right the Bohr and Saif model is basically saying the function of consciousness is to give you a

13:09

Speaker A

dynamic improvement in your ability to zero in on relevant information one of the most prominent theories of the nature of consciousness right now is to Nonis integrated information theory integrated information theory now his theory is not about the function of

13:35

Speaker A

consciousness it's about the nature of consciousness but of course he's going to give a derived account of the function what is consciousness according to him it's how powerfully integrated in pieces of information are how much one piece of information in your brain is

13:49

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causally dependent on interacting and affecting other pieces of information in your brain the more tightly the integration the more powerful right the processing and what he would say is the more likely that complex as he calls it because it's actually complexification

14:07

Speaker A

of information is going to be a reporting consciousness but then when you ask him or why is consciousness why that might be what consciousness is I think there's much more to consciousness but for the sake of argument that might

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Speaker A

be what consciousness is but why is consciousness doing this massive complexification of information so he actually proposes something like a Turing test for consciousness he says you can test to see how conscious a system is by giving it anomalous

14:41

Speaker A

pictures and figuring out if the pictures don't make good sense here's look here's the idea when I'm complexify Anan doing this this very dynamic integration of information what what that's tracking is how much I'm actually picking up on right the patterns in the

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Speaker A

world making sense of the world the reason why I'm doing this is precisely because I'm trying to as best I can track the complexity of the world so what's the main function or the main function of the integrated information

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Speaker A

is to allow you to determine if pieces of information are relevant to each other and relevant to you so what consciousness seems to be now let's be careful what I'm not saying I'm not saying that every instance of relevance

15:44

Speaker A

realization is consciousness what I'm seeing what I'm arguing is that what consciousness seems to do is the following it seems to be a way in which you can coordinate attention and other related abilities of awareness so as to

15:59

Speaker A

optimize how insightfully you can make sense of your world so that's why you need consciousness for complex situations that require insight for situations and problems that have a high degree of novelty or challenge in them it's way you can reduce consciousness

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Speaker A

when the problem has become very well-defined for you that doesn't have a high degree of novelty it doesn't require insight I don't know if this is a complete account of the function of consciousness but it explains something we've already noted that when you have

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Speaker A

an insight what do you have you have a flash it's like you get a sudden brightening of consciousness it explains why you might want to alter your state of consciousness because if I alter my state of consciousness I'm going to

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Speaker A

alter what I'm finding relevant and how it is standing out for me how it is salient for me let's put a lot of this stuff together the machinery we had about attention stuff we've talked about about fluency stuff we talked about salience and

17:27

Speaker A

notice a phenomena that mates in called sizing up right part of what's happening part of what consciousness is doing is it's creating a salience landscape for me and what does that mean for me well first of all I'm picking out of all of

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Speaker A

the things all of the things I could pick out and when I say I I don't mean me I mean my consciousness I'm picking out some features you are not paying attention to every piece of information in this room you can't it's

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Speaker A

overwhelmingly vast but you pick out on some and then what you do also is you begin so you've already selected and you start to prioritize it and you foreground some of it so for example presumably I'm for grounded and what's

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around me is back rounded and of course we've already seen it's going both ways remember that right and notice again what I'm looking at what I'm looking through and then taking the features and I'm starting to foreground them and then

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Speaker A

I'm going to ghost all those features I'm gonna figure I'm going to create a figure we use this language of figuring out figuring out and making something new and making it stand out even more more salient to me and I'm also

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Speaker A

configuring configuring it together so all the features and then for grounded and then this is getting configured right right and this also is feeding back and then of course and framing problems and framing problems we've been talking about that

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Speaker A

all through this series so you've got a very complex dynamical system at work so what's happening right now is your consciousness is creating a salience landscape some things are rising up right out of unintelligibility as features that are getting foregrounded

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and configured and then you're framing problems around them and then things are shifting and and your attention is shifting around other things are becoming more Senya you've got this highly textured highly flowing salience landscape that's what it's like to be

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Speaker A

here right now now there's more going on of course right so part of what I'm doing I get this salience landscape and my problem is around the cup but I'm not quite sure so I move around it I try to get into an

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Speaker A

optimal position if I get too close I lose too much of the dish don't if I get too too far away right I may see the whole thing but I'm losing the details I need to get to the right place where I

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can metaphorically and also literally in this sense get what Marlo party calls an optimal grip on it so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get I'm trying to get an optimizing between Gestalt and feature between looking through and

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looking at I'm optimizing within this whole sizing up so I'm taking my salience landscape and I'm using it to get a optimal grip on things not maximal and grip is meant here as a metaphor it's meant for my contact my

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Speaker A

interactional contact how can we understand what this optimal grip is doing look when I when I get the salience landscape and I adjust an affordance opens up okay what's an affordance this is goes back to Gibson the idea of visual perception is this

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Speaker A

active process of landscaping the cup is graspable to me it's not a property of the cup per se because it's not graspable by a praying mantis it's not a property just of my hand because right I can't my hand alone can't grasp an

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Speaker A

affordance is right setting up a relationship of coordination between the constraints and the thing and the constraints in my hand so that I can engage in an interaction so it's a way of Ko identifying the cup is perfect

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Speaker A

this thing is it's been min salient to me I've got now an optimal grip on it such that I can create affordances so it is presenting itself to me and I am configuring myself to it it is graspable

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by me and what and gives us Gibson's point you don't really you don't see like colors and shapes what you see our affordances I see that this is walkable that this is where I can place things that this is movable so what you see you

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Speaker A

get the basics the salient landscape sort of gets you in contact then you start the optimal gripping and the optimal gripping gets you into the creation of affordances where basically the agent and the arena are being Co identified I'm a grasper and this is

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Speaker A

graspable I am presenting myself to it and it is presenting itself to me so you have consciousness is setting up a salience landscape but within this you're doing this process of sizing up and that produces a presence landscape

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Speaker A

you get a whole bunch of a whole affordance network is laid out for you but that's not enough remember we talked about with flow you need to be able to track the differences between correlational patterns and cause causal

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Speaker A

patterns as you interact with things your brain is figuring out the causal patterns as opposed to the merely correlational this is the depth landscape this is your ability to figure out you see kids doing this right you got that you got the the

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Speaker A

two-year-old and they got the spoon and right and what do they pick up the spoon they drop it before you pick it up they pick up and they and they do this over and over again why are they doing that

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Speaker A

because they're trying to use their salience landscape to generate affordances the spoon is graspable it's throwable it's droppable but why are they doing why do they repeatedly grasp and throw and drop because they're trying to figure out the causal patterns

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Speaker A

around the spoon they're transforming the salience landscape into a presence landscape and that into a depth landscape they're getting a deep kind of understanding not in words but interaction aliy of the spoon this is what consciousness is doing for you it's

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Speaker A

doing it right now it's laying out right it's it's all of this is a way in which consciousness is helping you zero in on relevant information it's creating this textured salience landscape so that certain things stand up stand out for

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Speaker A

you and other things don't as much and it's constantly shifting dynamically and then within that it's creating a presence landscape of how you and what salient are being Co identified right coupled together into an array a agent and arena relationship and then it's

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also affording you and that's dynamic because the affordances are constantly shifting and then that's affording you tracking the causal patterns getting into deeper contact with the guts of the world that's what consciousness is doing so if I were to transform my

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consciousness I'm gonna be transforming all of this machinery I'm gonna transforming my salience landscape my presence landscape my depth landscape the patterns I'm going to track the kind of agent I can be the kind of arena I can be in are going to be radically

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transformed and I won't have just a flash of insight like I do with a nine dot problem I will have a systematic look on an altered state of consciousness is not it's not an insight in consciousness it's an insight of

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consciousness it's a it's a radical transformation of all of your landscapes not just this particular problem look I'll try it and show you what I mean by this by a systematic insight so this goes back to childhood development

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pivotal work of Piaget in psychology and this is picking up again on one of the metaphors we were using we use wisdom is like enlightenment or wisdom is like waking up and there's another one wisdom like as the child is to the adult the

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Speaker A

adult is to the sage wisdom is like growing up okay so you take a four-year-old and you do this you count up five candies one two three four five you need a four-year-old because they can count they understand that five is

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Speaker A

more than four it's less than six you count it out right and then you count up five more candies one two three four five you show them that like this and you say which which row do you want

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Speaker A

and they reliably and you've counted they know there's five here they knows what there's five here but they confidently pick this row and here's the thing all the kids do it and that mistake is related to a whole bunch of

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Speaker A

other kinds of mistakes they're making they're not making just a single error look this is what made Piaget a great great scientist why he's a pivotal figure in trying to understand development and think about Aristotle and development see there'd been lots of

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Speaker A

IQ testing way before Piaget people have been testing kids our IQ for a while and they had been throwing away the errors as garbage because what you paid attention to was that what the kid got right yeah success and Protestant work

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ethic yeah yeah Piazza had this insight it is it but wait wait wait what if there's a pattern in the errors if the errors are systematic and not random then that would mean that there are constraints remember constraints there are

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constraints operating in the child's cognition and maybe we could understand think about Aristotle again and biology cars Piaget was guess what a biologist maybe we could understand development in terms of how those constraints are shifting and how they're how they're

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shaping the kids sensory motor interaction with the world and what he found was in fact that the errors are systematic the kids are all of the kids are making this kind of error and they're making a whole bunch of related

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errors there's a whole system of errors and so that points to some underlying set of constraints now what's going on what's going on here why is the kid picking the the lower row because it takes up more space think about

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Speaker A

everything we've talked about here this variable is super salient to them their salience landscape is only picking up on that now you I hope don't fall prey to this because you're also picking up on another variable at the same time you

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Speaker A

also make salient that the extra space is non candy space and therefore is what not relevant but the kid doesn't pick up on that their salience landscape is not sizing that up and so they don't have the same affordance as you now notice

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Speaker A

this you see through this illusion because your salience landscape has been trained to pay attention to these multiple variables at the same time the way you size things up integrate them in attention means you don't fall prey to

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this part of the way in which you become wiser than the child you don't fall prey to self-deceptive illusion is because you've trained your salience landscape to zero in on the relative and information in the relevant way now

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Speaker A

think about this remember we talked about salience and how when things are super salient to you that triggers bullshitting and self-deception if I could change my salience landscape I don't fall prey to this I don't fall prey to the illusion and I wouldn't act

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Speaker A

foolishly now what I would need you to understand is here's a whole bunch of these errors that the kid is making they form a system and they all have to do with the fact that the salience landscape has not been sufficiently

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cultivated so the kid might have an insight here but it doesn't really matter because they're still going to be blocked in this problem in this problem in this problem they're still going to be locked into a particular stage of

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Speaker A

development but what if and this is an idea that working out in conjunction with Jensen Kim what if you didn't have a single insight what have you had a systemic in insight an insight that changed the whole system

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Speaker A

it wasn't an insight in your consciousness it was an insight of your consciousness in which you're changing your salience landscaping as opposed to just changing how you're framing a particular problem that's what the child does when it develops it actually

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changes its salience landscaping so that this whole system of errors falls away and it starts to see through an illusion and into reality here's the thing you need to now think you've heard me say it you have trained your salience landscape

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Speaker A

so that you do not fall prey to the systemic illusions of the four-year-old yes yes but you know what you are falling prey to a lot of systemic illusions you're not aware of because you can only become aware of them if you

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can transform your salience landscape your presence landscape and your depth landscape to get in at what is actually most relevant systematically not here and here all of us can have an insight here and here but what it is what is it

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Speaker A

to have a systemic improvement in insight that's to be wise when you have salience systematically tracking presence in depth so that you can wisely zero in on the relevant information and make your life more meaningful that's your significance landscape

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Speaker A

it protects you from bullshitting it allows you to see through illusion and into reality and it affords you having things more present to you it would afford you to have a more comprehensive flowing relationship with reality altered states of consciousness have

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Speaker A

this potential to create a insight of consciousness now they also have the potential to do the opposite right they have the potential to screw up your salience landscaping and make yourself more prone to more prone to self-deception that's why most altered

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states of consciousness are rejected as being illusory and the losery but why is it then why is it then that certain altered states of consciousness have the opposite why is it that certain altered states of consciousness feel like this

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Speaker A

like wait it all makes sense now I'm seeing through illusion into reality in a way I have before why is that altered state more real the really real as Plato is fond of saying and this this every day is less real why do I feel like I

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woke up that I became right an adult to my previous form that seemed to me like a child what's going on so let's set up the problem because getting clear about the problem is half the battle formulating a problem well is

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much much of the important work at trying to bring a solution to it so we know that many people experience as I mentioned these higher states of consciousness and what reliably we'll talk about the phenomenological profile in a bit but reliably what is

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characteristic of these states is that people find them to be really real and in - and in both directions arena and agent they say wow that's the way the world really is and they also say this is who I really am so much so that I'm

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going to transform my everyday experience so that it comes more consonant with that realness that enhanced realness so there's a mutual more Ness a mutual more realness that happens in these higher states and consciousness and it's prescriptive it

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demands change it challenges people to change it taps into those platonic meta drives of getting your fullness of being your real self and getting the fullness of contact reality it twitches those on and you go I need to have that I've got

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a I'm willing to transform everything in order to get back to that really real world and that really real self so I call this so we have the higher states of consciousness I call this the problem of the Anto normativity

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remember that ontology has to do with the structure of reality normative is when things are placing a demand on you to be better to improve so these higher states of consciousness are precisely experienced as higher because they're challenging you to change

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because they're presenting you more realness and they're triggering those platonic meta drives now as I mentioned these states are historically important and they're pervasive so you can read Taylor's book waking from sleep he has about 150 interviews you can read many

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of the he prevents a lot of first-person narratives of these people in these experience you can take a look at Newberg's book how enlightenment changes your brain he did a online survey of 1,500 people in 2016 as I mentioned

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there's just larger general surveys of how often people have these kinds of experiences and they range in intensity but it's around 30 to 40 percent of the population so we have to take these experiences seriously we know that from

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the work at the Griffis lab that what's happening in some a subset of psychedelic experiences so here's all the psychedelic experiences you have a subset in which people have a mystical experience and some of those people the mystical experience is deeply

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transformative it triggers that kind of quantum change okay so why is the entre normativity of higher states of consciousness problematic well here's why the transformative experience that people undergo and the the radical transformations they're willing to make seems to be driven and justified by this

41:30

Speaker A

they still do why are you doing this I'm doing this because I had this experience and it was more real and I've got to stay in touch with more real they justify this transfer make I mean sorry I don't mean to be reductive and I'm not

41:48

Speaker A

being disrespectful but you know Buddhism and Taoism and Vedanta and the core of you know aspects of Judaism and the mystical traditions in gianna tea and Islam come down to this claim I had this and it justifies what

42:04

Speaker A

I'm telling you it explains and motivates the changes that I would underwent but why is that problematic look because it's like I said it's it's in contrast to how we treat most of our altered states of consciousness we go into dreaming we

42:29

Speaker A

come back and we say that's not real we go into these we come back and say that was more real and this is less real now let me try and explicate this problem further look why do you you reject your

42:47

Speaker A

dreaming as unreal why because when you're in the dream it seems real because when you come out that pattern those things that happen in your dream don't come here with the rest of your life you've got this overall coherent picture

43:04

Speaker A

of your life intelligibility remember Plato this overall picture makes the most sense of the most of your experience and at Plato's right the more intelligible something is the more real it is this picture is more intelligible it's more real the dream is bizarre it

43:22

Speaker A

doesn't fit in there ago less real so realness is something like the pattern of intelligibility with the widest scope wide and rich coherence of content it makes the most sense of the most of your experience puts together your beliefs

43:45

Speaker A

and your memories etc but look what's happening in a higher state of consciousness it's exact reverse you have this single experience it doesn't go here with the rest of your life because that's why it challenges the rest of your life it doesn't go here

44:06

Speaker A

with the rest of their life it tells you that the rest of this is illusory and you need to change in fact the difference is so great that instead of rejecting it you reject your everyday experience if you so the thing

44:25

Speaker A

that you use to reject the drink so look at the picture I use all of this and I reject the dream and then I have the higher state of consciousness again a single thing and I use this to reject

44:35

Speaker A

all of this what's going on the higher state of consciousness is a temporary experience it does not go here with the rest of our experience that's how and why it can challenge and demand such radical transformation of our

45:00

Speaker A

everyday life our everyday self and here's here's what's even more I don't know perplexing it does this without providing any new intelligible content these experiences are traditionally ineffable you can't put it into words they're traditionally trans rational you

45:27

Speaker A

can't give any argument or explanation or justification how is it that this temporary experience that you cut why what was it describe the experience I can't I can't describe it well can you explain to me what I know I can't I

45:46

Speaker A

can't explain it so there's no content it's temporary and yet somehow it goes the exact opposite of most altered states of consciousness these states these so-called higher States should be the ones we most reject they're temporary they challenge all of

46:08

Speaker A

our intelligibility coherence they don't produce any viable explanation any viable content and yet we promote them as they're really real and use them to reject our everyday experience and that's the core of the axial revolution this problem of the Anto normativity of

46:28

Speaker A

higher states of consciousness goes to the heart of the axial revolution and the way it is still informing our very cognitive grammar and our existential ways of being right here right now that's the problem of the auto normativity of higher states of

46:48

Speaker A

consciousness now we know that there's a possibility that altered states of consciousness can bring about a developmental improvement but but how how how do we tie this to this can we give an adequate enough explanation of these higher states of

47:08

Speaker A

consciousness and we need to do one that will help to explain why triggering them can be so transformative because here's the thing Jayden's work shows people's lives do get better they're not making it up after they've had these these higher

47:25

Speaker A

states of consciousness the discount encountered with the really real their lives get better by all kinds of important measures measures of meaning relationship probably they get better okay so what do we need we need we have to solve this problem we have to make

47:45

Speaker A

some progress on it now we need actually two explanations that need to be integrated together first of all I need a descriptive explanation I need an account of the underlying processes cognitive brain processes we'll talk about this that explained the

48:09

Speaker A

phenomenological the experiential nature of these states why do people like when people describe what's happening in these states why do why does it have the features it has it has to explain why people feel that being more real why it

48:29

Speaker A

feels that it justifies empowers and motivates them to undergo transformative experience but in it in addition to something that's a descriptive account I need a prescriptive account I mean the first account is going to be largely psychological this is what's happening

48:51

Speaker A

and this is why people are experiencing the way they're experiencing it that's descriptively adequate but prescriptively adequate has to be show me this is it actually a legitimate thing do these states actually provide a rational justification and a guide for

49:08

Speaker A

the transformations that people are claiming on their behalf are these states actually philosophically justifiable or is their claim to Anto normativity all just an illusion is it rationally justifiable now this prescriptive account must integrate with the mechanisms and

49:39

Speaker A

processes of the descriptive account in order to be overall coherent in order to give us the best explanation of how and why these states are operating so the descriptive account the best way to do this is to do a cognitive scientific

50:04

Speaker A

approach now at some point I'm going to teach you in this series how to do good cognitive science but one of what we're doing in good cognitive science is we're plausibly trying to integrate different levels in our descriptive analysis my

50:20

Speaker A

descriptive account should give me a good account of the cognitive processes that are at work in the mind it should give me a good account and that's gonna rely largely on psychology it should also give me a good account of the

50:36

Speaker A

information processes that are at work that's gonna rely on ideas drawn from artificial intelligence and machine learning because that's the project when we're trying to most understand and optimize information processing it should also draw on neuroscientific accounts of what's happening in the brain I need

50:55

Speaker A

an account that simultaneously elucidates each one of these the cognitive mechanisms the machine learning mechanisms and the neurological mechanisms but Minh does that in an integrative mutually informative fashion I want a plausible integration that's what I need for the good descriptive

51:18

Speaker A

account that's what I'm gonna give I'm gonna try and argue how we can understand why these higher states of consciousness are the way they are in terms of both cognitive in terms of all of those the cognitive the machine

51:32

Speaker A

learning and the neuroscientific level after I'm doing that I'm going to then endeavor to try and show you how those processes the cognitive processes the information processing processes the neurological processes actually provide a rational justification for the transformation that the people undertake

52:01

Speaker A

it's not the kind of justification you might be expecting what I'm going to argue for is that it is not that these states provide us with any special knowledge because these states are not about changing evidence acquiring new

52:28

Speaker A

evidence the way science and we should not use these higher states of consciousness as a way of challenging our scientific claims and many people will do this but the mistake is to then think well that's it that's the sum

52:43

Speaker A

total we've shown that these higher states of consciousness don't generate reliable kinds of knowledge so we should reject them is irrational no because that's again to think that the whole point of your cognition and your rationality is to get better beliefs and

53:01

Speaker A

I've already been showing you through this series that there's much more to it when the child no longer falls prey to the illusion Newton no new facts have been discovered the child knew that there were five candies on top and below

53:22

Speaker A

no new facts it's not like there's been a new scientific discoveries about space or candies what changed what changed is not knowledge what changed was wisdom the child has learned to see through illusion and into reality and what I

53:43

Speaker A

want to pursue with you is this idea that higher states of concentration 'el not because they provide us with new knowledge look look people go into these states and they come out with exactly opposite conclusions you can reread so

53:59

Speaker A

many of these reports people go in and they have this higher state of consciousness and they said oh and I knew God people go and they have this higher state of conscience and I knew there was no God exactly the opposite

54:14

Speaker A

the content is diametrically opposite people will say ferried metaphysical claims what's changing is not the content not this or that piece of knowledge what's changing is you're functioning you're not gaining knowledge you're gaining wisdom you're gaining skills and

54:50

Speaker A

sensibilities and sensitivities of significance landscaping that radically transform your existential mode that is why for example that the Buddha famously refused to answer metaphysical questions about Nirvana about enlightenment because that's not the point that's not what this is about

55:19

Speaker A

this is not about getting supra scientific knowledge this is about getting extraordinary wisdom and transformation we're going to take a look more at trying to answer the problem of higher states of consciousness next time and we'll return also back to discovery

55:41

Speaker A

that's discussing more how the Buddha integrated that into trying to deal with some of the deepest problems that we face as entities that have to realize relevance pursue salience deal with existential anxiety cultivate significance and meaning trying overcome

56:02

Speaker A

our illusions and delusions and find a fullness of being and an optimal grip on the world thank you very much for your time [Music] you you

Topics: consciousness altered states of consciousness global workspace theory transformative experience meaning crisis mindfulness frame problem insight John Vervaeke integrated information theory

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