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[Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis so we have been engaged in a very long discussion because we're talking about a topic that is central about the possibility of enlightenment and to try and make that something
Vervaeke explores higher states of consciousness as domain-general flow, linking disruptive strategies, decentering, and wisdom to enlightenment-like transformation via cognitive science.
Key Takeaways
- Higher states of consciousness may be explained as a domain-general flow state for gripping reality optimally.
- Disruptive and decentering strategies can reveal systematic errors and enable wisdom-producing transformation.
- Such transformations alter the machinery of the self, so they are also changes of character.
- Autodidactic pursuit of these states carries real risks, so guidance and balance matter.
What the video covers
- The episode continues Vervaeke's inquiry into whether enlightenment can be understood through cognitive science rather than mystical mythology.
- Higher states of consciousness are described as a flow state in the domain-general skill of optimally gripping the world, not a specific skill like climbing or jazz.
- Disruptive strategies such as mindfulness and psychedelics increase variation in processing, revealing both real invariants and systematic misframings.
- Development is framed as systematic insight, where a learner corrects not one error but a whole class of errors in how reality is framed, linked to Jensen Kim's work.
- Igor Grossman's research on decentering, including the 'Solomon effect', shows that third-person perspective on interpersonal problems fosters wisdom.
- Egocentrism is described as a systemic error, which is why awakening is often metaphorized as waking from sleep.
- Awakening experiences can be traumatic or terrifying, and autodidactic pursuit of them risks echo chambers and self-entrapment.
- Woodward et al.'s randomization in neural networks (dropout) is used as an analogy: disruption prevents overfitting and helps find generalizable patterns.
- Psilocybin is linked to a metastable brain state that simultaneously integrates and differentiates, as an optimization of processing.
- The discussion ends by arguing that plausibility, not just certainty, is indispensable in science and in how the brain evaluates insight.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Enlightenment from a Cognitive Science Perspective
- 03:48Properties of Higher States of Consciousness
- 07:48Flow, Insight, and Mystical Experience as a Continuum
- 11:59Disruptive Strategies and Systematic Insight
- 16:40Decentering and the Solomon Effect
- 23:45Dangers of Autodidactic Awakening
- 30:45Neural Disruption, Randomization, and Metastability
- 44:10Plausibility, Science, and Closing Reflections
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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plausibly accessible to us rather than something wrapped and shrouded in mesmeric mystique instead we've been trying to understand this from a cognitive science perspective that could tell us why these higher states of consciousness might in fact provide a
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means for the radical self transformation self transcendence enhanced inner peace and connectedness to reality that are the central legacy of the axial age revolution and that are still needed today even if we no longer believe in the mythology of the axial
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age religions and philosophies how do we find a place to vouchsafe the value the precious value that these states can confer on lives in terms of meaning and transcendence when we no longer can understand and articulate and legitimate
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that in terms of a two worlds mythology so if you remember we had been discussing the properties of these higher states of consciousness we had discussed what it's the world is like it's a bright both comprehensive and detailed intricate and interesting the
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world in a grain of sand it's highly intelligible it's beautiful and behind it is a pervasive sense of oneness the self that is resonating with that world in the higher state of consciousness is a self deeply at peace like in Plato's
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description of an agog a it's experiencing joy it's experiencing a kind of deep remembrance sake of the being mode it's true and authentic self it is losing its ego centrism we talked about the connectedness between the self in the world as one so
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intimate so flowing so Anna gugak that the sense of participation and conformity is achieving a sense of identity deep and profound being at one with the oneness but that it is so profound that it is almost always described as ineffable we then took a
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look at what might be going on in these states because we're trying to remember we're trying to give a descriptively adequate and a prescriptively adequate account we took a look at the continuity hypothesis that they're the same machinery that's at work in our everyday
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experience of the fluency of reading into the moments of insight into the insight cascades of flow and then being exempted even more into mystical experience and then some of those mystical experiences bring about a quantum change right they bring about a
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deep transformative experience and I suggested to you I proposed to you that what's going on in these higher states of consciousness is something like a state of flow but that the skill the expertise that is flowing is not this
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particular skill of rock climbing or being a martial artist or playing jazz it's the skill the domain-general skill of getting an optimal grip on the world and so what's happening is people are getting a flow state in their ability to
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optimally grip on the world this connection to the machinery of insight helps to explain why disruptive strategies are used in order to try and bring about by states of consciousness because disruptive strategies are so central to trying to create insight
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they're both naturally disruptive strategies and you can acquire them through mindfulness cycle technologies we were examining what these disruptive strategies do they massively increase variation in your processing and that reveals invariants both good invariants you get to see more of the real patterns
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that are remaining unchanged through all the variation that's what science does across all of their variations we try to find the real patterns that are invariant and what science does is increase the variation we run experience experiments we increase the variation we
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do all kinds of manipulations and increased variations to try and find what remains invariant because we take that to point to us right point out to us what is more real that's what you're doing but it also right so it's opening
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up the invariance of the world and you're using the flow States capacity for enhanced implicit processing implicit learning of complex patterns tracking of causal patterns to do that but it's also picking up on the bad invariance it's picking up on right it's
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helping to reveal all the ways in which you are systematically miss framing so that like a child going through a developmental stage and I would point to you to the work of my former student friend colleague Jenson Kim for this
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idea of development as a systematic form of insight something in he and I are working on together I could like a child going through a developmental stage realizing not just this error or that error but a systematic tricity in the
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way that they're miss framing reality and finding a nexus a point of where the insight right is not just an intervention in this problem but in a whole class and type of problems that developmental change of seeing through illusion and into reality that
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is so central to wisdom is also being afforded by these higher states of consciousness what about the the centering that's so central to both flow mystical experiences and then ultimately to higher states of consciousness my colleague Igor Grossman has produced
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quite a bit of good experimental evidence that sets D centering strategies although this was prefigured in earlier work by the Berlin paradigm Igor Grossman has done some excellent work on showing that such dissenting strategies are very relevant for
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bringing about wisdom he has work on what he calls the Solomon effect let me describe it to you you'll see why these disruptive these centering strategies can be so powerful get people to find a problem that's very messy problematic
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and that they're stuck in usually it's an interpersonal problem because as Sartre said he'll has other people so he's heaven by the way he didn't say that but right the our deepest and most pervasive problems are generally problems with other people why because
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the thing that is I've mentioned this before that is most predictive of how meaningful your life is is your meaningful relationships to others the problem is human beings are endlessly complex okay so you're describing this interpersonal problem and when people
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describe it they are of course mesmerised by the Mirage of their own ego centric perspective they describe it without thought default from the first-person perspective and they remain stuck remember this notion of stuckness we'll come back to it again when we talk
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about gnosis and Gnosticism then you get the person to read ascribe the same problem from the third-person perspective you get them to D Center what will often happen is they will break frame they will realize the way in which they have
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been blocked systematically locked not solving their problem they'll often have a central insight into how to resolve their problem this is why it's called the Solomon effect because it tends to make you more wise think about the radical D centering that's going on in
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these awakening experiences in these higher states of consciousness notice the systematicity of the error of egocentrism it's not an error in this problem or this problem or this problem it's a systematic error that's why it's often described with metaphors of like being
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asleep because when you wake up you have a systemic change in your consciousness so what's happening in these higher states of consciousness in these awakening experiences you're getting a transformation an intervention in systemic error you're seeing through illusion precisely because of the
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powerful D centering that they are affording for you now that of course can be a powerfully traumatic experience it can be a terrifying experience pursuing this in an autodidactic fashion like all autodidactic being a completely self-taught right it's very very
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dangerous autodidact tend to get into echo chambers vicious circles of their own egocentric entombment and entrapment the buddha gives a wonderful parable about this he says this is how you catch a monkey you put some pitch on a piece
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of wood and it looks like something very shiny and tasties it's salient it's attractive so the monkey grabs it with its hand and it gets stuck and then it uses its other hand to try and free itself and it gets stuck so it uses its
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right foot and then its left foot and then it puts its head and smelt on and then it's completely trapped and then the hunter comes and kills it okay but decentering can alleviate that but if you are still
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pursuing this as an isolated individual as an autodidact then think about how ill-prepared unskilled untutored and egocentric li you are trying to confront this radical transformation that is why I think it is a very poor idea for people to take psychedelics without
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having them placed within a wisdom tradition in which they have a committed community that can give outside the centering and wise advice for how to process and handle these transformations but once again I point to you too an aspect of the meaning crisis we have
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institutions of information we have institutions of knowledge we have traditions and we have respected experts who give us guidance we do not have this before wisdom now what is amazing of course is that some individuals like sit hearta are able to do it as individuals
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I want to point out two things about that they deserve our admiration for successfully doing it as individuals even though the Buddha had training from other people all along the way but we should not take from that some kind of
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promotion of our North American individualism because the Buddha made it very clear that the Sangha or the community was necessary for the cultivation of these transformative States so you've got this radical decentering they can afford wisdom and I
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don't want to try and show you how it's not just a perspective of knowing it's not just a radical transformation in our salience landscape this is a participatory change this involves not just a machinery of cognition or the
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machinery of consciousness this alters the machinery of the self and therefore is also fundamentally a transformation of character never participatory knowing is knowing by conforming well the radical at oneness of these brings about a radical kind of participatory knowing
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we'll come back to this when we return and talk about plutinos but right it's so beautiful precisely because the coupling is so profound and think about you're getting reciprocal revelation to revert world is revealing itself more deeply and more depths of yourself are
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being revealed in a couple - --n well that's that that's love love is mutually accelerating disclosure if you want somebody if you want to fall in love with somebody although you shouldn't you can never sort of pursue it that way I
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think you know but what what happens is if you get two people mutually disclosing from each other in a coupled fashion iDisk I are honestly disclose something about myself and then you in response disclosed and then I pick that up and
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disclose more and then you disclose that reciprocal enhanced mutual conforming engenders love and love is something you know by participating in it like your culture and your language this is knowing by loving now what I want to suggest to you is that some recent
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cognitive science research can give us some understanding about why this decentering and this transformation of the sense of self might be functional here there's a lot of work I would recommend to you the work of soui and Humphrey from 2015 for example showing
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that one of the functions of yourself right not not your mom but yourself is to act as glue this is a term they use it's a metaphor by making things relevant to myself I can make them relevant to each other and glue them
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together so and and I'm always doing that right I'm simultaneously gluing things together as I'm gluing myself together what the self is is a powerful set of functions for integrating actually complexified processing to say you're you have a self is to say you
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have a systematic set of functions that are integrating not homogenizing complexify things together now if you remember we talked about the work of Michael Anderson exaptation the acceptation of the tongue here's a proposal to you this powerful machinery
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that is central to your cognitive agency your ability to make sense of the world but by gluing the world together as you're gluing yourself together this powerful machinery of complexification of information and information processing can be exact 'add what if you
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were to take all that machinery of integration that you're using to integrate yourself and you turned it on to the world what if you took all of that capacity to glue things together and you exerted it on the world that
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would mean that machinery that was normally self focused about integrating the self and integrating its processing could be used to achieve a deeper integration of the world to reveal deeper underlying patterns know vark in 96 claxton in 2000 both suggest with
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argumentation and with phenomenological evidence and many reports from people who undergoing mystical experiences seem to corroborate this that what seems to happen is all of the energy and machinery that has been bound up in our self has been turned on to the world
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that's where the world comes alive to us and we see so deeply into it imagine the intimacy you have in your self-knowledge being turned on to the world so all of that energy that stored up in your egocentric processing all the
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time and the resource and all Akoo am i what up what's going on how's it Oh how's it oh all that all that imagine if you could take that machine and say forget about John Verve a key just for a
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while even turn it on that turn all that massive machine onto the world radical radical decentering I propose to you is doing exactly that all of the time and effort and processing and skill and memory and structures that we've built
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into our ego can be exacted to disclose the world and that of course would be coupled with a radical sense of moving into the being mode and a radical sense of remembering who and what we really are so what I've tried to show you is we
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can understand the higher cognitive process at the psychological level in terms of this decentering the excitation of the self machinery flowing optimal grip right enhanced awareness of invariants both in the positive sense and then the ability that allows us to
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become systemic error we can see why this machinery is operating and producing the experiential profile it is producing what about the information processing level I don't want to get very technical here but this is the level at which we return to work that's
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being done in machine learning artificial intelligence where people are actually trying to make machines that make sense of the world and what kind of strategies do they come up with for trying to get the machines be better learners well one interesting
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thing is precisely the use of disruptive strategies so Woodward at Al in 2014 this this is a direct quote from them right they they introduced the quotient sect they introduced randomization into a neural network a neural network is a
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very powerful and cutting-edge form of artificial intelligence that in some important ways mimics how brains work and when you're training these neural net you'll program them you train them to learn for themselves right but very often what you have to do is you have to
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introduce noise entropy randomness into these networks in fact he goes on to say that such randomness quote is essential aspect an essential aspect of the self optimization process you have to give so what these aren't people doing psychology these are not people trying
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to understand higher states of consciousness what they're trying to do is they're trying to make neural networks that learn better that can self optimize and what they do what they say is essential that's the word he used to
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this is disruption disrupted strategies why see the problem with powerful machines is they pick up on patterns and you say well but John that's good isn't picking up patterns good well remember all the stuff we've talked about about
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when we talked about implicit learning and picking up on only correlational patterns I'll pick you come on real patterns see the problem you face is you're always sampling from the world so here's your experience and then here's the world and there's some pattern in
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your experience and what you want to know is that is that pattern in the world or not this is we invented a whole discipline to deal with this it's called statistics all statistics is basically this problem how do I know if the
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patterns in my sample are the same as the patterns in the world how do I know that right so for example if I was in class at U of T and I let say season even huge class 500 students psych 100 I say how many
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people here think that student tuition should be reduced or schools should be free and they all put up their hands should I then conclude look the overwhelming majority of people think that student tuition should be reduced you'd say that's ridiculous and this is
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what you should say because that is not a representative sample the pattern there is all students you need the sample to have the same patterns as the environment so why is that relevant to disruption very often what will happen
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with these neural networks is they will over fit to the data they will to tightly pick up on the pattern in the sample a pattern that does not generalize to the rest of the world so let me give me a
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way of understanding this graphically so very often right we're like you've been probably taught this right you do a scatterplot you point your point right and then you don't typically draw a line like this to try and capture the data instead what we
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typically do is a line of best fit which might might touch any of the data points this is called data compression the line of best fit why do we do that we do that in science because what we're trying to
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find is the function that will generalize that will go to all kinds of different contexts that will not be true just of this sample but will be true of the population but what the networks do is they do this they over fit to the
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data they track a function that perfectly describes the sample but does not generalize to the population precisely because they're so powerful they over fit so what do you do well you you can you can throw some noise into
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the system you can turn off you can do drop out you can turn off half of the nodes you basically disrupt the processing a lot because what the disruption does is it prevents you from overfitting to the data and an avowal
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aoz you to compress and what does the compression do it allows you to find the real invariants the real patterns that will generalize across all the varying contexts now of course right you don't want to under fit if you under fit then
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you're not picking up on any patterns at all so notice again you these systems have to toggle they have to toggle back and forth they have to disrupt right very analogous to breaking frame in order so they can make a better frame
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and they're trying to find that sweet spot between disruptive variation and compression to detect real patterns that allows them to become good learners so what we know is that again you have to have disruptive strategies set within powerful pattern detection that's
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exactly what we're seeing at work as I mentioned to you in these people that are pursuing these higher states of consciousness it's also again why belonging to a tradition that can afford powerful pattern detection introduced disruption when needed and guide you to
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help toggle to find the sweet spot is very very important if you want to be really good at jamming and you write you have to have the requisite skill jamming without jaws just sorry jamming without skill just gives you junk doesn't give you jazz so
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what's going on in the brain so notice notice what I'm showing you here the machines are doing right the compression that compression is right that toggling of attention that you see going on in the higher state of car
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they're open they're disrupting and then compressing and they're trying to find the huge and variance patterns but they're trying to break frame and they're doing stuff that seems I think plausible to say is analogous to what we see going on at the psychological level
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within people what about at the brain level well this is where we have to turn to Newburgh because he's done most of the work on tracking brains as people are having these kinds of experiences and what you see is right initially you
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get increased activity in the frontal area and the parietal area these are the two areas a frontal parietal connection that is most associated with your general intelligence your ability to make sense and get an optimal grip on the world because that's what your
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general intelligence is so the initially you see these areas get hyperactive and then you see the opposite you see them hypoactive so huge increase followed by a huge decrease now throughout you have throughout all of this this is the frontal parietal you
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have enhanced activity in the thalamus this is the area of the brain that tries to integrate all kinds of different information together the greater the shift the greater the disruptive shift the more powerful the awakening experience is it's just like what's
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going on in insight you initially bring all this machinery to bear to frame it and then you have to massively disrupt it and break it and then the system re self organizes and that is precisely what's going on I would suggest to you
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in these experiences so what is happening in the brain for example in psychedelic experiences because you'll often see this kind of shift what's important and there's a bunch of people doing work on this metastability so what for example
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psilocybin does according to recent work done by Lord Adel is increases metastability in the brain so if you look at the work of Kelso tog Noli and others what metastability is is a state in the brain that's doing this
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complexification I talked about so normally your brain is integrating things or segregating integrating differentiating but in psilocybin what you get is a state called meta stability where and this is a state in which the brain is simultaneously integrating and
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segregating it is massively complexify please remember complexification is with us when a system is both integrating and differentiating when you went from being a zygote to being a biologically complex organism your cells were differentiating into different types of cells liver
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cells eye cells etc but they were also integrating you are complex because you're both highly integrated and highly differentiated complexification gives you emergent functions it gives you new abilities you can do things as a person right a biological human being that you
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couldn't do as as I go precisely because you're complex look emergent functions come to the fact because I'm highly differentiated I can do many different things but because I'm highly integrated I don't fall apart as a system by doing these many different
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things I get new emergent abilities the way you grow and self transcend as a system is by complexify psilocybin by putting you into metastability right helps your brain complexify and come up with emergent abilities it allows you to
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see the world massive integration in a grain of sand massive pronunciation so I think what we can see here is at least I highly plausible and I'll come back to what I mean by that in just a minute
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the count at the psychological level at the machine processing level and at the brain level of what is going on in these higher states of consciousness and why they are so powerfully optimizing your cognitive functionality once again not
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to repeat this but that of course has to be placed within the proper zappy ntral context you need a tradition and institutions a committed community of cultivating wisdom now what about the prescriptive argument I've laid a lot of
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the groundwork for this why should we listen to people who have been in this state why should this state serve as the justification for a transformation for your life if someone comes up to you and says I want to transform you I want you
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to transform your life according to X Y Zed right you need that claim justified not just described and explained you need to justify what would make it a good thing to do are these states actually good guides for transformation
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well in order to do that I need to introduce a notion to you first we're going to come back to this notion again when we talk about the nature of cognitive science although I've been exemplifying a lot of cognitive science
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to you throughout these previous videos this is the notion of plausibility we need to talk about this because plausibility is central to your notion of how real things are now there's two senses of the word plausible one is a
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synonym for highly probable that's not the sense I'm using I'm using it in the sense that Russia and other made famous where this means makes good stands to reason right should be taken seriously most of the time and I'll make this
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point in detail in a few minutes you cannot base your actions uncertainty but you have to rely on plausibility now there's a lot of work on plausibility and I'm just going to try to sketch to you what I think will work on doing with
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Leo Ferraro and Anderson Todd about trying to integrate work by Lombardi and Nash Minh and Sinatra from 2015 Kyle 2006 Milgram 1997 kishar Ressler Russia I should say there's just a lot of different work going into this here's
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what I think it is to make something plausible first of all it involves what Russia calls trustworthiness I think there's an important way in which trustworthiness comes about you can see this in some of the work that Kyle has
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done on explanations we prefer we regard a particular proposal or a construct or some way of trying to model the world as trustworthy if it's been produced by many independent but converging lines of evidence let me give you a clear
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concrete example alright you will regard as more real information that comes through multiple senses as opposed to one sense if I'm only seeing something there's a good chance that it's an illusion or a delusion caused by the subjectivity of my seeing but if I can
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see it and touch it and hear it and smell it then the chance is that each one of those independent senses are right producing an illusion is radically diminished the fact that they all are telling me that same thing now that
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doesn't give me certainty but it gives me trustworthiness it reduces the probability and that's what trustworthiness is right it reduces the probability that I'm self deceived now that's not the same thing as certainty because unfortunately for example there is a form of schizophrenia
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in which people not only hear voices but they see people attached to those voices and when they reach out to touch the person they get a tactile illusion and it's very hard to convince those people that their illusions aren't real
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precisely because this is highly trustworthy this is why science likes numbers we like numbers because they allow us to converge the senses look you can see three you can touch three one two three you can hear three we like
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numbers not because we're fascists or something in science we like numbers because numbers quantification help us to increase the trustworthiness of our information gathering they allow us to reduce the chance that what we're getting what we're measuring what we're
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modeling is being produced by self-deception is that enough for plausibility I don't think so so we're converging to some processing state here but we also want something to be the case because we're not just looking backwards into how we got there
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we're also looking forward what we can do with it what we want is we want a model that we can now apply to many new domains that will open up the world for us that's multi apt this is like again taking a martial-arts
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stick I don't use this but I taking this stance because I can quickly adapt it to many different situations it's multi opt it's highly functional so why do I want this right when I can use the same model
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in many different places this is I I I would argue what people mean when they say a theory or a model is elegant you can use the same model right it can it's adaptive enough it's multi app that you
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can use it in many different places and apply it so you have convergence for trustworthiness but you have elegance for power for multi aptness for multi apt application is that enough no right I think this state has to be highly
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fluent to you remember we talked about this this has to be one that you can use readily powerfully for yourself that you can internalize when you have this when you have fluency convergence elegance right you need one more thing you need a
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balance between the convergence and the elegance if I have a lot of convergence without much elegance that's triviality the thing about trivial statements is not that they're false they're true but they're not powerful they don't transform many times we
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reject things we don't take them seriously they don't make good sense to us precisely because they're trivial what's the opposite very little convergence with a lot of promise of power this is when things are far-fetched conspiracy theories have this feature if
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they were true they would explain so much if we would just accept that the British royal family were lizard beings from outer space we could explain so much of their behavior but the problem is although that would be a very
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powerful explanation we have very little trustworthy evidence that that is in fact the case so what we want is we want that are as Milgram says our backward commitments and our forward commitment map we only commit powerfully forward if
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we've got a lot of trust in the model that we've produced when all of this is in place right I think we find what we're processing not only fluent we find it highly plausible when we have very deep convergence and very deep elegance
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and very like efficient fluency I think we then find the proposal profound so you're saying why are you going on about this because what I'm trying to show you is what the brain is doing is a that it
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is performing a kind of evaluation of its the plausibility of its processing when it's in a higher state of consciousness see this model what did we see what did we see we saw lots of things going into the higher state of
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consciousness we saw D automatisation right we saw dese entering all of these things are strategies for reducing bias reducing bias these are all strategies for reducing bias right the automatisation D centering fluency and processing the state that you're in
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is a state of flowing optimal grip it's intrinsically valued it's optimizing for processing and what's this affording this state well you're finding a nexus for a development you're finding that systematic error you're getting that complexification of your processing so you're getting emergent
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new functions you're getting the acceptation of machinery the insight machinery and the self machinery into new abilities do you see what I'm arguing your brain is in a state in which it's getting information that saying this processing is deeply trustworthy deeply
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powerful deeply fluent therefore profoundly plausible a plausibility is not certainty the plausibility is what we have to rely on what do I mean by that you can't get certainty for almost all of your processing you have to rely
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on plausibility all the time you say but I could turn to science will give me certainty for first of all pay attention to the history of science when does it ever done that almost all those theories that have been proposed in science have
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ultimately turned out to be false in some significant or an important way science isn't believed in because it gives us certainty or facts science is believed in because it gives us self-correcting plausibility look this is up what how do I decide what
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hypothesis to test I don't test any hypothesis I come up with I wonder if clipping my toenails will reduce famine in the Sahara let's test it out I wonder if I gather enough frogs together can I influence the Australian
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election let's test it out do you no matter how many hypothenuse a to me that's what ridiculous that's absurd what you're saying to me is those hypotheses don't make sense they don't deserve to be taken seriously what you're saying to me is I reject them
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because they're implausible now I go into my experiment I'm going to run an experiment in science what I'll have to do I have to control for alternative explanations what we're always doing in science is inference to the best
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explanation this goes to the work of Peter Lipton and others right here's some phenomena what I do is I have some candidate explanations for what's causing the phenomenon and then what I do is I put them into competition with each other
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which one of my hypotheses best explains it and the one that best explains it right is chosen as what's real but this how do you make how would you make this certain the way you would make this deductively certain is you would have to
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check all possible explanations how many possible explanations are there an infinite number you can't ever make science certain because you're always doing this this explanation is only as good as the competition it beats in science you advance by coming up with plausible
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alternative explanations that you beat with yours science depends on plausibility judgments it depends on plausibility judgments when we choose our hypothesis it depends on plausibility judgments when we choose what variables were going to control foreign experiments it depends on
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plausibility judgments once we're done and we have the data and we have to interpret it what is the number of interpretations I can give for any data infinite in number what do I do i generate the most plausible
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interpretation before the experiment during the experiment and after the experiment I'm relying on plausibility plausibility is indispensable that's why your brain looks for it so notice what we've got this higher state of consciousness is an optimization of your processing it
Speaker A
brings about a state of high plausibility and it's relying on processes that are fundamental right because optimization has priority I have to get my optimal grip before I can judge what it is I have to zero in on
Speaker A
the relevant information and have the right formulation of my problem before I can try and answer it these higher states of consciousness that's what I'm saying is that they have indispensability because they run in terms of your plausibility machinery
Speaker A
they are optimal in terms of getting the best possible functioning for you they are prior because they are fundamental to any and all of your cognitive processing getting this optimal grip toggling between trade-offs getting the best relationship between
Speaker A
generalizing and discriminating all of these have priority these are why these states are such good guides again if they're set within a set of soppy intial practices set within a central tradition now what what I'm saying is these are
Speaker A
states of consciousness are great guides on how to transform yourself how to cultivate wisdom how to see through self-deception but sometimes people come back from these states and they make pronouncements about the nature of the world sometimes these are bizarre people
Speaker A
will come back from DMT and tell them that hyperspace elves have told them that they should remain and forever inside their head or some bizarre stuff here's the thing you should know about the propositions that people generate from this are largely useless
Speaker A
you can read these reports people will have these higher states of consciousness and one group of people will come out and say I know there's a god other people have these experience and they come out and they're they're
Speaker A
filled with joy and they say I know there's no God diametrically opposite because this isn't about propositional knowing this is about participatory transformation this isn't about getting secret metaphysical knowledge this is about getting wise practices wise transformations ultimately what we need
Speaker A
to do is to take the wisdom from these higher states of consciousness and get it into rational discourse with an independently established via our best science metaphysics by science and philosophy when we can put those two together then we will have properly
Speaker A
salvaged what these higher states of consciousness can afford for us do not confuse the rationality of wisdom with the rationality of knowledge so next time what I want to do is now that we've got a preliminary account of what these
Speaker A
higher states of consciousness what these awakening the what the awakening of the Buddha might have been plausibly like we can return to what did he propose specifically thereby finishing off the axial revolution our discussion I should say of the actual revolution in
Speaker A
India and then we will return back to the Mediterranean world and look at what was happening there after Aristotle thank you very much for your time [Music] you you [Music]
Topics:higher states of consciousnessenlightenmentflow statedecenteringwisdomcognitive sciencemeaning crisispsychedelicsegocentrisminsight
