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[Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis so last time I was making a proposal to you of how we could address the perennial problems and I gave you a systematic set of things too that could be cultivated in an
John Vervaeke explores the idea of a 'religion that is not a religion,' contrasting creedal dominance (belief-as-propositions) with religio, and sketches a cognitive-scientific account of wisdom and o
Key Takeaways
- Religion's value lies in religio (practices and transformation), not merely in creedal belief statements.
- Creedal dominance misunderstands how criteria-setting works; the goal is continual optimal recalibration.
- A modern 'religion that is not a religion' requires integrated psycho-technologies within communities of practice.
- Wisdom, cognitively understood, is essential both for addressing the meaning crisis and for navigating the meta-crisis.
What the video covers
- Episode 39 of Vervaeke's series on the meaning crisis, continuing from prior proposals on addressing perennial problems and historical forces.
- Vervaeke positions his discussion as tentative and suggestive, not an attempt to found a movement, referencing other thinkers (Kahrs, Unger, Dawkins) working on similar ideas.
- Many people remain spiritually hungry while rejecting organized religion and pseudo-religious ideologies, which he links to 20th-century trauma.
- He argues for comprehensive psycho-technologies within communities of practice that transform consciousness, cognition, character, and culture, addressing Bjorkman's 'meta-crisis'.
- He distinguishes credo (propositional belief-systems, 'I believe') from religio, and critiques creedal dominance as a misunderstanding of religion's function.
- Relevance realization and setting criteria are used to explain why belief-as-assertion fails: the aim is continual, optimal re-setting of criteria rather than conclusive assertion.
- Knowing is described across levels (participatory, perspectival, procedural, propositional), with an ecology allowing both top-down and bottom-up emergence.
- He suggests open-ended, Wikipedia-like or cyber-enabled ecologies of practice as models for collective meaning-making.
- Wisdom is framed as a meta-virtue needed for these ecologies, for communitas, and for enlightenment, with a cognitive-scientific account still to be developed.
- The episode ends by promising further discussion of wisdom and postmodernism in later installments.
Chapters
- 00:00Recap of Previous Episodes and Series Framework
- 03:45Introduction to a Religion That Is Not a Religion
- 07:10Spiritual Hunger and the Need for Transformative Practices
- 14:10Religio versus Credo: Belief and Creedal Dominance
- 22:20Relevance Realization and Setting the Criterion
- 30:00Levels of Knowing and Ecologies of Practice
- 44:00Open-Ended Ecologies and Cyber-Enabled Communities
- 52:50Wisdom as a Meta-Virtue
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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integrated fashion for addressing pronoun problems and then we saw how that is interacts with our attempts to ameliorate and alleviate the perennial problems interact with the historical forces and that we get the fundamental undermining of meaning in life and that
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problem set by Woolf and then I propose to you that there was a response to that in terms of the notion of Agape and then I moved into the direct addressing of the historical forces looking about for recovery of something like what the
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three orders did for us and then I proposed to you that if we took a look at for ecology of science third generation cogs I and in particular some of the insights have afforded from that by sorry insights
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afforded by 4e cognitive science third generation cogs I and that were pointed out by Varela in his article we can see a ways in which we can get a worldview that strongly situates our meaning making processes within it legitimates
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it we talked about how we can recover something like the Noma logical order and at the normative order and how perhaps we can move to something post narrative an open-ended optimization is seeking for a depth of realization rather than a historical combination and
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I proposed to you bringing with it the the notion that good and upbringing with that whole project of responding to the historical forces and trying to bring with it a new notion from a good-enough swirl transcendence into rather than
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transcendence above or beyond and how that is resonant and consonant with the picture that we've been working on together a couple things remain that are central one of course is to give an account cognitive scientific account of wisdom
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because of the wisdom framing that is needed for both the cultivation of the responses to the meaning crisis and the use of interpretation of grasping the significance of the cognitive scientific framework so we need to develop an account of wisdom together and I also
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said we need to talk about this notion of getting something that's a religion that's not a religion and what might that look like so I want to address the second point first because I have less to say about it not because it's not
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important I've left to say about it because it's very tentative and well I want to try and talk about it and ultimately a suggestive fashion I'm not trying to found a movement or anything ridiculous or pretentious like that there are many
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people though who are writing books about this idea I recommend you John Kahrs his book the religious case against belief which I've already recommended there's Unger's book on future religion there's books like religion for atheists and which people
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are I think and I mean this in a serious sense but they're trying to play with what does what would it but this might look like a religion that's not a religion and how can it help us to
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address it even people like Richard Dawkins are trying to propose you know that we should get cultivate an ability ultimately poetic ability to in Dender Wonder and awe that is consonant with the scientific worldview so a lot of
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people are trying to get some conceptual vocabulary and theoretical grammar going for this I so I do not see myself as offering anything definitive or authoritative but on the basis of what we have done together I'd like to try
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and offer some suggestions of what this would look like so remember why are we setting this problem well we for many of us right and the the the group that our self identify as the nuns having no religion nevertheless a large majority
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of those people are still spiritually hungry in important ways returning to organized religion is not a viable option and part of that has to do with a lot of the history that we've traced out and pursuing pseudo religious political
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ideologies in utopic visions is also not viable precisely because of the trauma of the 20th century and parts of the 21st century in the clash of the pseudo religious ideologies in the way they drenched the world with blood and
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torture and horror and so I proposed to you that nevertheless we need to do something like what religion used to do we need a a comprehensive set of psycho technologies that are set within communities of practices that allow for
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the comprehensive transformations of consciousness cognition character and culture in a way that is analogous to religion with that is what we're looking for something they can do all of that because that is what we need that kind of transformation is needed today to
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address what Thomas Bjorkman calls the meta-crisis of all the various crises that we are facing and that are interacting with each other and what looks to be an increasingly accelerating fashion and having an increasingly Dilla tereus effect on us individually and
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collectively so that is part of the problem and what would it look like with the religion that is not a religion again as I said there are many people who are taking a stab at this or trying to get a grip on this and so I am just
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seeing myself as contributing to hopefully hopefully to that hopefully hopefully to that dialogue so part of it I think is and this is of course what I try to do is to acknowledge the centrality of religio and that there is
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important there's an important role for indispensible mythos and the activation accentuation acceleration appreciation of religio and so I think there that is something that should be acknowledged as what we would be looking for and and this brings out an important
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contrast I want to discuss so not equal religion religio versus credo let's talk about this a little bit and try and get clearer about it because we have this idea of an open-ended mythos analogous to the transgressive mythology of of the
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Gnostics so credo of course means I believe and it's it's the word behind things like the nut the Nicene Creed or the Apostolic Creed a notion of credo is a notion of sort of a paradigmatic set of propositions that who that state what
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the the essence of a religion is in terms of the truth content that is supposed to be believed and so what has happened to some degree in various ways and I tried to show you this is as this
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is of course is linked to propositional knowing and as propositional knowing has come into a ascendance right and as the having mode has come into ascendance the having of propositions that are asserted right and of course willful assertion
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we've seen all of this has come in to ascension right this has tended to become dominant so as I've mentioned we often think about religions or speak of them as if they are belief system systems of belief so right and so you have propositional
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knowing you have the having of those propositions and they're the way you have them is ultimately to assert them in in some fashion usually in a willful fashion where I mean that very broadly in the way that we've discussed here
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where it is not something that is ultimately derived from reason but it is something that is being asserted nevertheless now I think there's an important role for credo and so I want to make a distinction between credo and this creedal right assertion
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credo dominance okay so let's talk talk about this set of things as creedal dominance but let's talk about perhaps a way of understanding the functionality of this now first of all I'm of course aware of the postmodern critique and I will have
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a final towards the final end of this series I'll come back and talk about post-modernism but I'm aware of the postmodern critique in the the that a lot of this is and that makes sense given credo dominate dominance that this
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is matched with power with dominance with control with creating sort of purity codes where we have boundaries of identity of the US and the other all of that I think III think it's a legitimate form of argument and something I take
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seriously but I would put that under cradle dominance and I would want to try and take out of what remains what what what function can we see for people doing this and how might we understand it well first of all like I said we can
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we can think of people having paradigmatic statements and pictures that this might be a function of indispensability to them right so they can understand it right we can understand it as indispensable mythos again it's highly plausible there is a mythos for you or for groups
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of people that is indispensable given the contextual sensitivity the dynamic coupling of religio that that there's a sets of symbols and stories and celebrations and shows and souvenirs and all the things associated with mythos right that are indispensable for getting
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the kind of sacredness out of religio that people want and need in response to for example the perennial problems so again this of course is part of the philosophical reason not just theirs also an independent moral reason but
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this is part of my philosophical reason why I try to be deeply respectful to religious Creed's precisely because even though I think all of these criticisms or all the criticisms associated with this criticisms that I've all added to
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in this series I think they're all legitimate I think this is also a very legitimate thing now of course the problem is is to confuse indispensability with metaphysical necessity and to confuse need with authority and we've talked about all of
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that what I think we can think well this is not only in indispensability that's idiosyncratic to people or the group we can also talk about an indispensable functionality that might be more Universal in nature and this has to do
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with a basic idea from all of information processing from what's called signal detection theory so signal detection theory is a theory that basically argues that we're always facing perennial problems when and I mean I mean that to allude to the
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perennial problems that I've talked about here we're fate whenever we're doing information processing there's aspects in which the information is there's there's and this is no contradiction there's simultaneously too much information but there's often inadequate information like you're not
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seeing all of my body right now right so the information is simultaneously overwhelming and partial the information is often ambiguous it's it's unclear if that information is the information you need or you're there you're being misled in some way by information that's
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similar but not in the relevant way to the information you're looking for so all of these things point to an important point an important general conclusion now I'm gonna have to use two terms here I'm gonna use the word signal
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and this means information I want information I want or need and then noise noise does not mean audible distortion audible distortion is one kind of it what this means is this means information I do not want right it's in
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some way distracting right it's in some way misleading etc so here's the idea here's the population of events that constitute signal that you're looking for and the idea is there's always a significant overlap with noise again where noise doesn't mean audible
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distortion it means any information that you don't want that it can be confused with look it confused with can be confused with signal so you let's take a prototypical example right a prototypical example is this you're ghazal and you hear a noise in the bush
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now that could be important signal it could it could be information that you want because it's information telling you that a leopard is near or the noise in the bush could be noise in this technical sense it could just be the
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rustling of the leaves caused by the wind and that is and this is the important term here that's the irrelevant to you that's irrelevant to you that might be signal for somebody else or something else but for you as
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the Gazelle it's irrelevant see being signal and noise of course is a matter of relevance realization so you're sort of caught here right because if you're the gazelle what you're experiencing is this this zone right here right the zone
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of overlap between the signal and the noise you don't know what it is now what you can say is well what I'll do is I'll get more information and there's a sense in which that helps but you have to also
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understand that there's a diminishing return here because any new information that I try to get to resolve this will also suffer from this problem alright and this of course goes again towards you can't ultimately get certainty etc etc okay also the more I regressed and
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try to get signal about my signal about my signal about my signal the more time I'm taking and often time is an important constraint so first of all you can't ever escape this problem and as you try to reduce it you have to put in
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a lot of time and effort that can ultimately be too costly for you so the idea is there's a sense in which every act even an act of perception is to some degree risky it's a gamble and this is
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part again and we talked about this Tim little crap Blake Richards and I in the paper on relevance realization this is this is part again of the issue of you know trading off between various contingencies what's the trade-off here
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well that's right the trade-off is I have to I have to what's called do I have to set the criterion so the criterion is basically what I do is I put a dividing line a decision line remember decide ultimately means to cut
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and I'm gonna include everything right to the left that signal and exclude everything to the right now what's what's the problem with that well the problem with that is of course I'm now opening myself up to different kinds of
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errors okay so one of the things I can do here is I kept my criterion too high for example I will include a lot I will treat a lot of noise as signal okay if I set my criteria and way down here I I
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don't want to ever be wrong I'm gonna set my criterion really low right here all right I'm gonna set my that way I'll never the problem is if I set my criterion so I exclude all possible noise I'm gonna miss a lot of valuable
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signal okay the other issue that comes up so where do you set the criterion well I mean there isn't an algorithm for that because part of the problem is those different kinds of errors are differentially relevant to you depending
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on the context let's go back to the gazelle you have two gazelles you have build a happy gazelle and what Bill wants to do is basically write once to avoid leopards right so bill says well I'm gonna set my criterion very high because
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that way most of the time I'm going to treat the noise as a leopard in the bush and that way my chances of missing a leopard were very small now the problem with Bill is he's kind of you know he
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runs away a lot lot there's every wind and he runs away and all the other gazelles laugh at Bill look at Bill he's running around again and if bill does this too much of course it's exhausting right now in contrast to build the
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gazelle there is you know let's call it Tom and Tommy is the you know the really epistemic ly oriented gazelle tom will only act on the basis of what tom truly believes and so tom is gonna be very
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skeptical and set their criterion very low and tom says I'm only going to believe what I am really confident in and certain of right and that way you know this is what's gonna happen so what what happens for tom is all the
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instances where the wind is blowing and bill runs away Tom laughs Abdullah aha aha silly bill the problem is tom is missing signal by setting his criterion so low and one of these times there's a noise in the bush
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bill runs Tom begins to laugh and as he's mid laughs there is a leopard on his back sinking its jaws in a death grip on his neck because you see in this in this context not in all contexts not
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in all contexts but in this context missing signal is much worse than mistaking noise for signal see there's two kinds of errors I can miss signal I can mistake noise for signal when I do this right that's bill everybody laughs
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at me that's a cost and I'm using a lot of energy but if I miss right if I miss the leopard I'm dead and that's much much worse so that's why most gazelles are like Bill rather than like Tom they
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set the criteria and way over here they're willing to make a lot of mistakes so that they do not make very many misses now there's other situations where you write whether to bill reversed where a mistake is much more costly to
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you than a miss and so what you need right what you need is you need to be flexibly setting your criterion in a way that is deeply contextually sensitive deeply situationally aware this is again why perspectival knowing is so crucial
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perspectival knowing is your situational awareness and your situational awareness should be right your primary guide to what is the context and how do I set the criterion in this context in fact there's a neuroscientist cognitive scientist Lao who argues that one of the
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functions of consciousness is exactly to set the criterion for a for perception so what you're paying attention to right is how your situationally aware and so how you're paying attention how your situationally aware how you're setting the the criterion is actually the job of
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consciousness now as as you may realize and myself and Richard wu and anderson todd argued this again is another argument that one of the main functions of consciousness is to do relevance realization within perspectival knowing yet another converging argument now the point about
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this is two things and both of them have to be remembered what does this have to do with credo well I would argue that what credo is is criteria is setting the criterion on religio what it's trying to
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do is determine what's what behaviors what things are putting me really into contact with religio and then what is malfunctioning what is mad etc now the issue is we have to set the criteria that's in xscape Abul and one way to do
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this is to do it in an absolutist way one way to do this is to say there is a final way a final place an absolute place to set the criterion I can think I think you can see from the argument
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given here why that is a perilous thing to do you can see again why the open-endedness of relevance realization undermines these the attempt to absolutely set the criterion so you have to set the criterion but it is dangerous
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to set the criterion in an absolute fashion so if we can acknowledge this we can acknowledge that we will set the criterion with our mythos but and that's one half of credo but we should not ever try to set the criterion in an absolute
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or final manner which is what happens in credo dominance because that is ultimately to misunderstand the functionality of setting the criterion the point is not to set the criterion conclusively the point is to continually reset the criterion optimally again
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open-ended relevance realization rather than a final solution so a way of thinking about that is the religion of not that's not a religion would always always have credo in the service of religio now I'm sure that there are many
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religious people would say well that is that is what we do in practice and you know we have our Creed's but they're constantly being historically interpreted be right and I think that sort of right in practice but there's
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often been a lot of conflict between de facto and de jure in the history of the religious discussions around orthodoxy and Creed etc and I point to you again to the work of Arthur Lewis and his work on the way in which the the the West
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history of pursuing and persecuting heretics people who write do not set the criterion as we do has actually helped to foreshadow and train the West for totalitarian regimes and città latarian ideologies so all I point you again to
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his historical argument for how that came about so for that reason we should always be thinking of making credo clearly and comprehensively always in the service of religio that would be helped as you can I think see by being
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linked to a notion of sacredness as being grounded in an inexhaustible open-ended Optima optimization rather than in some absolute state of perfection next I think that the religion that's not our religion should when it's crafting its mythos and understanding
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that credo is always in the service of religio it should always understand the mythos as being beholden to sort of the three levels that we've been talking about here so you have the unconscious level right mm this is the level at
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which relevance realization is taking place right most of the relevance realization that's going on for me I do not have introspective access to in any way and this of course is the grounding of my participatory knowing of course
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you become you can become conscious of your participation but that's some what I'm saying here I'm saying that the processes by which from which I emerge as an autobiographical ego and the world emerges as an unfolding arena right or
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ultimately below the level of consciousness and that's where the participatory knowing is happening and then of course there is the level of consciousness and this is the level of salience Landscaping and of course this is the level of
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perspectival knowing the prospective Duyvil knowing is grounded in the participatory and the prospective will knowing with the situational awareness that I've just talked about of course makes possible the procedural knowing these are tightly intermeshed as well this is where I am right consciously
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directing my interactions in order to appropriate affordances given to me at this level and I'm appropriating those affordances by cultivating skills so that my coping turns into skillful interaction my coping caring becomes skillful action and apt Sensibility and
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then of course this passes into the cultural level this is the level of distributed cognition and this is the level at which we are trying to write communicate so this is this is this is level of which connections are being made this is the
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level at which connections are being sensed and internalized and then this is the level of which connections are being shared and so what we have here of course is the whole machinery of mythos and of course the machinery of science
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and other things such as that but I'm gonna although that's at the cultural level and taking it out because what I'm going to concentrate on here is addressing this so as I said this will pick up on our propositional knowing but
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of course the mythos also points down towards right all of these because here we have credo in the service of religio and so any mythos is going to understand itself this way if I put it horizontally as always in the service of religio
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which means it is always going to also be directed you'll allow me downwards right to the procedural knowing the respect travel knowing and the participatory knowing so it should be a mythos that is explicitly committed to both of those in an integrated fashion
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that the credo the paradigmatic propositions the paradigmatic pictures right are always in the service of religio and that the mythos therefore is directed towards accessing activating accentuating right appreciating the procedural knowing the prospective all-knowing without participatory knowing and
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so it should be given given the argument very tentative you what it should be doing is once you you've got you've got this programmatic framework in mind then what it should be doing is cultivating an ecology of psycho technologies
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an ecology that it is designed to be both top-down it reaches from the propositional down to the participatory but also is open to and allows bottom-up emergence from the participatory up through the perspectival through the procedural and into the propositional so
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I tried to indicate to you what that ecology should look like you should be setting up psycho technologies sets of practices and cognitive styles that have complimentary relationships to each other that have sets of corresponding checks and balances strengths and
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weaknesses so that you have a dynamical system that is reliably complexified a reliably self-correcting manner which means we need to do something very important and this is an idea that emerged in a discussion with Jordan Hall and he put it this way I think which is
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a very interesting way of putting it we need a meta cyclic technology that is designed to give us move us out of the intuitive construction of psycho technologies into the more explicit so two points here they're more explicit
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creation of cyclic technologies and explicitly the task of trying to cultivate an ecology of more explicitly engineered psycho technologies so this would be the meta psycho technology so this religion that is not a religion should give people ways of cultivating
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this Metis I call this meta psycho technology as a way of crafting the ecology of practices for addressing the perennial problems in a way that is always consonant with and mean coherent with worldview attunement I think that there are deep
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connections between the capacity for collectively creating the Metis and you have to do this collectively because that's how selective technologies are created right the capacity for creating this collectively and the individual virtue meta virtue because that's what it is the meta virtue of wisdom there's
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deep connections for that the more the people are individually cultivating because wisdom is basically a way of cultivating and coordinating the individual virtues we'll come back to that so you need individual wisdom the meta virtue in order to collectively
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right pursue the creation and the cult the ongoing cultivation of them the meta psycho technology that will allow us to engineer individual psycho technologies and to cultivate a ecology of psycho tech that reaches right comprehensively down to our participatory knowing and
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affords comprehensively the emergence up from our participatory knowing so I think those are some very general structural features some things we might be wanting to do a more organizational level is and this is extremely tentative extremely so what might it be to create
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that open-ended credo well we have something like that already because of the emergence of the cyber technologies that are being increasingly integrated with the psycho technologies and it and I'm using this just as an analogy but we have something like Wikipedia and what's
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interesting about the Wikipedia is is the way it's generated the way it's maintained the way it's revised it's done in this collective cooperative fashion and it has both a quite you know reliable stability but also a quite reliable evolved evolution and what's
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interesting is I've recently expose any oath created something like this from one of my courses and in the what we did there in one of the courses at the University it's got former students to grace basically create a wiki of some of
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the main ideas main themes main arguments in the course and and what happens is people of course get much more involved in a participatory fashion with the generation of sort of the credo for the course and on what they also do
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is write is they create something like the Wikipedia that gives people much more interactional and evolving content to work with so you get sort of this presentation of what's paradigmatic and pro typical for the course but in this
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collective a dynamic and ongoing fashion so perhaps we could think about creating a credo analogous to that where we create something like a wiki a credo wiki for example by which groups of people that are interested in creating
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Ecology's of practices and cycler technologies can communicate with each other for how to adaptively set the criterion and how to constantly re-engineer the creation of the meadows like the meta psycho technology that will help to guarantee maybe that too
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strong a word help to promote reliably promote both the bottom-up and top-down functionality of this ecology of psycho technology maybe that could be set in conjunction with a co-op structure of these various communities where they are co-opting together to create a shared
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curriculum a shared credo in this wiki manner and which they are also trying to afford a kind of synoptic integration a shared vocabulary not imposed as an ideology but to allow for transformative and bridging insights and discourse between the various groups so that they
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might be able to afford each other's development and enhancement now as I've said all of that is not this I am NOT presenting a utopic vision that that's not what's going on what's going on is people are already doing
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this there they are already trying to create these ecologies of practices they're trying to create ways of talking to each other setting the criterion and they're making use of social media they're making use of the Internet they're making use of
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cooperative dynamic forms of social organization I think all of those could be appropriated and a way to help bring about this religion that's not a religion and what I've tried to do is offer some suggestions on things to keep
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in mind and at least some potential methods for helping to bring this about whether or not this functions whether or not any of this takes root again it's not even up to me I'm not some sort of linchpin or pivotal figure I'm just
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trying but this sounds so so insufficient I'm just trying to help I'm really just trying to help I and I want to give people some way of how to go about starting to make this work more and more powerfully and
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perspicacious Lee all right so I have tried to show how in three interrelated ways we can respond to the meaning crisis I've tried to show that we can there are sets of practices that we can cultivate as an ecology for addressing
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the perennial problems we can set that those perennial problems into a legitimating worldview via the theoretical scientific machinery given to us by third generation cognitive science 4e cognitive science and that all of that can be set practically within the project of trying to bring
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about the religion that is not a religion in terms of like I said some suggestions about some structural features of what we're looking for and some organizational features of how to try and initiate that and get that going
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this is ultimately going to come back to the dialogue that I'm going to set up between what I've argued for here and some of the other prophets of this religion beyond a religion that's not a religion like Tillich Jung I would argue
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also Corbin and perhaps aspects of Barfield and the The Godfather of all of that of course is are people like Heidegger so that's going to be something we're going to come back to but we need to do something else now
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that I've constantly been putting aside because it also is going to be involved in the process that I have been proposing to you and we've said it throughout which is their cultivation of wisdom and as we've seen the cultivation
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of wisdom as a meta virtue is deeply resonant with right the communitas cultivation of the meta psychology that is needed for the ecology of ciclo technology and of course wisdom is also needed for the project of i´ve enlightenment I've already mentioned and
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finally wisdom has always been associated since the axial revolution with satisfying those deep connectedness the connectedness to one's self the connectedness to the world the connectedness to others that makes for a meaningful life so I want to start
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talking now about the cognitive science of wisdom and I want to and again this is this is a very exciting and hot area in in cognizant there's lots going on about this right now and it's becoming very very pervasive
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and the discussion of wisdom 'men the culture at large is coming to the fore again so I can't I mean I would like to have a series at some point that's just on wisdom I can't do that right now what
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I want to do is try and give again sort of a very quick overview of sort of the key players if you'll allow serious players in the cognitive science of wisdom business and what we can glean from that
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and how we can integrate it into the model and picture we've been building here so this really took off in the 1990s with an anthology by Robert Sternberg Sternberg the psychologist Robert Sternberg has done a tremendous amount of work to bring back the notion
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of wisdom within psychology within cognitive science in general within and even within pedagogy and the understanding of Education and that anthology really started to bring out some of the initial work that was being done the seminal work and also promote a
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lot of work that has expanded since on this I want to talk about work that was happening at around the same time as this shortly thereafter so the Sternberg the first Sternberg anthology on wisdom there's been another one since the wisdom handbook was in
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1990 and then Minh siddur a really important article came out in 1999 by the Ian barber it was important because it was basically retrospective reflection on sort of the first decade of work on wisdom but it was doing
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something more than that so it was it was definitely doing that retrospective but it was also doing something very important something that is is so resonant with what we've been doing here together because what they wanted to do
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was they wanted to try and link two things together in a very powerful convergence argument they wanted to look at all of what they call the a priori theories of wisdom our way of understanding that I think is very easy
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just by seeing what they looked at they wanted to look at all the philosophical theories and we've look that quite a few of them so we're we have an understanding of what they're talking about we saw the Socratic theory and the
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Aristotelian and the stoic right and the platonic so you have the philosophical theories of wisdom and of course that's appropriate because philosophy is the love of wisdom but they also wanted to look at right and there then about 15
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years because the anthology comes out in 1990 some work had been going on in the 80s and then it starts to really take off but but you've got the psychological theories right now these are very conceptually driven they're very sort of
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top-down these of course are much more empirically driven bottom-up and what they were trying to do was they're trying to set up basically a reflective equilibrium between them they're trying to find they're trying to find through a coordinated investigation a convergent
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theme both from all of the philosophical work and all of the psychological works so looking at all of the philosophical work what does it converge on same thing with the psychological work and then can we draw it all together in a you know in
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a reflectively coherent fashion and they did they make a very powerful argument they go through and they make an argument that what all of these theories converge on is seeing through illusion that the core of wisdom is the ability
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to see through illusion where this means of course much more broadly they're not meaning primarily here visual illusion they're meaning right cognitive and existential illusion that is caused by self-deception so seeing through this and they end and of course because
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wisdom is a systemic notion and this is something they are going to explicitly argue about this is systematically right so not just this elysian or this self-deception but a systematic seen through of self-deception and then and something that Leo and I published in Leo Farrar
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on unpublished in 2013 we argued that this of course has a strong implication that should be filled out here seeing through allusion and in to write some sense of what's reality or at least what's more real and because you can
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only know if you're seeing through allusion if you come to something that you regard as being less illusory in nature so this is directly this systematic right seeing through illusion and into reality now notice what this is this is a this is a very profound
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meaning both deep and pervasive meaning across many different instances of where you're trying to solve your problems achieving your goal this is a very profound kind of insight it's at systemic insight that we talked about when we talked about higher states of
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consciousness and and we'll see that McGee and Barbara are using exactly this idea it's to find across many areas in which you have been miss framing problems to see them to realize them as systematically right related such that
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you can come up with an insight that intervenes not just on this problem but in all of these problems in a systematic fashion and thereby you start to see systematically through illusion and into what is more real so this is a key idea
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as to what you're trying to cultivate when you cultivate wisdom and what we're going to do next time is we're going to continue to look at we're going to follow this about putting the psychological theories and the philosophical theories into dialogue and
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to write continue developing what is it that we're talking about when we're talking about wisdom and relatedly what is it we're doing when we're proposing the cultivation of wisdom thank you very much for your time and attention [Music]
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you [Music] you you you
Topics:meaning crisisreligiocredorelevance realizationwisdomJohn Vervaekereligion without religion4E cognitive sciencepsycho-technologiesmeta-crisis
