John Vervaeke is a psychologist and cognitive scientist at University of Toronto. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
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Books mentioned:
Flow: https://amzn.to/3cQDby9
On Bullshit: https://amzn.to/3PZDvYW
The Denial of Death: https://amzn.to/3KsIctp

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:10 - Meaning
21:24 - Consciousness
30:24 - Relevance realization
41:47 - Wisdom
49:01 - Truth
53:46 - Reality
1:06:06 - Meaning crisis
1:29:35 - Religion
1:37:25 - Nontheism
1:52:34 - Distributed cognition
2:10:45 - Flow
2:30:42 - Psychedelics
2:39:10 - Marxism and Nazism
2:51:15 - Evil
2:55:27 - Powerful ideas
3:02:17 - Advice for young people

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The universe doesn't care about your personal narrative.

You can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life.

It's the culmination of your whole project for happiness, and you step into the street, and a truck hits you, and you die.

Mortality isn't just some far-flung event.

It's that every moment we are subject to fate in that way.

So you can think of lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects and the plans you make come up against the fact that the universe can just roll over them.

The following is a conversation with John Verveche, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at University of Toronto.

I highly recommend his lecture series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which covers the history and future of humanity's search for meaning.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's John Bervecchi.

You have an excellent 50-part lecture series online on the meaning crisis.

And I think you describe in the modern times an increase in depression, loneliness, cynicism, and wait for it, bullshit.

The term used technically by Harry Frankfurt and adopted by you.

What are we looking for when we engage in the search for meaning?

So when I'm talking about meaning, I'm talking about what's called meaning in life, not the meaning of life, that's some sort of metaphysical claim.

Meaning in life are those factors that make people rate their lives as more meaningful, worth living, worth the suffering that they have to endure.

And when you study that, what you see is It's a sense of connectedness.

Connectedness to yourself, to other people, to the world, and a particular kind of connectedness.

You wanna be connected to things that have a value and an existence independent of your egocentric sort of preferences and concerns.

This is why, for example, having a child is considered very meaningful because you're connecting to something that's gonna have a life and a value independent of you.

Now the question that comes up for me, well, there's 2 questions.

And then secondly, and I think you have to answer the second question first, which is, well yeah, but why is meaning so important?

Why is this sense of connectedness so important to human beings?

Why, when it is lacking, do they typically fall into depression, potentially mental illness, addiction, self-destructive behavior?

And so the first answer I give you is, well, it's that sense of connectedness.

And people often express it metaphorically.

They wanna be connected to something larger than themselves.

I mean, if I chained you to a mountain, you wouldn't thereby say, oh, now my life is so fulfilling, right?

So what they're trying to convey, they're using this metaphor to try and say, they wanna be connected.

They wanna be connected to something real, they wanna make a difference and matter to it.

And 1 way of asking them what's meaningful is, tell me what you would like to continue to exist even if you weren't around anymore.

And how are you connected to it, and how do you matter to it?

That's 1 way of trying to get at what is the source of meaning for you, is if you were no longer there, you would like it to continue existing.

That's not the only part of the definition probably, because there's probably many things that aren't a source of meaning for me that maybe I find beautiful that I would like to continue existing.

Yes, if it contributes to your life being meaningful, you're connected to it in some way, and it matters to you, and you matter to it in that you make some difference to it.

That's when it goes from being just sort of true, good and beautiful to being a source of meaning for you in your life.

Is the meaning crisis a new thing or has it always been with us?

Is it part of the human condition in general?

And part of the argument I made in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is there's 2 aspects to it.

1 is that there are perennial problems, perennial threats to meaning.

And in that sense, human beings are always vulnerable to despair.

You know, the book of Ecclesiastes is, it's all vanity, it's all meaningless.

But there's also historical forces that have made those perennial problems more pertinent, more pressing, more difficult for people to deal with.

And so the meaning crisis is actually the intersection of perennial problems, finding existence absurd, experiencing existential anxiety, feeling alienated, and then pressing historical factors, which have to do with the loss of the resources that human beings have typically, cross-historically and cross-culturally made use of in order to address these perennial problems.

Is there something potentially deeper than just a lack of meaning that speaks to the fact that we're vulnerable to despair?

You know, Ernest Becker talked about, in his book The Null of Death, about the fear of death and being an important motivator in our life.

As William James said, death is the warm at the core of the human condition.

Is it possible that this kind of search for meaning is coupled

or can be seen from the perspective of trying to escape the reality, the thought of one's own mortality?

Yeah, Becker and the terror management theory that have come out of it.

There's been some good work around sort of providing empirical support for that claim.

Can you steel man that case and then can you argue against it?

So what aspects I find convincing is that human, being, human finitude, being finite, being inherently limited, is very problematic for us.

Given the extensive use of the word problematic, I like that you used that word to describe one's own mortality as problematic.

Because people sort of on Twitter use the word problematic when they disagree with somebody, but this to me seems to be the ultimate problematic aspect of the human condition is that we die, and it ends.

I think, I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm trying to get you to consider that your mortality is not an event in the future, it's a state you're in right now.

So your mortality is just a, we talk about something that causes mortality fatal.

But what we actually mean is it's full of fate.

And I don't mean in the sense of things are pre-written.

What I mean is the sense of the universe doesn't care about your personal narrative.

It's the culmination of your whole project for happiness, and you step into the street and a truck hits you and you die.

So you can think of lots of little deaths you experience whenever All the projects and the plans you make come up against the fact that the universe can just roll over them.

So death is the indifference of nature, of the universe to your existence.

And so in that sense, it is always here with us.

Yeah, but you're vulnerable in so many ways other than just the ending of your biological life.

Because it's interesting, if you rate what people fear most, death is not number 1.

They often put public speaking as number 1.

Because the death of status or reputation can also be a profound loss for human beings.

So as the terror management folks would say, as Ernest Becker would say, that a self-report on a survey is not an accurate way to capture what is actually at the core of the motivation of a human being.

That we could be terrified of death, and we've, from childhood, since we realized the absurdity of the fact that the ride ends, we've learned to really try to forget about it, try to construct illusions that allow us to escape momentarily or for prolonged periods of time, the realization that we die.

Okay, so first I took it seriously, but now I wanna say why there's some empirical work that makes me wanna reconsider it.

So terror management theory is you do things like you give people a list of words to read, and in those list are words associated with death, cough and funeral.

And then you see what happens to people, and generally they start to become more rigid in their thinking, they tend to identify with their worldview.

That's if you present it to them in that third person perspective.

But if you get them to go in the first person perspective and imagine that they're dying and that the people that they care about are there with them they don't show those responses.

In fact, they show us an increase in cognitive flexibility, an increase in openness.

See, so I'm trying to say, we might be putting the cart before the horse.

It might not be death per se, but the kind of meaning that is present or absent in death that is the crucial thing for us.

By the way, to push back, I don't think you took it seriously.

I don't think you truly steel-manned the case because you're saying that death is always present with us, yes, but isn't there a case to be made that it is 1 of the major motivators?

Nietzsche, will to power, Freud wanting to have sex with your mother, all the different explanations of what is truly motivating us human beings.

made that this death thing is a really damn good, if not anything, a tool to motivate the behavior of humans.

I'm not saying that the avoidance of death is not significant for human beings, but I'm proposing to you that human beings have a capacity for considering certain deaths meaningful and certain deaths meaningless, and we have lots of evidence that people are willing to sacrifice their biological existence for a death they consider meaningful.

As somebody who produces a lot of ideas, records them, writes them down, is a deep thinker, admired thinker, and as the years go on, become more and more admired, does it scare you that the ride ends?

No, I mean, you have to talk to me on all my levels.

I'm a biological organism, so if something's thrown at my head, I'll duck and things like that.

But if you're asking me, do I long to live forever?

No, in the Buddhist tradition, there are practices that are designed to make you aware of simultaneously the horror of mortality and the horror of immortality.

The thought of living forever is actually horrific to me.

like when you're sitting with a loved 1 or watching a movie you just really love or a book you really love, you don't want it to end, you don't necessarily always flip it to the other aspect, the complete opposite of the thought experiment.

There's gotta be a middle ground, like the snooze button.

Sure, you don't wanna sleep forever, but maybe press the snooze button and get an extra 15 minutes.

That fear seems to be a source of an intense appreciation of the moment, in part.

I mean, that's what the Stoics talked about, to meditate on one's mortality.

It seems to be a nice wake-up call to that life is full of moments that are beautiful and that you don't get an infinite number of them.

Right, And the stoic response was not the project of trying to extend the duration of your life, but to deepen those moments so they become as satisfying as possible so that when death comes, it does not strike you as any kind of calamity.

Does that project ring true for your own personal feelings?

Part of it, as I'm older, and your temporal horizon flips somewhere in your 30s or 40s.

You don't live from your birth, you live towards your death.

That's such a beautiful phrase, the temporal horizon flips.

The point before which the world of opportunity and possibility is infinite before you.

There's all these golden possibilities and you fly around between them.

And then when it flips, you start to look for a different model, the Socratic, the Stoic model.

Buddhism has also influenced me, which is more about, wait, When I look at my desires, I seem to have 2 meta-desires.

In addition to satisfying a particular desire, I want whatever satisfies my desire to be real, and whatever is satisfying my desire to not cause internal conflict, but bring something like peace of mind.

And so I'm more and more moved towards how can I live such that those 2 meta-desires are a constant frame within which I'm trying to satisfy my specific desires?

I think mind and life go away completely when we die.

And I think that's actually significantly important for the kind of beings that we are.

We are the kinds of beings that can come to that awareness and then we have a responsibility to decide how we're gonna comport ourselves towards it.

Can you linger on what that means, the mind goes away?

Like when you're playing music and the last instrument is put down, the song is over.

Doesn't mean the song wasn't beautiful, doesn't mean the song wasn't complex, doesn't mean the song didn't add to the value of the universe and its existence, but it came to an end.

Is there some aspect in which some part of mind was there before the human and remains after?

Something like panpsychism, or is it too much for us limited cognitive beings to understand?

Something like panpsychism, I take it seriously.

I don't think it's a ridiculous proposal, but I think it has insoluble problems that make me doubt it.

Any idea that the mind is some kind of ultimately immaterial substance also has, for me, just devastating problems.

Those are the 2 kinds of framework that people usually propose in order to support some kind of idea of immortality.

The fact that we participate in distributed cognition, that most of our problem solving is not done as individuals but in groups, this is something I work on.

I've published on that, I think that's important.

But most of the people who do work on systems of distributed cognition think that while there's such a thing as collective intelligence, there's no good evidence that there's collective consciousness.

In fact, it's often called zombie agency for that reason.

And so while I think it's very clear that no 1 person runs an airline and there's a collective intelligence that solves that problem.

I do not think that collective intelligence supports any kind of consciousness.

And so therefore I don't think the fact that I participate, which I regularly and reliably do in distributed cognition, gives me any reason to believe that that participation grounds some kind of consciousness.

Okay, there's so many things to mention there.

First of all, distributed cognition, maybe that's a synonym for collective intelligence.

So that means a bunch of humans individually are able to think, have cognitive machines, and are somehow able to interact with the process of dialogue, as you talk about, to morph different ideas together, like this idea landscape together.

It's so interesting to think about, okay, well you do have these fascinating distributed cognition systems, but consciousness does not propagate in the same way as intelligence.

But isn't there a case, if we just look at intelligence, if we look at us humans as a collection of smaller organisms, which we are, And so there's like a hierarchy of organisms, tiny ones work together to form tiny villages that you can then start to see as individual organisms that are then also forming bigger villages and interacting different ways and function becomes more and more complex and eventually we get to us humans to where we start to think, well, we're an individual, but really we're not.

There's billions of organisms inside us, both domestic and foreign.

So isn't that building up consciousnesses, like turtles all the way up to our consciousness?

Are we the only, like is this the phase transition when it becomes a zombie-like giant hierarchical village that first like, ah, there's like a singing angels and it's consciousness is born in just us humans.

Not bacteria, but maybe you could say bacteria does, but like the interesting, complicated organisms that are within us have consciousness.

I think it's proper to argue, and I have, that like a paramecium or bacteria has a kind of agency and even a kind of intelligence, kind of sense-making ability.

But I do not think that we can attribute consciousness, at least what we mean by consciousness, this kind of self-awareness, this ability to introspect, et cetera, et cetera, to bacteria.

Now, the reason why distributed cognition doesn't have consciousness, I think is a little bit more tricky.

And I think there's no reason in principle why there couldn't be a consciousness for distributed cognition, collective intelligence.

In fact, many philosophers would agree with me on that point.

I think it's more an issue of certain empirical facts, bandwidth, density of connections, speed of information transfer, et cetera.

It's conceivable that if we got some horrible Frankensteinian neural link and we linked our brains and we had the right density and dynamics and bandwidth and speed that a group consciousness could take shape.

I don't have any argument in principle against that.

I'm just saying those contingent facts do not yet exist and therefore it is implausible that consciousness exists at the level of collective intelligence.

So you talk about consciousness quite a bit, so let's step back and try to sneak up to a definition.

For me, there are 2 aspects to answering that question.

1 is, what's the nature of consciousness?

How does something like consciousness exist in an otherwise apparently non-conscious universe?

And then there's a function question, which is equally important, which is what does consciousness do?

The first 1 is obviously problematic for most people.

Like yeah, consciousness seems to be so different from the rest of the non-conscious universe.

But I put it to you that the function question is also very hard because you are clearly capable of very sophisticated, intelligent behavior without consciousness.

You are turning the noises coming out of my face hole into ideas in your mind, and you have no conscious awareness of how that process is occurring.

There's an extra question you need to ask.

Should we attempt to answer those questions separately or should we attempt to answer them in an integrated fashion?

I make the case that you actually have to answer them in an integrated fashion.

What consciousness does and what it is, we should be able to give it a unified answer to both of those.

Can you try to elucidate the difference between what consciousness is and what it does, both of which are mysteries, as you say.

Can you try to explain the difference that's interesting, that's useful, that's important to understand?

So that's putting me in a bit of a difficult position because I actually argue that trying to answer them separately is ultimately incoherent.

But what I can point to are many published articles in which only 1 of these problems is addressed and the other is left unaddressed.

So people will try and explain what qualia are, how they potentially emerge, without saying what do they do, what problems do they help to solve, how do they make the organism more adaptive.

And then you'll have other people who'll say, oh no, this is what the function of consciousness is, but I don't know, I can't tell you, I can't solve the hard problem.

So, what I'm saying is, many people treat these problems separately, although I think that's ultimately an incoherent way to approach the problem.

So the hard problem is focusing on what it is.

So the qualia, it feels like something to experience a thing, that's what consciousness is.

And does is more about the functional usefulness of the thing.

To the whole beautiful mix of cognition and just function in everyday life.

Okay, you've also said that you can do very intelligent things without consciousness.

I don't know what I'm doing to access my memory.

But the mechanisms that create consciousness could be deeply interlinked with whatever is doing the memory access,

So I guess what I'm trying to say in this, we'll probably sneak up to this question a few times, which is whether we can build machines that are conscious, or machines that are intelligent, human-level intelligent or beyond, without building the consciousness.

I mean, ultimately, that's 1 of the ways to understand what consciousness is, is to build the thing.

We can either sort of from the Chomsky way try to construct models, like he thinks about language in this way, try to construct models and theories of how the thing works, or we can just build the damn thing.

Exactly, and that's a methodological principle in cognitive science.

In fact, 1 of the things that sort of distinguishes cognitive science from other disciplines dealing with the nature of cognition in the mind is that cognitive science takes the design stance.

It asks, Well, could we build a machine that would not only simulate it, but serve as a bonafide explanation of the phenomena?

Do you find any efforts in cognitive science compelling in this direction?

There's on the computational side of things, something called cognitive modeling.

There's all these kinds of packages that you can construct simplified models of how the brain does things and see if complex behaviors emerge.

Do you find any efforts in cognitive, or what efforts in cognitive science do you find most inspiring and productive?

I think the project of trying to create AGI, artificial general intelligence, is where I place my hope of artificial intelligence being of scientific significance.

This is independent of technological, socioeconomic significance, which is already well established.

But being able to say because of the work in AI, we now have a good theory of cognition, intelligence, perhaps consciousness.

I think that's where I place my bets is in the current endeavors around artificial general intelligence.

And so tackling that problem head on, which is now become central, at least to a group of cognitive scientists, is I think what needs to be done.

And when you think about AGI, do you think about systems that have consciousness?

Let's go back to what I think is at the core of your general intelligence.

So right now, compared to even our best machines, you are a general problem solver.

You can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains.

And some of our best machines have a little bit of transfer.

They can learn this game and play a few other well-designed rule-bound games, but they couldn't learn how to swim, right, or et cetera.

And so what's interesting is what seems to come up, and this is some of my published work, in all these different domains of cognition, across all these different problem types, is a central problem.

And since we do have good sort of psychometric evidence that we do have some general ability that's a significant component of our intelligence, I made an argument as to what I think that general ability is.

The amount of information in this room that you could actually pay attention to is combinatorially explosive.

The amount of information you have in your memory, long-term memory and all the ways you could combine it, combinatorial explosive.

The number of possibilities you can consider, also combinatorial explosive.

The sequences of behavior you can generate, also combinatorial explosive.

The right memories are coming up, the right possibilities are opening up, the right sequences of behavior, you're paying attention to the right thing.

Not infallibly so, but so much so that you reliably find obvious what you should interact with in order to solve the problem at hand.

That's an ability that is still not well understood within AGI.

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John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom | Lex Fridman Podcast #317