YouSaid · the spoken record

John Vervaeke

lines on the record: 213
first: 2022-09-04
most recent: 2022-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's It's even central to reason and rationality. This is Plato, but Spinoza, the most logical of the rationalists, the ethics is written like Euclid's geometry. But he calls it the ethics for a reason. Because he wants to talk about the blessed life. And what does he say? He says that ultimately reason needs love because love is what brings reason out of being entrapped in the gravity well of egocentrism. Murdoch, Iris Murdoch said, I think really beautifully, love is when you painfully realize that something other than yourself is real.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's in fact the narrative. I struggled with it thinking it was a purely personal, idiosyncratic thing. I started learning the cogsi. I started doing the Tai Chi and the meditation. I started doing all this Socratic philosophy. And when I started to talk about these pieces Saw my students' eyes light up, and I realized, oh, wait, maybe this isn't just something I'm going through. Talking to them and then doing the research and expanding it out. It's like, oh. Many people In a shared fashion and also in an individual lonely fashion are going through meaning crisis.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When it was very bad, it felt extremely lonely and deeply alienating. The universe seemed absurd. And there was also existential anxiety. I talk about these things for a reason. I don't just talk about them as things I'm pointing to. I'm talking about them as seeing in myself and in people I care, you know, having undergone them and how they can bring you close to self-destructive. I started engaging in kinds of self-destructive behavior.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And square quotes had soured in my stomach and made me nauseous. And the juxtaposition of those seemed like an irresolvable problem for me. Was a very, very dark time for me.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. When I left Fundamentalist Christianity. For a while, I was just sort of. Hard bitten atheist. The problem with leaving the belief structure That I didn't deal with all the non propositional things that had gotten into me. All the procedures and habits and all the perspectives and all the identities, and the trauma associated with that. So, you know, I acquired therapy, required years of meditation in Tai Chi, and I'm still wrestling with it. But for the first Four or five years, I would. I described it like this, I called it the black burning. I felt like there was a blackness that was on fire inside of me, precisely because The religion had left a taste for the transcendent in my mouth, but it had the food it had given me.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of us get unlucky, and we all had a tremendous sense of urgency around this, but we were trying to balance it about not being premature, but there it was going to, I mean, we're going to produce a meta-curriculum that's coming in months. There's going to be a scientific paper about integrating the scientific work on wisdom with this practitioner-based ideas about the cultivation of wisdom. There's going to be projects about how we can create a self-correcting vetting system so we can say to people, we think this ecology is legit. It's in good fellowship with all these other legit ecologies. We don't know about that one. We're hesitant about that one. It's not in good fellowship. We have concerns. Here's why we have our concerns, etc. And you may say, well, who are you to do that? It's like nobody.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, I take this very seriously, and I was with a bunch of people in Vermont at the Respond Retreat, people, Rafe Kelly was there. A bunch of people who have set up colleges of practices and created communities. And I have good reason to find all of these people trustworthy. And so we gathered together to try and generate real Dia Logos, flow in distributed cognition. Exercise the collective intelligence and try and address that problem, both in terms of meta-curriculum that we can offer emerging communities, in terms of practices of vetting, how we will self-govern the federation we're forming so that we can resist gurification.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the first thing is An ecology of practices and a community that supports them without involving you in believing things that contravene our best understood science So that wisdom and virtue. Especially how they show up in relationships are primary to you. This will sound ridiculous. But if you take care of that, The other things you want are more likely to occur because what you most want What you wanting your death. Is what were the relationships? Cultivate it to yourself, to other people, to the world. And what did you do to improve the chance of them being deep and profound relationships?”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, you never do. You never do. And I think we have I reject the monological mind. I reject the monophasic mind model. I think we are multi-centered. I think we have different centers of motivation that operate according to different principles to satisfy different problems. And that part of the task of our humanity is to get those different centers into some... Internal culture by which they are optimally cooperating rather than in conflict with each other.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think Plato's right, and I think there's a connection for me Plato's my first philosopher, Young's my first psychologist, and Young is very much the Plato of the psyche.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, to a degree, right? But also, I mean, yeah, to bring consciousness where there was unconscious is part of Jung's mythos. But it's also not the thought that that can be completed. Part of the why you're extending the reach of the conscious mind is it so it can enter into more proper dialogical relationship with the self-organizing system of the unconscious mind.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Least an unconscious. I like the term unconscious. And young continually reminded people that the unconscious is unconscious, that we're not conscious of it. And that's its fundamental property.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is relevant and important. I'm not dismissing, I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but it's certainly not. The unconscious a lot of work that's going on, my colleague and deep friend Anderson Todd is about can we take the Jungian stuff and the cognitive science stuff and can we integrate it together theoretically? And so he's working on that exactly that project.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're talking about the aspects of the unconscious that have to do with your sort of ego development and how you are understanding and interpreting yourself.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, both Freud and Young are only talking about the psychodynamic unconscious, which is only a small part of the unconscious.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Directly. So Freud has a hydraulic model. The psyche is like a steam engine. Things are under pressure. There's a fluid that's moving around. It's like this is. Raccour noted this Young has an organic model. The psyche is like a living being. It's doing all this opponent processing. It's doing all of this self-transcending and growing. And I think that's a much better model of the psyche than the sort of steam engine model.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm on Freud is the better writer, but Young has, I think, a model of the psyche that is closer to where cognitive science is heading. He's more prescient.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so we talked about this before the supreme being is a particular being. Whereas being is no thing. It's not any particular kind of thing. And so, if you're thinking of being as a being, you're thinking of it in a thingy way about something that is fundamentally no thingness. And so then you're disconnecting yourself from presumably ultimate reality. This takes me to Tillik. Tillik's great idea is understanding faith as ultimate concern rather than a set of propositions that you're asserting, right? So what are you ultimately concerned about? What do you want to have? What do you want to be in right relationship to, ratio religio? And is that ultimate is that the ultimate reality that you conceive of are those two things in sync? This has had a profound influence on me. And I think it's a brilliant idea.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for Heidegger, One real powerful idea that has had a huge influence on me. He's had a huge influence on me in many ways. He's a big influence on what's called for e-cognitive science. And this whole idea about the nonpropositional that was deeply afforded by Heidegger and Marloponti. But I guess maybe the one idea, if I had to pick one, is his critique of onto theology, his critique of the attempt to understand being in terms of a supreme being, something like that, and how that gets us fundamentally messed up. And we get disconnected from being because we are over-focused on particular beings. We're failing to love wisely. We're loving the individual things, and we're not loving the ground from which they spring.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe something's going awry here, right? Well, I love my country. Great. But should you love your country at the expense of your commitment to the religion you belong to? People should wrestle with these questions. And I think sin is a failure to wrestle with these questions properly.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, exactly. And so I want to, I think the term sin is good because Somebody may not be doing something that we would prototypically call immoral. But if they're failing to love wisely, they are Disconnecting themselves in some important way from the structures of reality. I think it was Hume. I may be wrong. Hume says, you know, people don't do things because they think it's wrong. They do a lesser good in place of a greater good. That's a different thing than being immoral. Immoral, we're saying, you're doing something that's wrong. It's like, well, no, no. You know, I'm loving my wife. That's a great thing, isn't it? But if you love your wife at the expense of your kid,”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to and trying to come into a proper, respectful relationship with Christianity via a detour through Buddhism, Taoism, and pagan Neoplatonism.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it, and I struggle around this because I was brought up as a fundamentalist Christian, and so that is still there within me. There's trauma associated with that.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Front the world and confront aspects of the world that individuals can't. And I think when we're talking about evil, that's what we're trying to point to. This is a point of convergence between me and Jonathan Peugeot. We've been talking about this.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These collective agents, I call them hyperagents within distributed cognition that have a capacity to wreck havoc on the world that is not just due to a sort of a sum total of immoral decisions. You know, this goes to Hannah Arendt's thing, right? And the banality of Eichmann. And she was really wrestling with it. And I think she's close to something, but I think she's slightly off. You know, Eichmann is just making a whole bunch of immoral decisions, but it doesn't seem to capture the gravity of what the Nazis did, the genocide and the warfare. And she's right because you're not going to get just the summation of a lot of individual rather banal immoral choices adding up to what was going on. You're getting a comprehensive parasitic process within massive distributive cognition that has the power to confirm.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't because I think part of what we're wrestling with here is resisting the enlightenment. I mean the historical period in Europe, the idea that evil and sin can just be reduced to immorality, individual human immorality. I think there's something deeper in the idea of sin than just immoral. I think sin is a much more comprehensive Category. I think sin is a failure to love wisely so that you ultimately engage in a kind of idolatry. You take something as ultimate, which is not. And that can tend to constellate”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope it's not a necessary requirement. I hope that the next Buddha can be the Sangha rather than a specific individual. But I think in that situation, Hitler's charisma allowed him to take on a mythological in the proper sense, archetypal. He became deeply symbolic and he instituted all kinds of rituals, all kinds of rituals and all kinds of mythos. There's all this mythos about the master race and there's all these rituals. The swastika is, of course, itself a religious symbol. There's all of this going on because Was tapping into the fact that when you put people into deeper and deeper meaning scarcity, they will fall back on more and more mythological ways of thinking in order to try and come up with a generative source to give them new meaning making. I should say meaning participating behavior.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the professor extended lecture on this, and it still rings true for me. He says, if you understand Nazism as just a political movement, you have misunderstood it. It is much more a religious phenomenon. In many ways”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Nazism is part of that too. The Promethean spirit that we can make ourselves into supermen, Ubermich, right? Nazism has fueled very much Appropriating and twisting. Sort of Gnostic themes that are very prevalent. Gnosticism tends to come to the fore when people are experiencing increased meaning crisis. And don't forget the Weimar Republic is like a meaning crisis gone crazy on all levels. Everybody's suffering domicile. Everybody's home and way of life and identity and culture and relationship to religion and sciences. All of that, right? And so Nazism comes along and offers a kind of Gnosticism again twisted, perverted. I'm not saying I'm not saying that all Gnostics are Nazis, but there is this Gnostic mythology mythos, and it comes to the fore. I remember, and this stuck with me undergrad, I was taking political science.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ground zero with Paul Pot and the Cameron Rouge, right? Exactly. And you only believe in an ends that can justify any means if you believe in a utopia and you can only believe in the utopia if you really buy into the Promethean spirit.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think what Ohana talks about in the intellectual history of modernity, The Promethean The idea, the really radical proposal, and think about how it's not so radical to us in that sense, Marxism has succeeded. The radical proposal that you see, even in the French Revolution, Don't forget the terror comes in the French Revolution too. We can make ourselves into godlike beings. Think of the hubris in that. And think of the overconfidence to think that we so understand human nature and all its complexities and human history and how religion functioned that we can just come in with a plan and make it run. To my mind, that Promethean spirit is part of why it's doomed to fail and it's doomed to fail in a kind of terrorizing way because the Promethean spirit Really licenses you to do anything because the ends justify the means.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it offered people. It offered people something that typically only religions had offered and It offered people the hope of making a new man, a new kind of human being in a new world. And when you've been living in Russia, in which things seem to be locked in a system that is crushing most people, getting the promise in the air of scientific legitimacy. We can make new human beings and a new world and in which happiness will ensue. That's an intoxicating proposal. You get sort of, like I said, you get. Get all of the intoxication of a religious utopia, but you get all the seeming legitimacy of claiming that it's a scientific understanding of history and economics.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much, it is activists. It's about reorganizing society, but the transformation in individuals is largely ideological, meaning it's largely about these significant propositional changes and adopting a set of beliefs.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does but I think marks to a very significant degree inherits one of Hegel's main flaws. Hegel is talking about all this and he's trying to fit it into post-Kantian philosophy. So for him, it's ultimately propositional, conceptual. Like everybody after Descartes is very focused on the propositional level and he's not paying deep attention to the nonpropositional. This is why the two great critics of Hegel, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, they're trying to put their finger on the non-propositional, the non-conceptual, the will to power or faith. And they're trying to bring out all these other kinds of knowing as being inadequate. That's why Kirkegaard met when he said, Hegel made a system and then he sat down beside it. And so Marxism is...”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intelligibility and respect. Then Marx takes that and says, you know, that process by which the narrative is working itself out that Hegel called dialectic, I don't think it's primarily happening in ideas. I think it's happening primarily between classes within socioeconomic factors. But it's the same story. Here's this mechanism of history. It's teleological. It's going to move this way. It can move towards a utopia. We can either participate in furthering it like participating in the work of God or we can thwart it and be against it. And so you have a pseudo-religious vision. It's all encompassing. Think about how Marxism is not just a philosophical position. It's not just an economic position. It's an entire worldview, an entire account of history and a demanding account of what human excellence is. And it has all these things.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hegel is to Protestantism, what Thomas Aquinas is to Catholicism. He was like the philosopher who took German Protestantism and And also Kant and Fichte and Shelling. And he built. A philosophical system, he explicitly said this, by the way. He wanted to bridge between philosophy and religion. He explicitly said that. I'm not foisting that on him. He said it repeatedly in many different places. And so he was trying to create a philosophical system that gathered to it, I think, the core mythos of Christianity, the core mythos of Christianity is this idea of a narrative structure to reality in which progress is real, in which our actions now can change the future. We can co-participate with God in the creation of the future, and that future can be better. It can reach something like a utopia or the promised land or whatever. He created a philosophical system of brilliance, by the way. He's a genius. But basically what it did was it took that religious vision and gave it the air of philosophical.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Yayden's done work on it. Again, all of this stuff is recent, so we have to take it with a grain of salt. But by a lot of objective measure, people who do this, who have these higher states of consciousness and undergo the transformative process, their lives get better, their relationships improve, right? Their sense of self improves. Their anxieties go down, depression, like all of these other measures are, the needles are moved on these measures by people undergoing this transformative experience. Their lives by many of the criteria that we judge our lives to be good get better.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They come out of these states and they say that doesn't fit into this consensus, right, intelligibility, and that means this is less real. They do the exact opposite. And that fascinates me. Why do they flip our normal procedure about evaluating alternative states? And the thing is, those higher states of consciousness, precisely because they have that on-normativity, the realness that demands that you make a change in your life, they serve to bridge between mystical experiences and genuine transformative experiences.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when people do that, that's when I call it a transformative experience. Now, the higher states of consciousness are really interesting because they tend to move people from a mystical experience into a transformative experience. Because what happens in these experiences is something really, really interesting. They get to a state that's ineffable. They can't put it into words. They can't describe it. But they do this, they're in this state temporarily and then they come back and they do this. They say that was really real and this in comparison is less real. So I remember that platonic metadazire. I want to change my life myself so that I'm more in conformity with that really real. And that is really odd, Lex, because normally when we go outside of our consensus intelligibility, like a dream state, and we come back from it, we say, that doesn't fit into everything, therefore it's unreal. They do the exact opposite.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine if you just created more openness in a person. And they're now open to a lot more, and they want to explore a lot more, but you don't give them the tools of discernment. That could be problematic for them in important ways. That could be very problematic.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where did we go here? I think the psychedelic state. On a continuum, there's insight, and then flow is an insight cascade, there's flow, and then you can have sort of psychedelic experiences, mind-revealing experiences. But they overlap with mystical experiences. And they aren't the same. So, for example, in the Griffiths lab, they gave people psytocybin and they taught them ahead of time how the features of a mystical experience. And only a certain proportion of the people that took the psilocybin went from a psychedelic into a mystical experience. What was interesting is the people that had the mystical experience had measurable and longstanding change to one of the big five factors of personality. They had increased openness. Openness is supposed to actually go down over time. And these traits aren't supposed to be that malleable. And it was significantly altered, right?”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you need another S. I think you need sacred. You need psychedelics need to be practiced within a sapiential framework, a framework in which people are independently and beforehand improving their abilities to deal with self-deception and afford insight and self-regulate. This is, of course, the overwhelming way in which psychedelics are used by indigenous cultures. And I think if we put them into that context, then they can help the project of people self-transcending, cultivating meaning, and increasing wisdom. But I think we removed them out of that context and put them in the context of commodities taken just to have certain phenomenological changes. We run certain important risks.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can break it out of overfitting to the data and open you up. Now that means though Just doing that, right, in and of itself is not the answer. Because you also have to make sure that the system can go back to exploring that new space properly. This isn't a problem with neural networks. You turn off, drop out, and they just go back to being powerful neural networks, and now they explore the state space that they couldn't explore before. Human beings are a little bit more messy around this, and this is where the analogy does get a little bit strained. So they need practices to help them integrate that opening up to the new state space so they can properly integrate it. So beyond Leary's state set and setting,”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You get areas of the brain talking to each other that don't normally talk to each other, areas that do talk to each other not talking to each other, down regulation of areas that are very dominant, like the default mode network, et cetera. And what that does is exactly something strongly analogous to what's happening in dropout or putting noise into the data. It opens up. By the way, if you give human beings an insight problem that they're trying to solve and you throw in some noise, like literally static on the screen, you can trigger an insight in them.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, yes. I think at this point there is no relevant difference. So one of the classic problems because of their power is they suffer from overfitting to the data. Or for those of you who are a statistical orientation, they pick up patterns in the sample that aren't actually present in the population, right? And so what you do is there's various strategies. You can do dropout where you periodically turn off half of the nodes in a network. You can drop noise into the network. And what that does is it prevents overfitting to the data and allows the network to generalize more powerfully to the environment. I propose to you that that's basically what psychedelics do. They do that, they basically do significant constraint reduction.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to remind you of something you said, which is a gem. It's not so much the experience, but the degree to which it can be integrated back. So here's a proposal that comes from Woodward and others. A lot of convergence around this. Carhart Harris is talking about it similarly in the entropic brain. But I'm not going to talk first about psychedelics. I'm going to talk about neural networks. And I'm going to talk about a classic problem in neural networks. So neural networks like us with intuition and implicit learning are fantastic at picking up on complex patterns.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this was the sort of Taoist claim around Tai Chichuan that it actually transfers in ways that you might not expect. You start to be able, and I've now noticed that I now notice how I'm doing Tai Chi even in this interaction and how it can facilitate and afford. And so there's a powerful transfer. And that's what I meant by flow wisely, not only flow in a way that's making sure that you're distinguishing causation from correlation which flow can do, but find how to situate it, home it, so that it will percolate through your psyche and permeate through many domains of your life.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. The point I was trying to make is. Whether or not that particular example is ultimately right, the possibility of transfer failure is a real thing. And I want to contrast that to an experience I had when I was in grad school. And I've been doing Taichi Chan about three or four years very religiously in both senses of the word, like three or four hours a day. And reading all the literature and like. And I was having all the weird experiences, cold as ice, hot as lava, all that stuff. And it's ooh, right? But my friends in grad school They said to me, what's going on? You're different. And I said, what do you mean? And they said, You're a lot more balanced in your interactions and you're a lot more flowing and you're a lot more sort of flexible and you adjust more. And I realized, oh.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You do have to laugh hard enough The advertising get millions of dollars precisely because for many, many people it does make you buy the shampoo. And that's the concern.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You laugh at the hair shampoo commercial and you buy the shampoo. A capacity for tremendous bullshitting because of the way these machines are designed to trigger salience without triggering reflective truth-seeking.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source