There's a lot of controversy around whether or not we should call it axial age, or an axial stage. What happens in the axial age is for some fairly prosaic reasons, there's a bunch of new psychotechnologies that come on line. And this alters cognition in a way that i think was not intended by people who started using these psycho technologies. The world in which we are beset by self deception is a world of self destruction and violence largely caused by the unattend meaning making machinery of our mind. But if we can enlighten that machinery, we can see through the illusion into the real world. In that real world, we will assume a more full
John Vervaeke joins Jim for the first of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke's popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis...
John Vervaeke joins Jim for the first of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke's popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. In this episode they focus on defining core concepts, including meaning, non-reductive science, symptoms of the meaning crisis, attention, shamanism, psychotechnology, ritual, serious play, participatory vs perspectival knowing, the flow state, mindfulness, the Bronze Age collapse & transition into the Axial Age, two-worlds mythologies, faith as loving commitment, the perniciousness of romantic comedies, kairos & its relation to Game B, the Socratic revolution, Socrates's imprecation to "know thyself," lying & bullshit, availability bias, salience vs transformation, and much more.
Episode Transcript
John Vervaeke on Twitter
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis, by John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, & Filip Miscevic
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
JRS EP27 - Jamie Wheal on Flow & the Future of Culture
JRS EP123 - Jamie Wheal on Recapturing the Rapture
Sam Harris's Waking Up app
On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt
John Vervaeke is an Associate Professor, in the teaching stream. He has been teaching at the University of Toronto since 1994. He currently teaches courses in the Psychology department on thinking and reasoning with an emphasis on insight problem solving, cognitive development with an emphasis on the dynamical nature of development, and higher cognitive processes with an emphasis on intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and the Psychology of wisdom. He is the director of the Cognitive Science program where he also teaches courses on the introduction to Cognitive Science, and the Cognitive Science of consciousness wherein he emphasizes 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) models of cognition and consciousness. In addition, he teaches a course in the Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health program on Buddhism and Cognitive Science.
He is the director of the Consciousness and the Wisdom Studies Laboratory. He has won and been nominated for several teaching awards including the 2001 Students' Administrative Council and Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students Teaching Award for the Humanities, and the 2012 Ranjini Ghosh Excellence in Teaching Award. He has published articles on relevance realization, general intelligence, mindfulness, flow, metaphor, and wisdom. He is first author of the book Zombies in Western Culture: A 21st Century Crisis, which integrates Psychology and Cognitive Science to address the meaning crisis in Western society. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
