The Deep Continuity Hypothesis and the Deep Constraint Hypothesis

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Evan Thompson talks about this idea of the deep continuity hypothesis. He says there's a continuity between those biological the principles that make you alive and the set of constraints and principles that makes you a cognitive agent. This is directly relevant also to my work on relevance realization because your brain is doing this opponent processing between trying to be as efficient as it can and how resilient resilient meaning keeping as many options open as it can. The way you make sense of things at this primordial level where things are obvious and salient to you is very much dependent on you being in embodied being an embodied mind.

Today's guest is John Vervaeke, PhD. John is an award-winning lecturer at the University of Toronto in the departments of psychology, cognitive science and Buddhist psychology. John joins Emerge to discuss the meaning crisis, it's consequences, and how we might design ecologies of practice to chart a path to new vistas of meaningfulness. We cover: what is the meaning crisis, how does the meaning crisis intersect with the ecological and political crisis, how our consciousness prioritizes what is most meaningful out of the totality of perception and how much flexibility we have in adjusting and transforming what we find meaningful, why it’s problematic to ‘unbundle’ and decontextualize practices like mindfulness from a larger integrated ecology of practice, how everything from literacy to rationality to mindfulness could be considered a ‘psychotechnology’, what the highest leverage practices for resolving the meaning-crisis in our own lives, how to think about building the religions of the future, why new communities of practice ought to focus on process instead of personality, John’s own journey in amplifying the meaning in life, and how our bodies can function as ‘meaningfulness’ compasses in our lives. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis