Episode 1 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m going to spend the next few weeks studying John Vervaeke’s lectures on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. He’s an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and is in the psychology department and the cognitive sciences program. He also teaches for the Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health program.
NOTE: My goal here wasn’t to merely provide a transcript of his lectures. But rather, I wanted to understand them and integrate them. So I often provide commentary on the material that you might not find in the lectures. However, I don’t often present a clear boundary between what came from his lectures, and what came from me.
The meaning crisis
Vervaeke notes that there’s a diverse list of phenomena taking place in the world whose emergence seem to have a unifying explanation. On the one hand, he notes that there seems to be a growing number of people in the West interested in Buddhism and its intersection with cognitive science. Especially recently, there’s been a surge of academic and public interest in psychedelics. He cites research showing that psilocybin-assisted therapy was efficacious in producing large, rapid, and sustained antidepressant effects in patients with major depressive disorder. There’s a huge amount of academic interest in the causal factors of happiness, along with an academic interest in the process for cultivating wisdom. Tying a lot of this together, there seems to be a deep interest in finding ways to alter our state of consciousness.
Simultaneously, there seems to have been a growing mental health crisis even before COVID-19. According to the CDC, suicice rates increased 30% between the years of 2000-2018. In 2020, 3% of the adult American population seriously contemplated suicide and 0.3% attempted suicide. There’s an increasing amount of addiction to substances like opiates. There’s a deep sense of frustration and futility with the world that seems ubiquitous in our society. We’re experiencing a widespread erosion of trust in our public institutions, our political system and our judicial system. Religious affiliation and people’s memberships in clubs is on the decline. People seem to be experiencing an increasing sense that the world is mired in “bullshit”, and there’s substantial public fascination in the ideas of doom, zombies and the apocalypse.
The lectures are a series of arguments that both these positive and negative trends have the same underlying causal structures. Our society is experiencing a profound crisis of meaning. This crisis is pervasive, and is not independent of the climate nor the socio-economic crisis. But rather, it seems to interact with them in fundamental ways.
The goal of these lectures is to clearly define what Vervaeke means by this “meaning crisis”, its relationship to our cognitive ability as humans, and the fundamental connection between cognitive ability and changes in consciousness.
Rewinding the clock - setting the stage for shamanism during the upper palaeolithic period
Before we can easily discuss the meaning crisis, we need to explore a number of important developments that humanity has made along the way. But more specifically, we need to explore how changes in our consciousness enables us to solve novel problems and therefore improve our cognitive capacity.
Our story likely begins sometime during the upper palaeolithic period. Given how far back this is, I imagine we don’t have the scientific tools to construct high-resolution timelines. Nevertheless, based on what we currently know, something fascinating seems to take place during this time. Humans don’t seem to undergo any substantial upgrades to their hardware, but they seem to experience an explosion in cognitive capacity. This seems to be the first time that humans start creating abstract art like small statues, wall paintings and music. Needless to say, a lot of factors likely caused this.
We’re most interested in one possibility in particular. It seems that around this time, humans underwent a near-extinction event caused by changes in the climate. It’s speculated that the global human population was reduced to around 10,000 individuals. We’re in the year 2022 and we barely have the technology to manage the global climate. Humans back then had limited tools at their disposal to adapt to the crisis. So their response was socio-cognitive in nature. That is, they came up with new ways of structuring their society, and new ways of thinking in response to the new climate. Humans decided that starting trading networks between hunter-gatherer tribes was the best way to reduce their overall risk. Trading allowed them to broaden their social networks, allowing each society to solve more complex problems.
This expansion of their social networks forced humans to invent new rituals to solve two important problems. They first needed rituals to generate and maintain trust between tribes. Keep in mind that each tribe could have had its own unique language and culture. And then they needed rituals to maintain trust within a tribe, especially if particular members were often exposed to strangers.
Humans needed to develop important cognitive skills in empathy to engage with strangers and build trust with them. That is, they needed to hone the ability to put themselves in another person’s position, and imagine how that person perceives the world. It’s one thing to engage solely within one’s tribe. But one likely required a very different depth of competency to engage with strangers. Vervaeke cites a book that calls this ability “mind-sight”. We live in civilizations where we live shoulder-to-shoulder with total strangers that have no kinship or tribal affiliation with us. We take this totally for granted! Yet no species seems to organise itself in this way. What we consider “social norms” today can be conceptualised (to some degree) as a collection of rituals for maintaining a certain amount of provisional trust with strangers.
With the emergence of these social networks, an individual’s commitment and loyalty to their tribe was tested more often. This is likely when the first initiation rituals developed. An individual being tempted by a stranger has happened so often in human history that we have all kinds of mythologies around this pattern. These early initiation rituals were often extremely painful and traumatic. They likely carried some risk of mortality. But as a side effect, they put increased pressure on each individual’s ability to regulate their emotions. To survive as a human, one needed the ability to live together within a tribe of one’s one-time abusers. And to perhaps rationalise it to yourself. It’s no wonder that intellectualization is an incredibly powerful coping mechanism for individuals that have experienced trauma.
Emergence of shamanism via exaptation
“Exaptation” is an idea that comes from biology, where an existing biological adaptation has been repurposed by the evolutionary process to solve some other problem. Vervaeke points out that this is likely what led to the development of human speech. If the tongue evolved to confer speech, then we’d expect speech from all animals that have tongues. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Due to an idiosyncrasy of the human air passageway and the mechanics of our tongue, our bodies were able to exapt this machinery to produce speech. There’s work showing that our minds likely work similarly. That is, instead of creating new cognitive machinery, our minds will attempt to repurpose existing machinery to solve new problems. This is likely more energy efficient than the alternative, and also allows us to learn faster than evolutionary timescales would normally permit.
It seems that the ability to construct rituals to generate trust within and between groups was exapted in the construction of shamanic rituals. Shamanism seems to be a cultivated practice for altering one’s own states of consciousness by tapping into these newly honed skills of “mind-sight” and improved emotional regulation. There’s work showing that shamanism was pervasive in hunter-gatherer groups and seemed to improve the hunting outcomes of a group. The shaman is such a pervasive figure, that there even seem to be archetypes for them (e.g. the wise old man like Merlin or Yoda).
A plausible case can be made that the advent of shamanism led to the cognitive explosion during the upper palaeolithic period.
Evolution of shamanism
A “technology” is essentially a systematic use of a tool, and it’s something humans are uniquely gifted at. If anything, we seem to be “natural-born cyborgs”. That is, we find it incredibly natural to integrate tools with our bodies. For example, we wear clothes, shoes, glasses, watches, etc. In addition to filling up our environments with our tools, we have the ability to do weird things like “feeling” our tools with our bodies. For example, think about what’s happening when you’re able to park because you can “feel” the corners of a car. We have evolved to find it natural to integrate with tools, and to make them extensions of our body.
A physical tool fits your physiology and enhances it. Our minds seem to have exapted the notion of physical tools into the realm of cognitive tools. A psycho-technology is a tool that fits our mind and enhances how it operates. For example, literacy is a psychotechnology. You’re born with an ability to understand language, but you’re not born literate. In fact, literacy didn’t exist for most of our history. But it provides a standard set of tools for processing information. And it substantially extends your memory by allowing you to network with not just yourself but other humans across time. Imagine what a loss of literacy would do for you. It would substantially diminish your ability to solve problems and live in the world. That’s what effective psycho-technologies do for us. They allow us to substantially increase the scope and scale of the problems we can solve.
Shamanic practices can be interpreted as a set of psycho-technologies for altering one’s state of consciousness and enhancing your cognition. Shamans will often engage in practices like sleep deprivation. Or intense and long periods of singing, dancing and chanting. They will often engage in imitation to put on the clothing or masks that imitate some other figure (e.g. animals). Sometimes the shaman will go into periods of social isolation. And they may also make use of psychedelics in order to help bring about an altered state of consciousness.
Essentially, the shaman is trying to disrupt the normal ways in which their brains are finding patterns in the world. Why in the world would anyone want to do something like that? It’s because the same cognitive machine that humans employ to find patterns is the same machinery that makes us prone to self-deception.
Nine dots problem
Maybe all that was too abstract. Here’s an example to help.
Your job is to connect each of the dots in the box using four straight lines. Each line has to start where the previous line ends. I want you to genuinely try solving this problem before you proceed to look at the solution. I wasn’t able to solve the problem the first time that I saw it.
Nine dots solution
You’re likely feeling frustrated after looking at this solution if you got blocked solving the problem.
What’s going on?
Most people’s instinctive emotional response is to reject the solution because the arrows go outside the box. But the rules never said you couldn’t go outside the box. In fact, notice how we’re instinctively forced to see the “box” the moment we see this grid of dots? Most people find this problem challenging because they unconsciously project a “box” onto the grid. Framing the problem incorrectly makes it almost impossible for someone to reach the correct solution.
What’s happening is that the brain unconsciously projects a pattern on the stimuli. The brain then activates the set of skills necessary to attempt to solve the problem. But if you project the wrong pattern with a bad framing, you’re blocked. There’s little you can consciously do at that point. You have to disrupt your framing if you want to solve the problem. For most people, the brain is likely exapting the skills that one learned when playing “connect the dots” as a kid. It’s usually adaptive when playing that game to parse borders of objects from constellations of dots. Otherwise a picture of a deer would end up looking like a piece of psychedelic art. But in this game, it’s unhelpful.
And notice that simply telling someone to “think harder” doesn’t make it any easier to solve the problem. That’s because the person is unconsciously solving the wrong problem. There’s more types of “knowing” than knowing facts or propositions about the world. And it’s one of these more fundamental types of knowing that blocks you from solving the problem, if you “know” the wrong thing.
Shamanism is a set of practices that seek to disrupt everyday framing so that the shaman can gain enhanced insight into the environment. This can either be insight into the natural world or even enhancing their mindsight into other people. When the shaman is enacting the deer, the shaman isn’t engaging in the propositional beliefs of the deer. They’re becoming a deer. Not metaphysically, but they’re trying to get a sense of the perspective the deer has, the way it thinks and other kinds of participatory knowing. By becoming the deer, the shaman enhances their ability to track and hunt the deer.
The psychotherapist seems to be our culture’s modern incarnation of a shaman. They take advantage of this idea that there’s more types of “knowing” than merely knowing a set of propositions or facts. And our culture seems to have largely de-emphasized this type of knowing. The psychotherapist seeks to disrupt our existing maladaptive framings of reality and to shepherd us into more helpful framings that allow us to overcome trauma or self-deception.
The next set of lectures take these ideas of exaptation, psycho-technology and changes in our consciousness to start fleshing out what the meaning crisis is.