Can We Be Rational AND Spiritual? | Prof. John Vervaeke on Solutions to the Meaning Crisis

For more than a decade Prof. John Vervaeke has been studying what he calls the meaning crisis: “Millions live disconnected and without a sense of home—anxiety within, alienation without, and a sense of absurdity with the world. The scientific world gives us tools for innovation, but it cannot tell us how to live. Few of us know where to turn to develop the transformative wisdom necessary to cultivate a meaningful life.”

Hans Busstra sat down with John Vervaeke to discuss the meaning crisis, the Zombie myth we’re in, and how it all relates to what Vervaeke calls “rabbit hole metaphysics”: the conspiratorial, outlandish and often absurd ideas people start believing in, in search of meaning. A characteristic of rabbit hole types of metaphysics is that they have a ‘thick’ description of reality: a constellation of ungrounded assumptions build up to a ‘once you get this, there’s no way back’ narrative, which repeats itself in online echo-chambers.

John Vervaeke’s YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/ @johnvervaeke

The Vervaeke Foundation:
https://vervaekefoundation.org/

Chapters
00:00 Intro edit with highlights
06:01 Is John Vervaeke a ‘Wounded Healer’?
09:53 The only modern myth is the myth of Zombies…
13:18 How to kill the Zombies?
15:25 What is the origin of the meaning crisis?
19:59 Metacognition and the Axial revolution
24:40 How we became locked into dualism
26:25 Hume’s empiricism and Newton’s attempt of integration
28:51 Unawareness of metaphysics: Vervaeke’s critique on Kant’s critique
32:51 Kant and ontology
34:20 Heidegger, Wittgenstein and the attempt to break out of the Cartesian split.
36:59 Quantum and a relationality ontology
39:57 Vervaeke’s ontology of transcendent naturalism
45:29 On what’s happening in psychedelic research 50:09 What about Buddhism and mindfullness without the ontology? 53:13 On the necessity of religion
56:59 Defining the sacred
1:00:46 Psychedelics and the advent of the sacred
1:03:52 On spiritual bypassing and rich ecologies of practices
1:08:20 Intelligence, rationality wisdom and relevance realization 1:16:39 The alignment problem
1:21:20 Where in your model do you fit phenomenal consciousness? 1:26:41 On the adverbial vs adjective quality of consciousness 1:28:12 Can machines be conscious and have relevance realization? 1:30:41 The library of Babel
1:34:03 On the syntax-semantics divide
1:37:29 Penrose’s argument about the non-computability of consciousness and quantum mechanics
1:43:11 A consciousness theory should be compatible with cognition first, not physics 1:44:47 The work of the Vervaeke foundation
1:47:20 All the thinking that goes into a ‘thin’ description… 1:48:07 John’s own ecology of practice
1:55:32 What was John’s last moment of STRONG transcendence?

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