John Vervaeke joins Jim for the second 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 second of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. They discuss virtue & virtuosity, Plato's man-monster-lion model, hyperbolic discounting, agent & arena, Plato's parable of the cave, the continuity between Plato & Aristotle, personality vs character, Erich Fromm's idea of having vs being, modal confusion, reversal theory, mindfulness as meta-modal optimization, opponent processing, hierarchical complexity, mystical experiences & putting transformation above metaphysics, the danger of reifying consciousness, global workspace theory, the g factor, integrated information theory, an emerging consensus about the function of consciousness, and much more.

Episode Transcript

JRS EP143 - John Vervaeke on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis: Part 1

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

"Hyperbolic Discounting," George Ainslie et. al. (paywalled)

Anagoge

Spiritual bypassing

Plato's Critique of Impure Reason, by D.C. Schindler

To Have or to Be?: The Nature of the Psyche, by Erich Fromm

Piaget's stages of cognitive development

JRS EP97 - Emery Brown on Consciousness & Anesthesia

Buddhism Without Beliefs, by Stephen Batchelor

Why I Am Not a Buddhist, by Evan Thompson

JRS - EP105 Christof Koch on Consciousness

JRS - EP108 Bernard Baars on Consciousness

"Applying global workspace theory to the frame problem," Murray Shanahan and Bernard Baars

"The Chinese Room," John Searle

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.