657 Professor John Vervaeke — How to Build a Life of Wisdom, Flow, and Contemplation
This is a OPEN AI summary of the Tim Ferriss Podcast #657- visit www.TinyTim.blog for more AI summaries, or www.Tim.blog for the official Tim Ferriss Podcasts.
John Vervaeke discusses the four ways of knowing - cognition, consciousness, embodiment, and embeddedness - and how they shape our memory and interactions with the world. He talks about how culture shock is a result of missing the "affordances" that tell us how to interact with others in a given culture. He explains that there are different types of knowing, including propositional, perspectival, and procedural, and that the flow state is an example of the prioritization of the procedural, perspectival, and participatory over the propositional.
John Vervaeke talks about how important it is to be in a flow state, and how Daoism is the religion/philosophy of flow. He explains how Tai Chi can help achieve a flow state, and how this state can permeate many different domains of life. He argues that those who get "trapped" in video game addiction may do so because the games provide a sense of flow that is lacking in their everyday lives.
John Vervaeke was 15 when he decided to leave Christianity. He found it to be a very fragmented way of life, and he wanted to try something different. He was lucky to find Eastern philosophies, which taught him a variety of practices that have been with him ever since.
John Vervaeke talks about the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and how wisdom is understanding foolishness. He explains that the processes that make us intelligent also make us prone to self-destructive behavior. He gives the example of confirmation bias and how it can lead to self-deception. The No Free Lunch Theorem states that there is no one problem solving method that will work for all problems. This is because every problem is different and requires a different approach. This means that people need to be careful about biasing their attention towards one particular method or heuristic, as it may not always be the best option. John Vervaeke discusses the idea of bounded rationality, which is the idea that one cannot be completely logical all the time. He argues that one must use other forms of knowledge, such as intuition, to tell when and how to be logical.
The article discusses the idea that relevance is not a logical property, and that it is therefore not possible to create a logic of similarity. It cites research on implicit learning to support this claim. John Vervaeke explains that intuition is not deductive, but rather a result of implicit learning. He gives the example of people being able to reliably identify strings that belong together, even when presented with new strings that have not been seen before. This ability degrades when people are asked to explicitly figure out the rules that are generating the strings. Implicit learning is the ability to pick up on complex patterns without consciously knowing how or why. This can be both a strength and a weakness, as it can lead to picking up on patterns that are not actually causal. To combat this, we can explicitly set up situations in which we are doing implicit learning, in order to better distinguish between cause and correlation. The information needs to be clear, concise, and error-free in order to enter the flow state. This state is an evolutionary marker that allows for greater insight and understanding. To achieve this state, one must be careful about where they are and what they are doing. Intuition is not a panacea, and one should be careful of trusting it too much. Reason, emotions, and logic all have their own strengths and weaknesses, and no one faculty is superior to the others. The best way to cultivate wisdom and virtue is to practice an ecology of practices, which refers to a well-designed system of complementary practices that check and balance each other. John Vervaeke discusses how to improve one's ability to spot correlations and causation, and how this ties into Stoicism. He argues that it is important to practice actively open-mindedness, and to note and counteract biases in one's own thinking.
In order to think more like Socrates, it is necessary to engage in consistent practice, including dialoguing with oneself and others, as well as internalizing the sage. Tim Ferriss interviews John Vervaeke about the different forms of exercises that help improve mindfulness, including meditation, contemplation, circling, paraphrasing, and lectio divina.
John Vervaeke and Tim Ferriss discuss the idea that "God is related to the world in the same way the mind is related to the body." Vervaeke explains that this means that the order of causes (the body) and the order of intelligibility (the mind) must be in contact with each other in order for knowledge to be possible. Ferriss asks whether this means that God is to the world as the mind is to the body, and Vervaeke says yes.
In this conversation, Tim Ferriss and John Vervaeke discuss the importance of community for religious people. Vervaeke shares his thoughts on the Sufi community and how it has impacted him personally. He also talks about the importance of philosophy in one's life, and how the works of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle have transformed him.
In this excerpt, Tim Ferriss and John Vervaeke discuss the importance of being embodied. Vervaeke argues that without a body, it would be impossible to experience consciousness. Ferriss agrees, and adds that being embodied is a precious gift. The mean is not a good place to point people about this because emotions are not irrational. Emotion and cognition are interweaving and inter-affording. So that's why emotion should be the next E. John Vervaeke talks about the three questions of consciousness: the nature question, the function question, and the origin question. He believes that the function question is just as important as the nature question, and that people don't give it enough attention. Vervaeke also talks about how consciousness is constantly evolving and adapting, like a machine that is constantly being repurposed.
This essay discusses the nature of consciousness, and how it relates to qualia. It argues that there are two types of qualia - adjectival and adverbial - and that the latter is more important. It also discusses the idea of the "pure consciousness event," in which one is conscious but without any other thoughts or experiences. The adverbial qualia are necessary for consciousness, and can be explained by relevance realization.
Jordan Peterson and the author share a belief in relevance realization, or the idea that we are connected to the world in a non-propositional way. They have different views on the importance of practices and theories, but they respect each other and can have deep discussions despite their differing political commitments.
John Vervaeke is a philosopher and psychologist who has created a YouTube series called "After Socrates" in response to criticisms of his previous series, "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis." "After Socrates" is designed to be taken up in discussion by groups, with each episode building on the previous ones. It also includes points of reflection and instruction in practices that relate to the content of the lecture. In this lecture, Vervaeke discusses the words "subjective" and "objective," and how they are used to frame the way we think about life in the West. He argues that this dichotomy is not exhaustive or complete, and that there are other ways of thinking about reality that do not rely on this division.
In his book "Im glad I asked," Tim Ferriss revisits the idea of the subjective-objective dichotomy and explores how it shapes our understanding of reality. He interviews John Vervaeke, who discusses the idea of connectedness and how it underlies many of our concepts. Vervaeke emphasizes that this is not a new way of thinking, but rather a revisiting of an older way of knowing. The way we know things is through contact and connection with the world, not just through our individual minds. This is an ancient idea that is being supported by cutting-edge cognitive science.
657 https://tim.blog/2023/02/23/john-vervaeke/
