"I Didn't Know This Kind of Intimacy Was Possible"
"I Didn't Know This Kind of Intimacy Was Possible"
A Brief Primer on Dr. John Vervaeke
You’ve been hearing me refer to him in passing for over a year now. If I ever plagiarize, it’s most likely his work I’m passing off.1 He inspired me immediately the first time I heard him participate in a dialogue, and as YouTube’s algorithm learned more about me, he became a more regular presence in my daily listening until, suddenly, I discovered just how much work he’s done.
Who is John Vervaeke?
A few points.
I.
He was raised in some sort of fundamentalist North American variety of Christianity. As a teen, he spent a lot of time worrying about eternal damnation. In college, he got into Philosophy, and seems to have gone through the whole materialist atheist thing. This brought him into the realm of science and psychology, which he pursued ardently.
II.
After earning a Master’s in Philosophy, he obtained a BSc in Cognitive Science. Then he went back and got a PhD in Philosophy. When Robert Wright asked him about his background, Dr. Vervaeke was as quick to say that it is in Psychology as much as it is in Philosophy. (I guess we’d need to look at the papers and theses to judge for ourselves.) Since carving out the department of Cognitive Science in Toronto almost single-handedly, he seems to also be very well informed in Neuroscience and hip to the latest research in Artificial Intelligence.
Somewhere along that journey he read Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life and started thinking differently about ancient philosophy, and this drew him to (neo)Platonism.
Simultaneously, he was studying two other things: Tai Chi and Vipassana (Buddhist Mindfulness/ Insight) meditation.
This cocktail caused him to start seeing the world differently. Like another one of his heroes, Spinoza, he believes that by starting with firm facts which we can know on the ground, eventually — through study and practice — begin to develop an erotic connection with the mystery of the cosmos, which transforms us mystically and spiritually.
III.
He has more or less created, maintained, and grown the Cognitive Science department at University of Toronto. His research has included working in and introducing a few key concepts. I’m not going to get deep here, this is a quick primer. Google may be helpful to you here. It is likely I may write on these later on.
Four E Cognitive Science
This is a theory of the way that we understand the world as conscious beings capable of self-reflection. Our cognition is experienced in at least four ways. It is
Embedded
Embodied
Enacted and
Extended
Four Ways of Knowing
Dr. Vervaeke is very intent on reminding us that our knowledge isn’t only experienced by reading facts in textbooks (propositional knowing). Rather, we have at least four different ways of knowing. Again, I will probably write (a lot) more on this later on.
Propositional
Participatory
Perspectival
Procedural
Relevance Realization
I don’t pretend to have a mastery on this idea, but it has to do with the idea that as conscious beings we have a “salience landscape” where we need to hack short-hands and thumbnails to prevent information overload. Further, if we try to figure everything out, we run into “combinatorial explosion,” where the possibilities become too much to process.
Dr. Vervaeke almost always defines “realization” as meaning two things at once:
To make something real
To come into awareness of something
We do both when we educt from ourselves recognition of what is relevant.
IV.
He thinks we’re in the midst of a Meaning Crisis. Here he is talking to our friend Robert Wright:
Bob: So I wanna talk about this meaning thing. I think a lot of people will recognize the problem you’re talking about — or at least are familiar with some of the indices you cite of the crisis. Higher suicide rate among young people. Various signs… more mass shootings and so on. You note that more and more people seem to need to look for meaning in things like video games, virtual worlds… There are a lot of things you would cite as evidence of the Meaning Crisis. Just quickly, are there a couple of big ones you’d add to that? On your list, what are the next two or three?
Vervaeke: You also get significant surveys. There was one done in the UK in 2019 — 89% of people said that they felt their lives were meaningless, which is significant. You get increased loneliness. The number of close friends that people have on average is declining consistently, even though we’re more connected virtually. The fact that we seem to be in weird, paradoxical states where everything is politicized — yet we all feel disenfranchised, and feel the political system is not legitimate. You’ve got polarization and gridlock but political intensification of everything. That’s just one example of things that seem to bespeak a system that’s in criticality — that’s breaking down in some important ways for people.
There’s also not just negative symptoms (this is work I’ve done with Christopher Mastropietro) There’s also positive things in which people are attempting to respond to these. I have criticisms of each one of these, but I think they should be seen as positive responses, rather than symptomatic reactions. Things like the Mindfulness Revolution. I’m very aware (and have participated in the criticism) of McMindfulness. But the revival of things like Stoicism. . . and the fact that Meaning and Wisdom are now hot academic topics. (And I’ve published on them.) And they weren’t that even ten years ago.
V.
He thinks the Axial Age “Legacy” religions are no longer viable, and that is a part of the reason we’re struggling. Rather than doubling down and trying to practice faiths in such a way that might only increase our division, he proposes the idea of “Ratio Religio” — keeping “that which binds us” in proper proportion for ethical participation. (It’s often thought that the root of “Religion” is “to bind together.”)2
Additionally, he advises folk develop an “Ecology of Practices” to work with the nature of our cognition to grow into a deeper participation with the Cosmos, wherein which “Meaning” will naturally return to our sore psyches.
If you’re interested in knowing more, here is a 60 second clip from his series After Socrates (a series where he offers FREE lectures and practices to help us): "Are You Willing to Take That Risk?"
VI.
Dialectic into Dialogos
Especially given the four ways of knowing, and the four Es of cognition, Dr. Vervaeke is 100% that we can’t do this alone. We need to work together. But not only that — we can’t understand the cosmos without dialectic. This idea starts with Plotinus, but moves up all the way through modernity, especially via Plato.
But Dialectic itself isn’t enough. Better is when, during attentive and considerate conversations where people do not assume adversarial roles, but rather engage their curiosity and compassion, we can enter a process state called Dialogos.
Logos is a slippery, all-encompassing idea that I can’t get into here. But it’s used by Plotinus, the Stoics, Plato and Aristotle, and in the introductory statements in the Gospel of John. It has to do with the way that the cosmos can come to be understood logically. It is the root meaning “study of” we see in “Psycho-logy.” But it’s also more.
We can get glimpses of the things when we reach a state of aporia in our dialectic. It all sounds kind of psychedelic — we reach a state where we’ve surpassed our individual assumptions to see a greater reality, albeit one we can’t necessarily restate once we’ve come down from the mountain top.
* * *
And now, fair reader, I shall abruptly end my first round of description of our scholar. As Dr. Vervaeke ends all of his lectures,
“Thank you very much for your time and attention.”
You will, I hope, forgive me. Dr. Vervaeke is a well-read academic who is quite rigorous in his citations as he speaks. I am a lowly poet, and am doing my best to assimilate the information. It might be that sometimes I actually plagiarize another scholar by plagiarizing Dr. Vervaeke. My goal is to acquire the ideas and tools and implement them into my daily life. At some point during my Master’s degree I flatly decided, “I don’t want to become a scholar. I want to be a poet — and make do howsoever I may.” Pros and Cons to all decisions, aren’t there? So, let this footnote be my first confession: “I am a plagiarist, insofar as ideas are concerned.” I say this unabashedly, for better or worse.
One of my favorite things about Dr. Vervaeke is that he shares with me a love of Etymology — a sense of the historical meanings of words. Rather than being pedantic, this is done to refresh already existing language to draw out fresh recognition of the sources of its meaning, giving us new ways to optimize the tools we’ve been blessed with.