The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis: John Vervaeke Iain McGilchrist Daniel Schmachtenberger
by luishfelicio@ · 23 things on NewTwos
- The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (English Edition)
- The very process that makes you intelligently adaptive makes you perpetually prone to self-deception.
Very often what we ignore can turn out to be the relevant information that we actually need to solve whatever problem we are facing.
- The First Noble Truth is not a dismal metaphysical statement saying that everything is suffering. Notice that there is a difference between a metaphysical doctrine in which you are making a statement about The Absolute and a Noble Truth which is a reflection. A Noble Truth is a truth to reflect upon; it is not an absolute; it is not The Absolute. This is where Western people get very confused because they interpret this Noble Truth as a kind of metaphysical truth of Buddhism - but it was never meant to be that.
You can see that the First Noble Truth is not an absolute statement because of the Fourth Noble Truth, which is the way of non-suffering. You cannot have absolute suffering and then have a way out of it, can you? That doesn’t make sense. Yet some people will pick up on the First Noble Truth and say that the Buddha taught that everything is suffering.
The Pali word, dukkha, means "incapable of satisfying" or "not able to bear or withstand anything": always changing, incapable of truly fulfilling us or making us happy. The sensual world is like that, a vibration in nature. It would, in fact, be terrible if we did find satisfaction in the sensory world because then we wouldn’t search beyond it; we’d just be bound to it
- Eightfold path as a solution for self-deception. They are represented by a wheel because of they interconnectedness and self-organization
Right View, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.
The first seven are taught to be pillars that support Right Concentration.
The Eightfold Path is the path to liberation from samsara
- To comprehend the significance of meaning crises, we need to understand that unlike many other cultures, we lack the knowledge of where to search for wisdom. Earlier, we had a worldview that provided us with a sacred canopy. Our religious frameworks gave us traditions, worldviews, and practices to address this. The crisis began with medieval nominalism and later with the scientific revolution. With the advent of hyper-technologies, the situation has only worsened.
When we lack wisdom, the meaning of life is put at a significant risk.
- Finding meaning with video games and the digital world. The four pillars.
- Sacred canopy is something that every human society builds over its world to give it meaning
- Nominalism is the philosophical view that abstract concepts, general terms, or universals have no independent existence but exist only as names. It also claims that various individual objects labeled by the same term have nothing in common but their name.
- Ontology
- at its simplest, is the study of existence. But it is much more than that, too. Ontology is also the study of how we determine if things exist or not, as well as the classification of existence. It attempts to take things that are abstract and establish that they are, in fact, real
- is a way of showing the properties of a subject area and how they are related, by defining a set of terms and relational expressions that represent the entities in that subject area.
- It is not that reality is a meaningless universe that we have to paint meaning on but that reality has something like an intrinsic purpose to it.
- Utilitarianism is a philosophical belief that emphasizes the importance of maximizing overall happiness and reducing suffering. In the context of society, this often means prioritizing practical, logical, and analytical thinking, which are functions primarily associated with the left hemisphere of the brain. While this approach can be very useful in solving problems and making decisions, it can also lead to an imbalance that neglects other important aspects of life, such as creativity, intuition, and emotions, which are primarily associated with the right hemisphere of the brain. But we cannot expect this to answer our questions or that this level of value will give us the fulfillment that is promised to us by our culture which is all about acquisition, greed and competition, typical values of the left hemisphere.
- Finite vs Infinite games
- In a finite game, there is a clearly defined end point and there are winners and losers. In an infinite game, all parties are working to keep the game in play. There are no winners or losers, but rather those that drop out of the game due to a lack of will or resources to continue playing.
- In the end purpose will be an openness to an attractive force. There are many but they can be boiled down in some ways to 3 incredibly important things that give meaning to life, each of which has more or less trashed by our current civilization
- The first is our relationship with society, being bound to one another, the business of sharing one's life with people who share your values who you can trust, confide in, play with, eat with, and generally share a culture, which may be based on religion, but has common rituals which we all understand
- The second is the relationship with the natural world in all its complexity and beauty. Only the last 150 years we have become isolated from nature
- The third is the relationship to a realm of something beyond this. The transcendent realm of the spiritual or the sacred.
- The left hemisphere is designed only for the acquisition of pleasure, getting stuff, and having fun, associated with power and acquisition, it is more dopaminergic equivalent, associated with addiction than the right hemisphere
- The right hemisphere is more able to open itself to the sacred and higher values of beauty, goodness, truth and the spiritual, even higher is the sacred.
- When people are experiencing a lack of meaning in their lives, they can fall into a mentality of scarcity and short-term thinking, focused solely on their own needs. However, if we can help them rediscover the joy of being and the importance of connection with themselves and others, we can inspire them to prioritize more fulfilling values, such as connectedness over success.
- Democracy is necessary to counteract self-deceptive bias since other entities possess alternative biases, and by committing to the Geist and logos between them, they can achieve the best self-correcting system, which is what democracy is supposed to provide. But not just individual cognition, it is supposed to be for distributed cognition.