Meaning in the 20th century went missing. With the decline of religion, and the rise of science, for many in the modern world nihilism has taken hold. But this is a mistake. We must usher in the return of meaning, for the existential health of our selves and our culture, writes John Vervaeke.
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David Jones 2 5 February 2022
There is this image that is fractal and repeated and all the level with Vervaeke of a set group of distinct but often fuzzy edged ecology of dynamically interacting "things" (but perhaps too fuzzy and changeable to be a thing). I think this image is a step up from the fatally myopic propositional scientific system (perhaps a rigid network) in terms of truth but actually is not really helping us except to say we need talk about it more. What we want surely is to know what this competing relevance realisation modules in the mental dynamical system actually are and why? Until we fins that we are still just groping in the dark and going round in circles...
David Jones 2 5 February 2022
Good overview...just a point to help clarify
"Most of this meaning making is taking place below your beliefs and the obviousness of your everyday experience. However, for many historical reasons that I explored and explained in my Awakening from the Meaning Crisis video series, our culture has become excessively, perhaps obsessively, focused on this level of belief and everyday obviousness. We suffer propositional-ideological tyranny. "
This needs an addition of "propositional" before "beliefs" in the first line, else the rest doesn't make sense... it is propositional rather than perspectival beliefs (and the others) that we focus on and foreground - hence the propositional-ideological tyranny!
Cameron Wright 4 February 2022
It strikes me that the ideas you share are like the basic research that leads to some breakthrough later down the line. It's a real joy to read and listen to the things you and your contemporaries produce. But I wonder what you would have to say about specific things, say to take your perspective and knowledge and embody it by analyzing or critiquing some story, character, person, or cultural practice that's a bit more everyday rather than things, like this wonderful article, that require a reader to google the meaning of words or phrases, like perspectival knowing, or circling. Maybe if I said it like this it would make sense: provide smaller heuristics (?) that can be potentially built up into the large sophisticated matrix of ideas and pyschotechnologies you possess rather than deconstructing a large body of knowledge down into smaller components and then trying to link them to something appropriate. "That's amazing, but what do I do with it?" is a common refrain for me when I read or listen to things like this.
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