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The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis: John Vervaeke Iain McGilchrist Daniel Schmachtenberger

Dr Iain McGilchrist・2 minutes read

Human technological advancements and the impact of the Industrial Revolution have led to the metac crisis, posing existential risks by crossing planetary boundaries. The interconnected issues of climate change, species extinction, and nuclear threats emphasize the need for collective action and a balance between the left and right hemispheres of the brain to address the challenges civilization faces.

Insights

  • The term "metac crisis" describes the world's current state facing severe risks due to human technological advancements and population growth.
  • The poly crisis concept suggests that solutions to one problem may inadvertently worsen others, exemplified by post-World War II avoidance of nuclear war leading to complex global supply chains and resource consumption.
  • The left and right hemispheres of the brain offer different modes of attention, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world, with overemphasis on mechanistic reductionism potentially leading to collapse.
  • Reality is experienced as a relationship between observers and the observed, impacting each other, with happiness rooted in values, purpose, and a sense of the Sacred.
  • Wisdom must bind power to prevent self-destruction, emphasizing the need for restraint and self-restraint in societal progress, with a focus on balancing power awareness and maintaining wisdom.
  • The text advocates for a pluralistic approach that integrates various philosophical and religious traditions globally, emphasizing the importance of cultivating wisdom and creating conditions for its growth to prevent global catastrophic risks.

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Recent questions

  • What is the metacrisis?

    The metacrisis refers to the current state of the world facing serious risks and impending problems due to human technological advancements and population growth. It encompasses various interconnected issues like climate change, species extinction, nuclear threats, and more, emphasizing the need to address them collectively.

  • How do civilizations rise and fall?

    Civilizations rise and fall based on the balance or imbalance between the left and right hemisphere ways of seeing the world. Overemphasis on mechanistic reductionism can lead to collapse, as seen in historical patterns of civilizations experiencing cycles of creative flourishing followed by collapse due to neglect of interconnected, complex realities.

  • Why is relevance important?

    Relevance is crucial as it connects subjective and objective aspects, termed as transc. It is not just a calculation but a matter of caring and commitment, focusing on what's relevant while ignoring irrelevant information to stay aligned with reality and prevent self-deception.

  • What is the role of wisdom in managing power?

    Wisdom plays a vital role in managing technological power to prevent global catastrophic risks. It must bind power, guiding it to prevent chaos and imbalance, ensuring that power is used responsibly for the greater good and to maintain societal progress.

  • How can individuals contribute positively to the world?

    Individuals can contribute positively to the world by cultivating wisdom, creating conditions for wisdom to flourish, and integrating various philosophical and religious traditions globally. By internalizing sage models, being active participants in the world, and balancing global and local actions, individuals can inspire aspirational projects and regeneration at both global and local levels.

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Summary

00:00

"Metac Crisis: Interconnected Risks of Civilization"

  • The term "metac crisis" refers to the current state of the world facing serious risks and impending problems due to human technological advancements and population growth.
  • The Industrial Revolution and subsequent technological developments have led to the crossing of planetary boundaries, with six out of nine major boundaries already crossed, posing existential risks.
  • The metac crisis encompasses various interconnected issues like climate change, species extinction, nuclear threats, and more, emphasizing the need to address them collectively.
  • The poly crisis concept suggests that solutions to one problem may inadvertently worsen others, exemplified by the post-World War II era's avoidance of nuclear war leading to complex global supply chains and resource consumption.
  • Human technology and its impact on the environment stem from the unique nature of human beings, their ability to create and utilize technology, and the resulting challenges faced by civilization.
  • The left and right hemispheres of the brain offer different modes of attention, with the left focusing on precise details and the right on broader, interconnected views, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world.
  • The historical pattern of civilizations rising and falling is linked to the balance or imbalance between the left and right hemisphere ways of seeing the world, with overemphasis on mechanistic reductionism leading to collapse.
  • The Western world has experienced cycles of creative flourishing followed by collapse, often due to overreliance on mechanistic thinking and neglect of the interconnected, complex nature of reality.
  • The shift towards viewing the world as a collection of parts rather than interconnected wholes has led to philosophical errors and a loss of understanding of the inherent complexity and uniqueness of reality.
  • Factors like capitalism, global generalizations, and the pursuit of global empires have contributed to a departure from recognizing the intrinsic value and interconnectedness of all aspects of reality, leading to a disconnect from the true nature of existence.

17:15

"Meaning, Happiness, and the Brain's Role"

  • Reality is experienced as a relationship between observers and the observed, impacting each other.
  • Happiness is rooted in values, purpose, and a sense of the Sacred, not just material power.
  • The right hemisphere is crucial for emotional, social, and cognitive intelligence.
  • The term "master and Emissary" is used as a fable to illustrate the relationship between the hemispheres of the brain.
  • A national survey in the UK in 2019 revealed that 80% of people found their lives meaningless.
  • Anxiety, associated with the right hemisphere, leads to a sense of disconnection and concern.
  • Meaning in life is linked to a sense of belonging and is predictive of various negative outcomes like anxiety, depression, and suicide.
  • Zombies in popular culture symbolize a loss of meaning and intelligibility in life.
  • Video games provide narrative, rules, self-transcendence, and flow state, fulfilling the four factors of meaning in life.
  • Meaning in life is connected to attention, consciousness, working memory, and general intelligence, solving problems by anticipating and becoming part of the world.

33:05

"Relevance and Care: Cultivating Wisdom and Connection"

  • AGI project focuses on relevance and caring, not checking all information.
  • Ignoring irrelevant information is crucial in focusing on what's relevant.
  • Relevance is not just a calculation but a matter of caring and commitment.
  • Relevance connects subjective and objective, termed as transc.
  • Self-deception is a risk due to focusing on what's relevant and ignoring other information.
  • Balancing self-deception and adaptive connectedness is a complex trade-off.
  • An ecology of practices is needed to intervene in cognition and awareness.
  • Practices must be interconnected and self-organizing, set within a guiding community.
  • Lack of a sacred canopy leads to a crisis in cultivating wisdom and addressing self-destructive behavior.
  • Values and purpose draw individuals forward, evoking responses and guiding actions.

48:52

Essence of Reality: Love, Aspiration, and Connection

  • Intrinsic motivation is crucial for being in a state of connectedness and optimal motivation, leading to a flow state where activities are done for their own sake.
  • The sacred is about how reality reveals itself when engaged in serious play, exploring relevance realization and salience.
  • Aspiration is essential for binding oneself to the future, demonstrated through an experiment on saving for retirement and the impact of practicing imagining one's future self regularly.
  • Rationality involves an aspirational project of becoming someone different, requiring imagination and connection with one's future self.
  • Love is not merely subjective but a way of binding oneself to another person, involving a deep connection beyond choice or preference.
  • Value is often misunderstood as choice or preference, but it should be seen as a call to aspire towards the true, good, and beautiful.
  • Love is a way of connecting to the realness of something beyond oneself, emphasizing a deep connection and recognition of the other's existence.
  • The conversation delves into the intrinsic purpose of reality, challenging the idea of a meaningless universe and highlighting the importance of aligning with reality's nature.
  • The left hemisphere's focus on utility as the driving value contrasts with a hierarchy of values that includes love, beauty, goodness, truth, and the sacred.
  • Meaning is found in infinite games that hold value in being performed, emphasizing openness to attractive forces like relationships, shared values, and cultural cohesion, which are increasingly challenging to find in modern society.

01:04:58

Loneliness, Nature, Spirituality, Power, Wisdom, Balance

  • Loneliness is a key issue affecting people's lives, emphasizing the importance of connection and belonging in the social world.
  • The relationship with the natural world has become increasingly isolated in the last 150 years, highlighting the significance of being intertwined with nature.
  • The realm of the spiritual or sacred is often disregarded as insignificant, but it holds immense importance in bringing meaning to life.
  • The left hemisphere focuses on acquisition, pleasure, and power, while the right hemisphere is more open to spiritual and higher values.
  • Societies that prioritize utility and power tend to win in competitive dynamics, leading to a world driven by game theory and exploitation of resources.
  • The emphasis on utility and power creates a self-terminating civilization, evident in issues like climate change and species extinction.
  • Restraint and self-restraint are crucial for wisdom and societal progress, requiring sacrifices for a greater good.
  • Defection from self-restraint towards short-term power gains can lead to a world oriented towards power-seeking behaviors.
  • Wisdom must bind power, as the master must guide the emissary to prevent chaos and imbalance.
  • Symbolic values and connections to something beyond oneself, like having children, contribute to a meaningful life and subjective well-being.

01:20:59

Power, love, and meaning in philosophy.

  • Plato's concept of "the good" is discussed as a grounding force for the world.
  • Spinoza's insight on overcoming powerful motivations with love for being within, between, and beyond is highlighted.
  • Christianity's impact on the Roman Empire is noted, emphasizing the introduction of new ways of self-love, love for others, and love for God.
  • The importance of overcoming meaning scarcity to shift from a scarcity mentality to falling in love with being and connectedness is stressed.
  • The scarcity mentality is differentiated from economic scarcity, focusing on the need for meaning and connection.
  • The decrease in perspective-taking ability as individuals move up corporate structures is mentioned, impacting their capacity for deep connections.
  • The discussion shifts to the power law distribution, highlighting how a small percentage of individuals with significant power influence conditioning environments for others.
  • The distinction between cognitive empathy and emotive empathy in sociopaths is explained, emphasizing the importance of genuine empathy over simulated empathy.
  • The role of Christianity in preserving certain values and cultural cognitive grammar is acknowledged, despite the threat of power dynamics.
  • The responsibility of the master in maintaining the relationship with the sacred and preventing corruption by power is discussed, emphasizing the need for vulnerability and balance.

01:36:43

Balancing Power and Wisdom in Relationships

  • The dangerous brother produces thorns, flies, and bats, needing to maintain distance from the good brother to preserve independence.
  • The good brother must not fuse with the dangerous one, requiring one to be subservient to the other, although complete power cannot be guaranteed.
  • Wisdom sees beyond power, necessitating a balance between power awareness and maintaining wisdom.
  • In educational settings, educators aim to close information asymmetries with students, unlike traditional power dynamics that exploit and grow asymmetries.
  • Pursuers of wisdom and the sacred must not ignore developing power, as leaving power to sociopaths risks destruction and extinction.
  • While reducing harm is crucial, growth in wisdom is essential to prevent psychopaths from gaining control.
  • The left and right hemispheres must maintain a proper relationship, with the left not overpowering the right's reverence and values.
  • The Enlightenment clarified the difference between authority and power, emphasizing reciprocal recognition and distributed cognition.
  • Reason and rationality should not be reduced to mere calculation but should focus on being reciprocally responsible to each other.
  • Governance should be based on authority derived from reciprocal recognition, ensuring a balance between reason and being with each other responsibly.

01:51:59

Balancing Reason and Intuition for Education

  • Enlightenment era bound Authority and power, rationality reduced to mere calculation of behavior.
  • Reason, balancing rationality with intuitions from experience, vital for education for 2,000 years.
  • Logos reduced to logic, reason to logical manipulation, losing perspectival and participatory notions.
  • Importance of reverence between left and right brain hemispheres, recognizing each other's value.
  • Opponent processing crucial for self-correction, seen in autonomic nervous system and attentional system.
  • Nature's solution to the no-free-lunch theorem through complementary biases in systems.
  • Proper relationship between brain hemispheres as opponent processing, not adversarial.
  • Humans' evolutionary capability surpassing apex predator theory due to technological advancements.
  • Metacrisis origin traced back to stone tools, with exponential tech surpassing planetary boundaries.
  • Recognition of choice and honoring it crucial in the relationship to the sacred and ethics.

02:07:00

Evolution, Wisdom, and Technological Power: A Discussion

  • The text discusses the evolutionary selection of humans and the problems caused by anthropogenic activities like climate change.
  • It mentions the concept of exaptive solutions to both problems and solutions being tied to evolutionary capacities.
  • The text delves into the comparison between wise-oriented exaptations and technological power dynamic exaptations.
  • It questions the amount of hope that can be placed in these different types of exaptations.
  • The discussion revolves around the need for wisdom to manage technological power to prevent global catastrophic risks.
  • The text explores the idea of co-opting and exapting religion to guide civilization towards better stewardship of power.
  • It emphasizes the importance of developing wisdom at a scale necessary to ensure human survival without self-destruction.
  • The text suggests the need for a new form of religion that incorporates wisdom, restraint, and power binding to create meaningfulness and coordination.
  • It discusses the potential of integrating neoplatonism and Zen Buddhism to form a philosophical Silk Road for fundamental understanding.
  • The text concludes with the importance of trust in society, highlighting the need for shared values and the dangers of relying solely on external constraints for morality.

02:23:58

"Global Wisdom: Cultivating Beauty, Goodness, Truth"

  • The text discusses the provision of a philosophical framework and tradition that allows for experiencing beauty, goodness, and truth from various civilizations like Chinese, Japanese, and Indian cultures.
  • It emphasizes the importance of being active participants in the world rather than passive recipients, highlighting moral responsibilities in attending to things to create positive outcomes.
  • The text delves into the idea of the Divine being actively involved in creation and evolution, interacting with its creation to promote the sacred and further its understanding of itself.
  • It introduces the concept of repairing the shattering in the Kabbalistic story of creation, suggesting that humanity has a unique role in creating vessels more beautiful than before.
  • The text explores the role of humans in potentially influencing the existence and evolution of the Divine, proposing a deeper obligation to contribute positively to the world.
  • It mentions the significance of cultivating wisdom and creating conditions for wisdom to flourish rather than imposing it mechanistically.
  • The text advocates for a pluralistic approach that integrates various philosophical and religious traditions globally, allowing for individual enrichment while contributing to a collective evolution.
  • It stresses the importance of internalizing sage models and community role models to inspire aspirational projects and regeneration at both global and local levels.
  • The text highlights the need for balancing global and local actions, emphasizing the cultivation of wisdom and creating circumstances for its growth, akin to nurturing a plant.
  • It suggests a respectful inquiry into past religious and philosophical endeavors to synthesize meaningful aspects from different traditions without homogenization, recognizing the relative newness of Western and Eastern traditions in human history.

02:40:27

"Human Existence: From Local to Global"

  • Human existence pre-civilization lasted hundreds of thousands of years, with religious and philosophic structures only existing for a few thousand years.
  • Local experiences were prevalent pre-civilization, contrasting with the scalable nature of mimetic structures tied to technoeconomic and military scaling.
  • Reductionism emphasizes shared characteristics as real, challenging the uniqueness and distinctions that are equally crucial.
  • Wisdom cultivation is moment-specific, utilizing all capabilities uniquely, contrasting with abstracted relationships seen in larger contexts.
  • Indigenous wisdom traditions, rooted in intimate relationships, leaned towards animism, emphasizing the immanence of the Creator within creation.
  • Small-scale interactions foster high intimacy and touch, focusing on unique individuals rather than abstract group affiliations.
  • Hemispheric dominance may influence scaling approaches, with questions arising about differences between matriarchal and patriarchal cultures in this context.
  • Global scale issues driven by global drivers necessitate a balance between local uniqueness and distribution, challenging standardization and loss of instantiation.
  • Experimental suppression of hemispheres alters perceptions of animate and inanimate objects, highlighting the role of the right hemisphere in understanding uniqueness.
  • Intelligibility relies on integrating differentiation and integration, emphasizing the importance of both unity and division in ontology and understanding reality.

02:56:47

"Religion, Education, and Interconnectedness: A Synoptic Approach"

  • The term "reify" is discussed, with a clarification that it means interpreting religion in a specific direction that aligns with humanity's constraints.
  • Scholars debate the real interpretation of religious concepts, emphasizing that there are multiple valid perspectives.
  • A comparison is drawn between psychological health and cultural diversity, highlighting the importance of contextually sensitive universal principles.
  • Focusing on the Trinity within Christianity, the idea of relationality being primordial is emphasized, suggesting a shift in perspective towards interconnectedness.
  • Practical advice is given to approach practices with a relational mindset, potentially leading to a shift from a materialistic to a more meaningful existence.
  • The Vatican and the Department of Education are mentioned as potential entities interested in implementing wisdom development practices, seeking guidance on practical approaches.
  • The need for diverse teaching institutions, including universities, monasteries, churches, and hospitals, is proposed to foster a holistic approach to education.
  • A call to free teachers from bureaucratic constraints and focus on relational, empathic learning is made, advocating for a return to a more comprehensive educational approach.
  • The importance of synoptic integration across disciplines, such as cognitive science, is highlighted to address the replication crisis and promote a more interconnected approach to knowledge.
  • The lack of integration across specialty areas is linked to global risks, emphasizing the necessity of synoptic integrators alongside specialists for societal progress.

03:12:19

"Promoting wholeness, breaking feedback loops, taking action"

  • The text discusses the need to develop things that promote wholeness, integration, and sacredness while undoing elements that lead to excessive focus on the wrong mental modes.
  • It highlights the importance of identifying what can be dispensed with during a scarcity crisis and the challenge of relinquishing power from mediocre individuals in administrative roles.
  • The text emphasizes breaking positive feedback loops that steer us towards undesirable futures and the necessity of developing new positive feedback loops for progress.
  • It concludes with a call to action, urging listeners not to despair but to find hope, engage in personal and collective actions, and embrace the beauty and sacredness of reality to motivate protective impulses towards it.
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