Why Reason Needs Spirit | John Vervaeke

21:40no

21:43is it just fictional unreal no because you actually get real knowledge that you absolutely have to have in order to become reasonable that space inside your head is imaginal it's imaginal and it helps you get an optimal grip on your own cognition what about your relationship to your future self. If you're going to be rational, you have to do things now for the sake of your future self. Is that future self, is it physically real? Well, no. Is it merely fictional? No, because that's not right either because if you don't pay attention to it, you're dead. So what is it? Oh, it's imaginal.

22:31Sometimes I have to think really concretely and sometimes I have to think very abstractly. Notice what my hands are doing. I'm doing this. Is that physical? Is abstract, like, literally above us? No. Is that just fiction? No, because try and think of it without doing that. The imaginal is essential to being reasonable. But the imaginal is depending on your capacities for anticipation and relevance realization.

23:11The imaginal, which is so central to you being reasonable, depends on the fact that you are in this porous relationship with reality. You bleed into the world and the world bleeds into you. And that's not the model of reasonable rationality we were given by the Enlightenment.

23:42The model we were given is, and I'll come back to this, is the model of disengagement. This is Charles Taylor's work.

23:50Dr. John Vervaeke:To be rational is to disengage and try and look at things objectively.

24:00Dr. John Vervaeke:Let's go back to this. This relevance realization.

24:09Dr. John Vervaeke:Where's relevance? Is it in me? Is it a subjective value that I have? No, because I can get it wrong, and if I get it wrong, I die.

24:23Oh, so and it's object. It's an objective property of things. So notice this It's not relevant to you and now you're doomed because if it's objective, it's going to be relevant to you for the rest of your life So it's neither objective nor subjective Where is it? Where is it? and notice what we're trying to do here we're trying to these are the dichotomies see the disengagement of modernity is built on dichotomies, it's built on cutting things off from each other in here is myself and that's voluntary and that's where my values come from out there is objectivity and that's where

25:12Dr. John Vervaeke:the facts come from And you can't get from values to facts, and you can't get from facts to values, and Sam Harris and all those people argue.

25:22Now, does that actually make any ultimate sense? Because is relevance a fact or a value?

25:37Ah, right.

25:43All these dichotomies are like the grid work by which we are supposed to see and understand the world.

25:55But our relationship to the world isn't a dichotomous disengagement. It's a porous participation. It's a porous participation.

26:14Why does that matter? Let's keep doing this. I'm going to keep circling through the imaginal and the rational and show you its porous participation again and again and again and again and again.

26:30See,

26:36that domain of transjectivity, of the porous participation that is deeper, more real,

26:45Dr. John Vervaeke:than the subjective-objective dichotomy, which is not universal across cultures or history, by the way, even though we think it's natural.

26:57That religio domain, that's where voluntary necessity is. What's that? Well, this is a notion by Harry Frankfurt. And it's convergent with work by John Searle and a whole bunch of other people. So you're reading a compelling argument. It's persuasive, yes? And you come to the conclusion, you go, hey, I think that's true. So it's compelling. Was it compulsive? Did you lose your agency? Oh, I'm just addicted to the conclusion. No, that's actually the hallmark of somebody who's irrational. They'll go to the conclusion regardless of the argument, yeah? So notice this distinction. I'm going to play with these words.

27:41It's compelling, but it's not compulsive Right and notice how it doesn't lend it's not it doesn't land cleanly in voluntary or necessary So that's why he calls it voluntary necessity just to be provocative You're in love with somebody. It's compelling But do you feel that you're losing your agency by loving them?

28:08Dr. John Vervaeke:No, it feels like you, like, I am utterly convinced that I've made a lifetime commitment to Sarah that I love this woman profoundly. And I don't feel like a drug addict. I feel like I am totally free in the fact that I can do no other than love her the way I do. And that's, I hope that lands for you. There's the beautiful sunset It's compelling is it compulsive?

28:46No, you don't feel like you're losing your agency you feel like it's coming into fruition Voluntariness says look it's at the heart of reason. It's at the heart of love. It's at the heart of beauty It's at the heart of relevance things are relevant to you They're compelling but they're not compulsive because they can be relevant one minute salient one minute Your left big toe, it's salient to you now. Hopefully it doesn't remain that way for much longer. Voluntary necessity, voluntary necessity, voluntary necessity. You see, religio is the domain of voluntary necessity. I am talking about spirit, although you haven't heard me use the word yet.

29:28I am talking about spirit. I'm trying to give us a new way of talking about spirit.

29:37I was talking to Bishop Maximus on the Philosophical Silk Road, and he was giving me an argument.

29:44Dr. John Vervaeke:Some of you might have seen the video. And he was giving an argument for Clement of Alexandria, and he had what's called a presuppositional view of faith. And when it was done, I said to him, something just clicked for me. The Philosophical Silk Road has just unleashed a tsunami of synchronicities for me that I don't know how to explain. I'm just sort of riding the wave. and I said I've been trying to understand this voluntary necessity but what I think is going on is the sensed presence of that voluntary necessity that's the common heart sense of reason beauty love flow relevance that common heart sense that sensed presence of that that's what you mean by faith and he said John I think that's a perfect argument now when a bishop tells you that, you pay attention to it, right?

30:32And so, oh, good. I was kind of like, wow. You see, that's what I have with Sarah. I'm faithful to her. It doesn't mean that I get up, what things do I believe about Sarah without good evidence? That's not what that means. It means I have a sensed presence of a calling to her of voluntary necessity, And that voluntary necessity isn't something aberrant to my cognitive agents. It's at the heart of reason, love, beauty, flow, relevance, realization, predictive processing, etc.

31:21Now, I think that's what I finally got what Spinoza meant when he said, truth is its own

31:30Dr. John Vervaeke:standard. What he meant was, all you can use to judge if you're moving towards reality is that sense of, that sense presence of voluntary necessity that's at the core of reason, love, beauty, etc. And you can say, that can all lead you astray. Yes. And what do you use in order to judge that it's led you astray? The voluntary necessity sense is at the heart of reason, love, beauty, flow, relevance, realization.

32:07And then what Spinoza means more deeply is when that sensed calling, he called it the intellectual love of God, is calling us into a deeper relationship with a deeper reality.

32:26Now this is happening at multiple levels because you exist at multiple levels. You have your agency. Well, I left that out too long.

32:42Dr. John Vervaeke:I hope the red comes up as much. You have your agency. This is the fact that unlike a fire, you seek out the conditions that produce and protect your existence. You're an agent, so is a paramecium. But you're not just an agent you use narrative Oh goodness John Bervick he's talking about narrative You use narrative become to become a temporally extended agent you work in terms of goals that affect your far future in terms of things that come from your deep past no matter how eloquently a dog barks It can't tell you that his parents were born poor but hard working but you can. Through narrative you become extended in time.

33:29You become extended in reflection. You can reflect back on yourself by telling yourself your autobiography. You can consider possibilities by running the time clock forward on your autobiography. That's what it is to be a self. It is to use narrative to extend your agency in time, possibility, and levels of construal.

33:53But that's not all you are.

33:58You're also a person.

34:05You do something that no other thing can do, barring God or something like that. I mean, no other biological organism. You make promises.

34:19You make promises. You do things not because of your agency or your selfhood, because of your desires or your autobiography.

34:28Dr. John Vervaeke:You do things because you are obligating yourself to what is true or good or beautiful. And you always do that. There are no persons without communities, and there are no communities without persons.

34:44You're doing religio at all those levels, and it's always imaginal.

34:57and it's always multi-leveled,

35:04which means

35:09there are levels to you that are primordial. They're sub-egoic. they're from that from which everything springs. For example, relevance realization, religio, is primordial in a profound sense. Before you can form representations, thoughts, ideas, formal,

35:29Dr. John Vervaeke:all of that presupposes relevance realization. And if you don't believe me, go and look. I've got a few things on relevance realization. Go look at all the published work, all the arguments.

35:43but it not only reaches into the primordial like Elizabeth's roots of the tree it also reaches above into the community and beyond into the super egoic like the branches of the tree and it's not only porous this way it's not only porous participation this way it's porous participation this way because it's not like this is a ladder it's not like your agency is left behind when you're a person. It bleeds into yourself and into your person, and your personhood bleeds down into yourself and down into your agency. That's why you have weird things like the placebo effect. Because you believe that person is the doctor with the requisite authority, and he's come in, and he's acting out of an obligation, and he's telling stuff, and you can imagine it, and it reaches down into your agency, and then it reaches down below your agency, and you get healed.

36:42Now somebody who's doing a lot of work on that is a biologist

36:46Dr. John Vervaeke:who is going to be thought about in 20 years from now the way we think about Einstein now. And this is Michael Levin, who I consider a friend. And Mike has been doing undeniable experimental work showing that cognition reaches down to the sub-egoic into subcellular mechanisms and reaches up beyond individual organisms. Take a look at his work. It is astonishing. You got bottom-up stuff. So we've been taught, Richard Dawkins, selfish gene. It's just all bottom-up from your genes because you're a machine, you know. What Mike shows is, no, the community of the cells communicate bioeconomic, Bioelectrically and that's a top-down constraint on what the cell actually becomes and if you change the bioelectric field the cell will become a different cell Genetic determinism is dead doesn't mean that genes genes aren't playing a role, but like Jonathan said it's bottom-up and top-down Wow, we're talking about levels that's yeah, that's a way we have to talk but that's not the way it notice that more than any World War I army, modernism has these ditches.

38:07This is the last ditch? No, there's another one. There's another one. Yes, I concede that we have to talk that way, but that's not the way it really is. Really, read Eric Holt's two papers, 2020-2025, in which he uses tight, rigorous, mathematical argument from core assumptions in information theory or core assumptions in the philosophy of science of causation to show that these levels are real, meaning that each level has causal powers not found at the other level, and each level has access to information inaccessible at the other levels. These levels are really, really real.

38:52So this is not just a way of talking. This is the way things are. And to turn it around, We have to talk this way not because we're trapped in a content nightmare We have to talk this way because we're in a porous participation with reality and reality is really that way And that's why we have to talk that way. Why don't we consider that?

39:27Dr. John Vervaeke:So this is convergent the fact that you are a porous participatory thing this is convergent with all the evidence that your cognition is not monological it's dialogical you do better reliably experimentally, if you're in dialogue with other people rather than reasoning inside your own head.

39:51That should be uncontroversial. The best science shows that the model of reasoning given to us by the Enlightenment, computation in your head, is actually scientifically disconfirmed. You actually do your best

40:06Dr. John Vervaeke:reasoning, this is work I'm doing with Dan Schiappe, in dialogue with other people. Porous participation.

40:15But we were taught that what we had, no, no, no, we have to disengage. This is Charles Taylor. We have to disengage. And we have to view the reality objectively, which means view it absolutely still and unmoving, the view from nowhere. What's the view from nowhere?

40:36Dr. John Vervaeke:Well, it's the view of everything, everywhere, all at once. Godel showed it's logically impossible to have a formal system that is both complete and consistent. It is logically impossible to have a view of everything everywhere all at once. I'll put God aside because God doesn't fit in the lab. View of everything everywhere all at once? That requires absolute space. Einstein showed that's not possible. Do you understand? The model of disengagement is based on a picture that was not argued for, but was presented as correct, that is actually logically and physically impossible.

41:21Here's an idea. Let's not believe in things that are logically and physically impossible. That seems to me like a really rational thing to do.

41:34Why and how did we adopt this disengagement? We reverse engineered it from a desire for control and certainty. Why did we need control and certainty? Because all three of these words have the same etymological origin. They're siblings from a common ancestor. Truth, trust, and troth. like being betrothed to somebody. We lost those. Why did we lose them? Well, there's a video series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. So the response to the Meaning Crisis was disengagement, and what we'll do is we'll create a buffered self. And what we'll do is we'll separate intimacy from inquiry. And here's the thing I want to push you on.

42:24If you think that what we should be doing is concentrating on our personal relationships, because that's where intimacy is to be found, and that's where it should and only be found, you are actually buying into the picture that I'm criticizing. If the scientist can't have an intimate relationship with the world as he's studying it, by recognizing his poorest participation in it, then you haven't heard anything I'm talking about. Because we think of intimacy as the special thing that happens to buffered selves, and what they have to do is they have to get all by themselves and put walls and curtains around them and block it all off.

43:05Okay, now I'll get naked with you. I'll be vulnerable here.

43:20But we're porous participators, partakers. We are not disengaged observers.

43:35What I'm trying to get you to see

43:42is that spirit. There's porous participation from the sub-egoic. Egoic. Let's use a different word from the archetypal. To. Let's use a platonic word. To the paradigmatic.

44:08Porous participation all the way up, all the way down. All the way in, all the way out. That spirit. And that spirit can become a sensed presence to you. not just an idea it's a sensed presence that can call to you it can call you deeper higher or lower deeper in or out and when that when the primordial and the ultimate are resonating and the inner and the outer are resonating the vertical and the horizontal That's I'm suggesting to you that's spirit

44:54So that's Why is it incredible for you to think there might be a spirit of a city when you Understand that there's a spirit of the billions of neurons in your brain and you call it me What's the difference Well, I'm the buffered self and selfhood ends here Below, within, okay, I can deal with that.

45:20Dr. John Vervaeke:But above or below, no, just here. People actually literally think the self is sort of right here, about three inches in.

45:34Get a sensed presence of our porous participation. It's not just an unconscious thing.

45:44Dr. John Vervaeke:See what Dan Chappie and I argued the work we did up with this the scientists and the rovers is

45:53Dr. John Vervaeke:It's it's paradoxical because one of the rovers was called spirit Right they form that the scientists form a spirit and that spirit can track Hyper patterns that individual cognizers can't grasp and now Eric hole has showed that that's actually mathematically provable.

46:17But remember, the brain is modeling itself to model the world, and as it models the world, it's modeling itself. And what can happen is that sense of you being, that processing that's imaginal, dialogical, porous participation, it can go from being, I'm going to do this, the glasses you look through, to something you look at. And that's the work of Anderson Day and John Geiger and a whole bunch of other people in presence. And we now have to, this is going to be weird, and it needs to be weird. Because weird is showing you that we're starting to break the dichotomies. The number of people that have sensed presence is way more than you realize.

46:59The number of people who hear voices and aren't psychotic or have mental health issues is large.

47:09And there's a continuum some people have a sense presence and just it's something just sitting beside my right shoulder Other people have like a Socratic daemon talking to them

47:21And you think that's weird and strange but pay attention to What's called parts work in IFS talking to the different sub egoic parts of you is now the norm and becoming the dominant norm in psychotherapy

47:39It's weird. Now here's the thing that's encouraging. When you feel weird and creeped out, we know this because of psychedelic research and altered states of consciousness, altered states are neither good nor bad. They're neutral. The best way to understand them is they're states of epistemic vulnerability. Epistemic vulnerability. The buffer itself is broken, you're vulnerable. Now that can go really bad, and that can go really good. It's a double-edged sword. The evolutionary basis for this is you get weirded out And you sometimes get sensed presence when you're weirded out Because what's happening is your brain is putting itself into an optimal state for the fastest broadest learning It is capable of and it's relying on the fact that you're inherently dialogical Transjective and porous participation and it's foregrounding your glasses because it's saying you better update your glasses And that can be a spirit talking to you And what if we have a joint sensed presence that is reaching down to the primordial reaching up To the ultimate reaching from the archetypal to the paradigmatic reaching into the sub egoic aspects of my inner life, reaching out to the hyper patterns of reality, resonating them in a way that is reasonable, that is orienting me in a reciprocal opening, individually and collective to a greater reality.

49:11So we're sharing a spirit that is imaginal and transjective and for that reason is reasonable and real. And we can share it and we can live it together. and it can unite our depths to our heights and our innermost selves to our outermost aspirations.

49:34William Desmond argues that,

49:39Dr. John Vervaeke:some of you have seen my discussions with James Filler, that James says, you know, you can't get relations out of things, and you can't. But then I said to James, you know what? You can't get things from relations either. and he went, oh yeah. And then William Desmond was the head of both of us. He said, what we actually have is common unity, community. Remember what I said? There's no people without community, and there's no community without people. The relations and the relata co-emerge from something primordial together.

50:16In order for us, this is Yanaris, another great philosopher. In order, he calls it the communal criterion, not the definition, the communal criterion of truth. In order for there to be truth, we have to have shared meaning. Meaning has to be shared. You know what's bullshit? This is my meaning. That doesn't make any sense. You don't do that with any other kind of meaning. I'm using the word cat to refer to a kind of flower found only in the depths of the Amazon. That's my meaning That's not how meaning works if you think meaning is a personal possession You are falling prey to everything. I'm criticizing if it's not shareable connectable and correctable by others Don't tell me about your meaning.

50:56I'm not interested in it because you don't know what you're talking about You have to have troughing you have to have trusting before you can have true thing and so he has the communal criterion for truth

51:13Community is our best, it's not a representation, it's our best icon of how reality ultimately is. Communing in community is our best way of getting towards the truth. Voluntary necessity with each other, vertical and horizontal, porous participation. Fellowship of the Spirit is to participate in all of this in such a way that we become icons of God. Because communing in community is to enact the best model of ultimate reality and to engage the best way we get at connecting to reality and getting at the truth. That's my proposal to you about what fellowship in the spirit is. Thank you.

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