Where meaning making happens

 

I discovered a new author that I hope to study further in the near future. He crosses many of the disciplines I am interested in and applies them to the issues I care about, like polarization of views and how it affects us daily, and the changing face of religion. There are some time stamps for the parts I cover here.

This interview begins with many terms. As it progresses, they get sorted out. About halfway through they apply the ideas to the polarization happening today. It’s a battle of nostalgia vs utopia. Each is a vision of perfection. One looks back at how far we’ve fallen and the other is claiming some wondrous world is just around the corner.

28:00 The question is posed, how do we square this human desire for perfection, our need for transcendence, with all the side effects that come with it. The answer, which he then elaborates on, is that we need to reconfigure transcendence. People will continue to have visions of something larger than us, either hallucinated or extrapolated. And we will want to bring them into reality. This is the well-studied idea of “peak experiences”. People can have them at church, or a Grateful Dead concert.

29:32 We need to stop thinking of these as perfection, as something to complete. Instead, see them as a process of optimization. In our normal existence, we are doing this already, striving to fit ourselves into whatever reality is throwing at us. We might see that in a context of maximizing some value, but we don’t always reach those goals.

The idea that we can move beyond who we are is how transcendence has been traditionally viewed, but in the last couple of centuries we have begun to understand how we came to be what we are. The Theory of Evolution has provided a framework for seeing ourselves as part of a long process. This differs from transcendence in that it is not a story of a quest for a final form. It’s an impersonal story of natural processes, not something that has desires or goals. It is continual change.

The sacred connection to the universe is continual change. Reality in-exhaustively changes, and life evolves to fit it. Vervaeke quotes Ursula Goodenough (citation needed), You’re constantly trying to transcend into reality as it constantly discloses unexpected and unpredicted possibilities. When we connect to that complexity, we have perpetual self-transcendence.

32:00 How does this relate to today, and our problems with democracy in America? There is no final answer to the “best” political system. Democracy should enable us to adapt. The next proposal, the next President, the next removal by an ethics committee will not solve our problems. We have a Right that emphasizes a call to personal responsibility and a Left that emphasizes how we’re subject to fate. What we need is an understanding that the two need each other.

We are bound to our finitude and capable of transcendence. If we only pursue transcendence, we get hubris and inflation. If we only see finitude, we get servitude, despair, and tragedy. We can acknowledge both and focus on one while allowing those who see the world differently to remind us of the other perspective. This is where meaning making develops.

We’ve lost shared meaning and even the idea that those who see the world differently than us can even have shared meaning. With that, we lost the ability to hear each other. We try to replace it with proposals for resolving the tension between the worldviews. There is no resolution in the reality of constant change. The tension is where meaning is created.

I’m still researching “Opponent Processing Theory”. I think it started in biology but is finding applications in other systems. https://www.simplypsychology.org/opponent-process-theory.html

Here, it's applied to addiction. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258900422100095X