“Rituals are rational” – John Vervaeke | UnHerd ▶️

All around us are signs of crisis. UnHerd’s Flo Read and philosopher/cognitive scientist John Vervaeke sat down at the UnHerd Club to diagnose the alienation and anxiety that pervades our contemporary culture. Is a “meaning crisis” at the root of all the other crises we face – environmental, political, spiritual?

TOPICS:

Introduction
Understanding the West’s meaning crisis
By setting aside religious ‘delusions’, have we become more deluded in other ways?
What do ‘realness’, ‘meaning’ and ‘mattering’ mean?
Are we at the peak of the meaning crisis?
Artificial intelligence and the meaning crisis
Have we made identity groups, social concepts and science, sacred?
How do we recover the true meaning of the sacred?
Losing the notion of soul, and horror as epiphany
Have we lost the sense of the sacred because we’ve lost the notion of the sacred place?
We’re still performing rituals, even if we don’t realise it
Debunking the mental potential myth, and the role of art in the idea of the sacred
Concluding thoughts

John Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist and a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the nature of the mind, consciousness, and cognition. One of the key ideas that Vervaeke has proposed is a cognitive model based on recursive relevance realization. This model is intended to help us better understand how we create and process meaning in our lives.

According to Vervaeke, relevance realization is a fundamental aspect of cognition that allows us to recognize patterns and connections in our experiences. Relevance realization occurs automatically and recursively at multiple levels, leading to the construction of more complex and nuanced understandings of the world around us, and this is what consciousness is according to Vervaeke.

Vervaeke’s work on relevance realization and enlightenment has been widely discussed and debated in both academic and popular circles. In an effort to make his ideas more accessible to a wider audience, he has released a 50-part video series on YouTube called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. In this series, Vervaeke explores the challenges of meaning-making in the modern world and draws on insights from philosophy, psychology, and spirituality to offer a path forward.

Beyond his work on cognitive science, Vervaeke has also written a book titled Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis. The book examines the ways in which zombies have become a popular cultural icon in recent years and what this says about our society’s relationship to death, consciousness, and the meaning of life.

Vervaeke has described the 21st century as being in the midst of a meaning crisis. He argues that many of the traditional sources of meaning in our lives, such as religion and community, have been eroded by modernity. This has left many people feeling adrift and disconnected from a sense of purpose or direction.