John Vervaeke joins Jim for the fourth of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis...

John Vervaeke joins Jim for the fourth of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. They discuss Nietzsche as a prophet of the meaning crisis, the politicization of the quest for meaning, recreating religion, the deep functionality of Christianity, meaning cultivation, Newell & Simon's error, the essentialism heuristic, combinatorial explosions, the no-free-lunch theorem, relevance realization as the engine of general intelligence & its role in religio, secular wonder, "I" & "me," transjectivity & flow, the sense of sacredness, the importance of meta-meaning systems, the function & dangers of symbols, and much more.

Episode TranscriptJRS EP143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis"Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science," John Vervaeke, Timothy Lillicrap, Blake RichardsNelson Goodman (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Awakening from the Meaning Crisis EP33 - The Spirituality of RR: Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness"A Secular Wonder," Paulo Costa (paywalled)

John Vervaeke is an Associate Professor, in the teaching stream. He has been teaching at the University of Toronto since 1994. He currently teaches courses in the Psychology department on thinking and reasoning with an emphasis on insight problem solving, cognitive development with an emphasis on the dynamical nature of development, and higher cognitive processes with an emphasis on intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and the Psychology of wisdom. He is the director of the Cognitive Science program where he also teaches courses on the introduction to Cognitive Science, and the Cognitive Science of consciousness wherein he emphasizes 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) models of cognition and consciousness. In addition, he teaches a course in the Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health program on Buddhism and Cognitive Science.

He is the director of the Consciousness and the Wisdom Studies Laboratory.  He has won and been nominated for several teaching awards including the 2001 Students' Administrative Council and Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students Teaching Award for the Humanities, and the 2012 Ranjini Ghosh Excellence in Teaching Award. He has published articles on relevance realization, general intelligence, mindfulness, flow, metaphor, and wisdom. He is first author of the book Zombies in Western Culture:  A 21st Century Crisis, which integrates Psychology and Cognitive Science to address the meaning crisis in Western society. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.