John Vervaeke and Zach Stein #3: Education and Conviviality

Catching up with Zak Stein and exploring how his recent work—especially on education and in the internet—resonates with John’s. A too short but very sweet conversation between these two amazing and life generating thinkers. Essential spiritual and intellectual guides for our tragic and confused times.

John Vervaeke is a professor at the University of Toronto and the creator of the popular online YouTube Series ‘Awakening from The Meaning Crisis’, which is a rich feast of cognitive science, philosophy, religion, and the history of ideas. What makes Vervaeke special in my opinion is the breadth of his work, but his courage descend the ivory tower and talk to people ‘on the street’—and to exemplify his ideas. His hero is Socrates, and he embodies the living dialogue and courage that Socrates represents.

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Zachary Stein’s Blog:
His book education in a time between worlds:

[andrewrenwick]

❤️🔥🌊
"People need to be aware and empowered to know what to take seriously significantly before they decide whether it's true or false."

[andrewrenwick]

"We have to believe that every time we get together it's not a zero-sum game to figure out who's smarter, which is actually how schools have taught us to behave."

[Jimmy-elgh]

My world view is from an inconceivable experience

[Juhziz]

01:18 Consilience project.
08:15 Difference between knowledge and understanding.
09:50 Truth and significance.
13:30 Ensoulment.
16:57 Two meanings of plausible. Convergence of elegance and trustworthiness.
21:22 Tools for conviviality by Ivan Illich.
29:25 Importance of images in the ensoulment dynamic.
34:25 Psyche is sacramental. Locus of the sacred. Simplification of reality as escapism.
38:00 Imaginal and imaginary. Avoidant and adversarial.
45:35 Specifics of asynchronous text enchange compared to realtime talking.
47:37 Endwelling the narrative and movement between narratives. Exclusivity of narrative and transnarrative.
50:50 It's not learning that needs to be explained. Narratives are self-terminating.
56:00 Implicit evolutionary maladaptive stuff in humans.
59:55 New metaphysics. Anthroanthology. Radical realism. Brutal honesty.
01:02:00 Beauty is enacted serious play of the imaginal.

[ErnestoEduardoDobarganes]

The Imaginal can be said to be the mechanism we use to test each other's propositions... once you are deprived of the Imaginal you no longer have a way to distinguish what is Plausible from what is not, which then seems to drive people into a Reciprocal Narrowing process by default.

[justinferrell]

The imaginary represents our mental images. It’s an avoidance strategy. It's escapist.

The imaginal are images that are transjective. We enact them. They're between us, between the depths of ourselves, our minds and our bodies, us and other worlds.

You can think of imagination in two different senses: I'm imagining a sailboat, making a mental picture in my head, or you can think of a kid imagining that a piece of plastic is a sword - enacting it.

The difference between those two goes to a very important argument made by Tolkien. He wrote an essay called “On Fairy-Stories”, defending fantasy literature. He said, insofar as it's escapist, it should be criticized. But he goes on to say that he was trying to create a fictional world that was basically imaginal. You go into that world and you enculturate in that world. It's like an anthropological journey, so when you return back to this world you see it in ways you couldn't see it before. It's like an augmented reality where we get this image that allows us to realize the biases that we're projecting onto the world.

[_ARCATEC_]

"Permeable membrane" .that, I think is Predailogos. 55:33