Absolutely looooved this episode. John, THANK YOU so much for putting this on UKposts. It's practically life-saving to know that there are people out there who actually have the desire and patience to work these things out. Being able to witness this with my own eyes and ears gives me a tiny bit of hope in this increasingly insane world.

I love spending Saturday mornings cleaning my apartment and listening to John. It’s a a ritual that allows me to have insights on my behaviour in the past week. In fact this talk speaks of that process. I have sudden aha moments when i realise I failed to understand subtle context in social situations and played the wrong virtue or played it inadequately. Thanks as always John.

I appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄

24:00 People BECOMING wise by HAVING laws. Great way to allude to modal confusion. Great stuff

Brilliant! An apt quote: rules are for the guidance of the wise and the obedience of the foolish.

This series sings. Thank you, John!

The balancing and integrating of relevent virtues at the optimal time. Excellent. Hard to express how crucial your series had been for personal insight. Gratitude, John.

It is time we had the conversation, that politics is not the path to wisdom, that many believe it to be.

Thank you for clarifying which Peterson you were talking about 👌 needed that. More so , though, thank you for helping me to get to know the better parts of myself. It has alleviated much confusion and pain of being. I actually want to exist and live and love and embrace life even more than I ever did. You are a part of many to whom have helped me with that. The work you're doing is so important. It is inspiring to me. I like to believe that part of my calling is to help people , it's a huge reason why I am alive and why I keep on keeping on. I don't know if you know how you much you actually help with quality of life. And I can only aspire to be like you in that way. There is something so vital about saving people before they stumble and fall and helping to prevent future harm by providing a better one and better ways to get to that and reasons why life is worth living. Drawing people to life, to love life, to want to be in it, i think that that comes with knowing as well as enacting the truth through love and guidance, nurture nature , nature and mindfulness. The truth as in purest most optimized form of being in continuous transformation and trancendance and alignment with enlightenment whilst balancing with grounding , compassion, consideration and practise in order to achieve a placement in life so that a sense of joy and peace can be perceived and participated in and cultivated through understanding and application of embodiment of that leading to knowledge and experience of exactly that, then enacting it and spreading it , weaving it into life swiftly, softly and saliently with communication and connection through unity. I'm still trying to find my way though and I'm trying to stay Patient and be humble and content with the process. I reckon its worth it. I appreciate you and people like you so much 💓

One of my favorites of the series. Thanks John! Looking forward to continuing to the end and reviewing the content in the future again.

This lecture perfectly describes why it is important when "growing up" why you need to WANT to change, or any other scenario where you changing would result in an overall better scenario, WANTING to change is one of the key steps it seems

11:00 - How to balance a virtue is something that I have been exploring in my last conversations. When talking about compassion with Paul VanderKlay he puts it beautifully by saying "In every situation we have to seek wisdom to know when to say yes and when to say no". Affirmations like "Always be kind", "be nice to everyone" without using common sense sometimes could do more harm than good.

I'm wish the audio podcast feed of this series was still being updated. It's so much more convenient to listen when you don't have to have UKposts open.

I agree, we cannot have too many rules. We need wisdom to know how to deploy our virtues. In the old testament there was a admonition to hearten unto the voice of the Lord. I always pray for the wisdom to do apply the best rule. Since listening to your lectures I realize that I have to pray to recognize what is salient.

Thanks 🙏😁

I thought the last 10 minutes were really interesting. John talks about how wise people imagining talking to someone is pretty much as good as actually talking to someone, for completing wise talks. This is interesting because John points out that our framing isn’t something we see, it’s something we see through. We are confined to our perspective in a way that just thinking about it to yourself doesn’t help you break out of. Of course it doesn’t! (The longer you think the more time you are spending in the constraints of your perspective.) Therefore imagining talking to someone you’ve internalized, who is going to have a different perspective, is much more helpful for noticing your interfering biases than just thinking about it alone.

Thanks John for putting these lectures out there for free. Your lectures have really helped uncover many nuances of understanding, gaps and connections in my own extensive reading and self-development for my professional work (in personal development, and organisational change and learning). This is a gold mine for anyone trying to make sense of the research and theories for practical application purposes. Are you in touch with people like Mary Helen Immodino-Yang (a collaborator of Damasios, as you know) in the Mind, Brain and Education community? I'd be fascinated to hear more about your thoughts on her book Emotions, Learning and the Brain which I found helpful in my thinking. I really appreicate her education/application orientation, though I realise the work on wisdom may not yet have sufficient convergence of research and theory to really drive it into educational implications. That is clearly still an aspirational goal for MBE too. These are exciting times, you must abosolutely love your work!!! I'm enjoying the ride...

Glad to see more exposition on the Solomon effect. That concept had been rattling in my head since you first mentioned it. Thanks for your effort and citations.

In a way it is all very simple in order to be beneficial to others and yourself you have to know what is good for us in the long term. To know that you have to know the Good, or the deepest, most truly satisfying aim of human life, in other words the virtues need Sophia...

John talks about development so much yet never mentions the theorists who attempt to map the contours and stages of this growth. Like Kegan, Graves and Wilber. There is much synergy here.

Legend

Looking good John, always happy to see these coming up.

Accept that as human beings we are fallible and make mistakes. We must big enough to learn from them no matter how difficult it may be at the time.

I am fascinated by the connection between wisdom and virtue (it is what separates insight practices like mindfulness or therapy from organized religion, imo), and here is a great argument presented by Vervaeke suggesting that you can’t have virtue without wisdom...but can you have wisdom without virtue? can you become enlightened and still indulge in the pleasures of the flesh, or steal, or even kill in the name of ultimate freedom from a culpable self? i am here thinking of the likes of the drunken lama Chogyam Trungpa, or the zen rascal Alan Watts, or any such “dharma bums”...

There will be a live Q&A on my channel on Fri Nov the 22nd at 1600 EST. You can support my work at patreon.com/johnvervaeke and receive benefits such as priority question-asking access.

I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated

*taps wrist impatiently * 'And what time do you call this, young man?' Just kidding. But it's 1am in some parts of the world! Worth it though.

Referring to phronesis as an self-locked expertise to be in touch in how to deal and get a grasp on it, as you said, lacks of the very essence of itself. So I thought of phronesis in terms of meta-expertise, to know how to be expert in being expert in a context specific, but to be adding "meta" to denominate something seems poorly construed. Anyways, what I admire in this series is that we are coming back to the beginning with concrete and concise arguments to better understanding the key elements of the meaning crisis, in other words, a well rounded series. Thank you for your work, and giving knowledge to your virtual alumni.

This reminds me of The Apostle Shaul's perspective on the two ways of approuching The Law of Moses which is 'proposed' as given by God. The new covenant is predominantly a new way of framing oneself in retrospect to the Torah. Arguing that having wisdom - the logos within - is far more superior than studying contextual laws covering every nook and cranny of day to day life as a servant of God and instead - be a 'being person', not chiefly a 'doing/having person'. He also seem to give further insight into the common phenomenon of those of the Judeo-Christian worldview in which they reported to have a relationship with God/Jesus whom they 'talk to daily'. This could be in fact their cognitive capacity to imagine, very near to them, some form of archetype with whom to bounce off their thoughts and ambitions. Thus - as they claim, 'receive revelationary feedback via a still small voice or a gut feeling deep within. Perhaps they are taping into the subconscious which does not 'bs' a person, as the conscious more easily can. Having a 'imaginary friend' can be an example of an evolutionary strategy to some capacity...

For me, it's a new, interesting way to look at the apostle Paul's list of the fruits of the spirit in Galatians 5:22, 23.

25:00 Sophia/phronesis process Wisdom precedes virtue 53:00 - platonic internal dialogue/ stoic Relevance realization

Thanks John.

-in preparation for the next episode, JV talks about the work of Ardelt, how the concept of agapic love is key in developing wisdom/virtue by correcting for egocentrism. When I heard this, something about the mundane, obviousness of it set off what i think of as a psychic alarm. When this happens, the words echo in my mind and often stay with me for days or weeks and even manifest in dreams, though usually in some apparently misplaced or tortured context. What i realized is that what seems so redundant, specifically, is the fact that although we are correcting for egocentricity with agape, that's really only connecting us with other people. What about the rest of the world? So we're only moving from egocentricity to human centricity, and that's as far as 'love' gets with us humans (appetitive, philia, agape). Perhaps this is a driver of the so-called meaning crisis. Maybe the heart of the breakdown and undeniable deterioration we are experiencing as a species resides in the rift between humans being, as judged by not words but deeds, incapable of loving what is non-human, ie the ecosystem as a whole. As a result, the same 'unloved' earth now seeks to protect itself from what, in the absence of love, is only capable of enmity and harm. imho, we (humans) have triggered the earth's natural defense system and are now subject to vengeance, mostly by means of our own self-destruction, self-fulfilling the prophesy made by Chief Seattle a century and a half ago.

It seems like a fine line between "moral relativism" and the context-dependency of virtue. It seems like "moral relativism" was just a name given to behavior they didn't like by some conservative groups, so it became a bad word to associate with the old notion of someone of "loose morals."

Perspect eye of all knowing.

focus puller!

54:38 ❤

Be kinder.

23.15 ‘you cant derive an ought from an is’ Hume. That’s the issue linked to being ‘kind’ as a virtue - it has moral connotations for utilitarians.

First!

Expanding on this symbiotic relationship between 'sophia' and 'phronesis', the entire subject of 'betterness' could be built around this notion of the static patterned and their dynamic interaction. A pattern's general applicability may be its measure, but its plasticity provides its potential for adaptation and openness. All static patterns are made, broken, or moulded by their equivalence to the ongoing unfolding, undefined relevance/fittnedess/Quality of the moment. The inherent danger of rational lock down and rigid rules should be obvious against any process that relies on plastic response to a changing qualitative environment. In any event, the emphasis in this symbiosis should be to the source rather than its analogues.

Thanks John! Mind updating spotify? :) I have more time to listen than to watch. The most recent episode on there is episode 40 (October 18th).

nice this is my dream to write about conflict and empowerment bridges between virtues in relation to critical areas of of the psyches memory stems and webs. can it be simplified into a program for raising belief systems. tough youth.

Phronesis sounds like an s1 version of wisdom and sophia sounds like s2.

Is “asshole” a technical term too like “bull shit?”

Just as you need general intelligence to be cunning, calculating, and dianoetically savvy, you need wisdom to wield the noetic virtues in order to be just, humble, courageous, temperate, etc. The former primarily serves evolutionary imperatives, while the latter bends only toward the realization of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful - all of which values that transcend the salience landscape of natural selection. Rationality serves as a cognitive bridge between general intelligence (which is more or less fixed) and wisdom (which is malleable). So there appears to be a teleological chasm between (animal) intelligence and divine (wisdom), and that chasm is bridged by (human) rationality. All of us are born (with few exceptions) with a passably adequate intellectual took kit for fulfilling our biological needs, but very few are those who set off upon the rainbow bridge of rationality to reach the Valhalla of Wisdom, the aim of which is the realization of the Transcendentals. "Many are called, but few are chosen."

16:13 the problem of specifications

I don’t suppose some clever person could create a video just with John’s summaries of each lesson? It would help really help to synthesise the lessons.

Interesting. But I wonder if the invocation of a meta-heuristic is apt to fall prey to the same infinite regress problem as the homuncular explanation for perception? Maybe I am missing something. This is not a criticism, rather just the expression of my thoughts around the 43:00 mark.

So I'm not sure if this is totally appropriate, but it seems to me that an example of considering how legislation might affect someone's ability to be wise is welfare legislation because it can create a situation where someone tries to not have a job in order to get the welfare money.

I'd like to know where AGI would stand at a funeral.

41:00 - which james is it? Sorry if it was saied and ive missed it

Sharpe and Schwartz might have been worried about the way how our rational/philosophical/serial thought (Sophia) process sometimes makes complete parody out of the here and now understanding. It sometimes actively ruins the here and now experience with theory crafting. Sometimes, the prepositions people come up with, like in a work of literature, are not rationally generated. They somehow just come and make sense, in a similar was Nadal knows how to structure a particular rally in a tennis match. Subjecting Anna Karenina to rational, argumentative analysis makes only limited sense. It needs to read to be experienced, and the wisdom in it can only be understood while experiencing it. Rationalization of values sometimes ends up in what looks like a poor caricature of those values. I am not opposing Sophia, but just saying why those authors might have ignored it in favor of Phronesis. Without Sophia, we become a directionless ship, as Professor said, we need meta guiding principles, but that has problems as stated above.

Who is James around 40:00?

Bride-to-be

Instead of "problem of relevance" wouldn't another way of saying it be "the problem of prioritizing/weighing virtues"?

How about instead of politicians, we have a constitution with virtues and values explicitly laid out, and the cognitive/conceptual procedures to apply them, optimizing for wisdom/relevance, etc. Then have philosophers and ethicists and lawyers implement it.

Get rid of marking, get people to make genuine contributions to the real world.

Ad 45:56 - I don't think this is about moral relativism at all. IMO this is rather about the readiness to transgress norms should the situation need it. This is e.g. so frequent in Agatha Christie's books: she deliberately constructs the plot so that what seems to be a crime ultimately turns out to be an act of justice, or vice versa. She draws the readers in to suddenly confront them with the need to radically change the frame of reference. This - in accord to the central motive of your lectures - offers them a chance of a transformative experience. Maybe with the intent to make them wiser.

Give them a B grade, with (A-) in parenthesis.

100 years down the line, this, along with all of modern philosophy, will be thrown into the garbage bin of pseudo-scholarship. This much academic resource, in every sense of the term, used for self-evident, unoriginal, unnecessarily complex 'scholarship'.,