Awaken from the Meaning Crisis Ep2.
awaken-meaning-crisis
youtube
Flow, Metaphor and the Axial Revolution
Flow state
- Could be likened to ‘being in the zone’
- To achieve it: Demands of the current situation should go slightly beyond the current skill level.
- There are flow-induction machines, e.g., video games.
- Requirements:
- tight feedback with environment
- failure should matter
- Some scenarios that include flow and fulfill the above requirements: playing jazz, martial arts, rock climbing.
- Flow state is connected to meaning in life. They are directly propotional.
- Meaning in life → We create this meaning. It is not life meaning of life where people leave it to chance and destiny.
- Flow state is universal across groups.
- One is deeply at one with things.
- Time is passing differently.
- Self-consciousness is not present. It disappears. The inner critic that limits us is not present.
- Super salient → we are more vibrant. Occurrences are more intense.
- It is the best experience you can have, and it is where you do your best work.
- Mindfulness increases capacity to get into flow state.
- Cascade of insights, that in turn leads to more insight.
- We gain capacity for implicit learning – we pick up on complex patterns in your environment.
- Unbeknownst to us.
- Activates ‘psychic abilities’. In quotes. Our actions and decisions look like magic to the ordinary observer.
Implicit Learning
- Intuition is as a result of implicit learning.
- Intuition and bias are different sides of the same coin:
- Intuition is good learning and what we should strive for. As a result of casual patterns that actually exist
- Bias is bad learning and something we should look out for. As a result of correlations that we take too seriously.
- We should train our implicit learning to pick up on the casual patterns instead of the correlations.
- We should set up the right context so that implicit learning can occur.
- Science can be though of as distinguishing the casual from the correlation.
- Conditions for flow are the same for implicit learning. They reinforce each other:
- clear information
- tightly coupled feedback
- failure matters
- We lean real complex patterns.
- Flow deeply enhances cognition.
Metaphor
- Ability to connect things that are not connected.
- Pervasive and profound
- How you make creative connections between ideas.
- Restructures how you think of things/ideas.
Axial Revolution
- New kind of literacy
- There was a collapse – devastating, almost like apocalypse.
- Alphabetic literacy invented. Easier and more powerful. It helps:
- write down ideas – we can come back to them
- correct ideas that were previous wrong.
- Store ideas.
- Second order thinking – thinking about thinking
- Metacognition – awareness of your mind
- examine your own thinking and correct it.
- Coinage is invented. Trains you:
- abstract symbol system
- numeracy. Counting.
- Both leads to realizing:
- how much you can correct cognition
- enhancing awareness of self deceptiveness and awareness of errors in our cognition.