McGilchrist's Wager & the Human Role: Iain McGilchrist, John Vervaeke & Daniel Schmachtenberger

This clip is excerpted from a longer conversation between Iain McGilchrist, John Vervaeke and Daniel Schmachtenberger, recorded at Merton College, Oxford, in September 2023. With no planned objective or agenda, the discussion sought to outline the cognitive and spiritual components of the metacrisis. The metacrisis is the total ecosystem of all global crises and the common underlying dynamics that generate catastrophic and existential risks.
The conversation can be watched in its entirety here: • The Psychological Driv...
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[@ShannonMcCarthy]

With our cultural and spiritual values lost at sea as they are, McGilchrist’s message is a North Star.

[@alisonappleby30]

A grook of Piet Hein's springs to mind: I am a humble artist moulding my earthly clod, adding my labour to nature, simply assisting God. Not that my effort is needed; yet somehow, I understand, my maker has willed it that I too should have unmoulded clay in my hand.

[@attackofthewindmills]

I love those polished shoes. I also understand @1:30 Two types will develop according to those hemispheres, Yet in the end, the good brings back the bad

[@danheck1]

brilliant

[@SensemakingMartin]

Great chat. Tim Freke would also be a good interlocutor for this topic

[@shanosantwanos3908]

😊the soul is created by us.. We are not born with one.. With knowledge, wisdom,and attentiveness as well as intuition and imagination,the sense of a creator appeared in my life..as it is in nature...it is nature...that is, visible spirit.

[@darongardner4294]

The natural world 🌎 does not need us but we need it to survive.

[@leepretorius4869]

Please read Craig Carter and Lloyd Gerson. Christian Platonism is what you’re looking for.

[@MS-od7je]

Indeed. I am doing/acting in partial disobedience. I consider it to be somewhere between Oppenheimer’s dilemma and Jonah’s defiance. Although, I dare say, it is in a sense like Enoch. The wrestling, as like an Israel, required to get me this far was indeed arduous, tortuous, fire like. To say we are friends understates I am. I am even beyond asking “why me?” How to heal the land is not dissimilar. Arduous. Tortuous. Fire like. What do you do with knowledge like this? It seems you cannot give it away in either a desire to create something knew or destroy everything old. What is the depth to which humanity could descend if given all powers to create or destroy? To live forever? Would it be a dictatorship or a Garden of Eden? Until Consilience phronesis. When Consilience only phronesis.

[@mellonglass]

Likely comments are for the ‘other people’, where the privileged few, chat politely, audaciously and educated. I love what is being suggested Iain, yet education gives the badge of authority to assumptions and can not stand the reason of a child or it’s questions. We were taught, not to question. So today the repair is only of the machine, as the machine is the predominant architect without the human being. The frustration is the button pushers of their kingdom, without any service. The expiry of ‘build it and they will come’ was based on the ‘cart before the horse’. We build houses, without people, rockets without seeing sickness, and dreams without chaos of the human presence. Future thinkers, have objective knowledge based on a fictional emancipation. Navigation however, is not a Titanic race of wasted engineering and the attractor of glory to address squalor for escape. This process has outlived its sedentary neoliberalism, class and hate of the ordinary. Thermodynamics. Individualism.

[@patrickgoff6512]

he's describing Orthodox Christianity in his "wager".......we are a living sacrament to God. you can't reinvent the wheel by way of a bloated intellect.

[@matthewstokes1608]

So, after all this, there is only Christ and the Bible and the Christian Faith to shine above us all as the ONLY Truth - and the only meaning to this existence. Panentheism is not enough - of course - only Christianity - and all that that consists and insists of us INDIVIDUALLY - is Truth if beauty and joy and love is eternal. Once the penny drops, all else becomes clear (that one wants to be clear). Peace! 🙏🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🍻

[@davidbates9358]

The confusion in Iain's thought process is demonstrated by the undifferentiated use of the word 'consciousness,' in that slip-of-the-tongue way we all use language and unwittingly create our communication biased consciousness. In this conversation titled: The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis, neither man seems able to grasp the 'make-believe' foundation of human languages and our social creature 'alienation' from cosmic reality. Sadly the 'literary' lovers of well-educated polite society are arguably the least likely to grasp the perceptual-paradox of the human condition, because even though they may have read the influential story of God's only begotten son, they likely didn't see the allusion to the perennial 'mystery' of our perceptual-paradox in his stated reason for teaching parables: "I speak to them in parables, because seeing they don’t see, and hearing, they don’t hear, neither do they understand," Matthew 13:13. We are the 'they' in this timeless wisdom saying, imho.

[@Ludwig.-.Wittgenstein]

Can you explain what Iaian McGilchrist's point was here, or his wager was? To be honest, I could get anything adequately concrete to make sense. I do not think obfuscation is a mark of a good intellectuality, if that is the case here.

[@davidbates9358]

@@Ludwig.-.Wittgenstein Iain thinks we have the capacity to 'see beyond' and problem solve from our supposedly 'unique' perception of reality. Yet as Plato argued, we don't actually know what knowledge is and we are inherently confused about the nature of language and reality, with our communication biased form of consciousness. Both McGilchrist and Veraeke speak of our increasingly desperate need of wisdom to balance the fallacy of logical positivism that has driven Western civilization in recent history, yet both men are guilty of a too literal sense of words and lack the discernment of a reality-wise assessment of the entwined truths and falsehoods inherent in every Sight associated word we use in our vernacular (spoken by ordinary people) vocabulary. Hence the Ascension philosopher's "they seeing, see not," wisdom injunction, imho. And to Iain's blindingly obvious sense of 'seeing beyond' I would suggest 'seeing within' is what humanity clearly needs now if we are to save ourselves from ourselves. While the ongoing advent of neuroscience research is doing precisely that in my opinion, following the ancient wisdom command; Know Thyself.