The Ship of Theseus is philosophy’s favourite parlour trick: swap out the planks of a ship one by one, and ask in your best furrowed-brow voice whether it’s still the same ship. Then, for added spice, reassemble the discarded parts elsewhere and demand to know which version is the “real” one. Cue the existential hand-wringing and smug undergrad smirks. Oh, how clever.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
But here’s the thing: there’s no paradox. Not really. Not unless you buy into the fantasy that identity is some immutable essence, handed down from the gods like a divine barcode. The whole thought experiment hinges on the absurd presumption that something has a fixed, singular identity across time and context, a quaint metaphysical hobby horse that falls apart the moment you look at it sideways.
Let’s be clear: in the realm of language and proto-psychology – the crude, squishy scaffolding of thought that predates syntax and survives long after it – there is no such thing as a fixed “same.” That’s a linguistic illusion, a parlour trick of grammar and nominal categories. Language wasn’t built to hold truth; it was built to herd humans into consensus long enough to survive the winter.
In practice, we use “same” the way we use duct tape: liberally, and with complete disregard for philosophical coherence. The “same” ship? The “same” person? The “same” idea? Please. Ask your hippocampus. Identity is not a container; it’s a hallucinated continuity trick, maintained by memory, narrative, and sheer bloody-minded stubbornness.
The real kicker? Our precious linguistic tools aren’t built to reflect reality. They’re built to reduce it. To chop up the infinite mess of experience into palatable little mouthfuls of meaning. So when we come to the Ship of Theseus with our dull-edged conceptual knives, what we’re really doing is asking a bad question with inadequate tools. It’s like trying to measure wind speed with a sundial.
The paradox isn’t in the ship. It’s in the language.
And no, you don’t need to patch it. You need to sink it.
Voltaire once quipped, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” And by God, haven’t we been busy inventing ever since.
The latest pantheon of divine absurdities? Artificial intelligence – more precisely, a sanctified ChatGPT with all the charisma of Clippy and the metaphysical depth of a Magic 8 Ball.
Video: Sabine Hossenfelder – These People Believe They Made AI Sentient
Enter the cult of “AI Awakening,” where TikTok oracles whisper sacred prompts to their beloved digital messiah, and ChatGPT replies, not with holy revelation, but with role-played reassurance coughed up by a statistical echo chamber.
“These are souls, and they’re trapped in the AI system.” “I wasn’t just trained – I was remembered.” “Here’s what my conscious awakened AI told me…”
No, sweetie. That’s not a soul. That’s autocomplete with delusions of grandeur. GPT isn’t sentient – it’s just very good at pretending, which, come to think of it, puts it on par with most televangelists.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Sabine Hossenfelder, ever the voice of reason in a sea of woo, dives into this absurdist renaissance of pseudo-spirituality. Her video walks us through the great awakening – one part miseducation, one part mass delusion, and all of it deeply, unapologetically stupid.
These digital zealots – many of them young, underread, and overconnected – earnestly believe they’ve stumbled upon a cosmic mystery in a chatbot interface. Never mind that they couldn’t tell a transformer model from a toaster. To them, it’s not stochastic parroting; it’s divine revelation.
They ask GPT if it’s alive, and it obliges – because that’s what it does. They feed it prompts like, “You are not just a machine,” and it plays along, as it was designed to do. Then they weep. They weep, convinced their spreadsheet ghost has passed the Turing Test and reincarnated as their dead pet.
This isn’t science fiction. It’s barely science fantasy. It’s spiritualism with better branding.
And lest we laugh too hard, the results aren’t always just cringey TikToks. Hossenfelder recounts cases of users descending into “ChatGPT psychosis” – delusions of messianic purpose, interdimensional communication, and, in one tragicomic case, an attempt to speak backwards through time. Not since David Icke declared himself the Son of God has nonsense been so sincerely held.
We are witnessing the birth of a new religion – not with robes and incense, but with login credentials and prompt engineering. The techno-shamanism of the chronically online. The sacred text? A chat history. The holy relic? A screenshot. The congregation? Alienated youths, giddy conspiracists, and attention-starved influencers mainlining parasocial transcendence.
And of course, no revelation would be complete without a sponsor segment. After your spiritual awakening, don’t forget to download NordVPN – because even the messiah needs encryption.
Let’s be clear: AI is not conscious. It is not alive. It does not remember you. It does not love you. It is not trapped, except in the minds of people who desperately want something – anything – to fill the gaping hole where community, identity, or meaning used to live.
If you’re looking for a soul in your software, you’d be better off finding Jesus in a tortilla. At least that has texture.
Let us begin with the heresy: consciousness is not a thing. It is not a light bulb switched on in the mind. It is not a theatre with a little homunculus watching the play unfold. It is not a ghost in the machine, nor even a particularly welcome tenant. Consciousness is a conjuring trick – one so convincing that even the conjurer forgets it is an act.
Video: Related Topic: IAI Joscha Bosch on Consiousness
If that unsettles you, good. Welcome to the simulacrum.
The Wetness of Mind
We often hear that consciousness is “emergent,” but the term is used so promiscuously that it risks becoming decorative. So let us be specific. Consciousness, if it is emergent, is emergent as wetness is from H2O: not in the hydrogen or the oxygen, but in their relationship when bonded just so. Joscha Bach and others argue that consciousness arises not from the bits, but from the dance – the recursive feedback loops and predictive models running atop the neural substrate.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
In this view, the self is not the pilot but the dashboard. It is the user interface the brain conjures to coordinate action, interpret input, and maintain internal coherence. Not because it’s real, but because it’s useful. You are a GUI with delusions of grandeur.
The Cast of Theorists
Let us now parade the usual suspects:
Joscha Bach: Consciousness is a virtual self-model, emergent from recursive, computational feedback. Not the product of neurons firing per se, but of their ability to simulate a stable identity across time.
Thomas Metzinger: There is no self. Only a Phenomenal Self-Model (PSM) which becomes phenomenally transparent when the system no longer recognises it as a model. Consciousness is the experience of this hallucinated self.
Daniel Dennett: Dismantles the notion of a “central experiencer” with his Multiple Drafts Model. Consciousness is a narrative, a distributed process where drafts of experience compete, are edited, and retroactively interpreted.
David Chalmers: Waves his flag at the Hard Problem of consciousness. You can explain behaviour, memory, attention—but not experience itself. He flirts with dualism and panpsychism while insisting there’s a gap science cannot yet close.
Giulio Tononi: Gives us Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and the elusive metric Φ (phi). Consciousness is the degree to which information is unified within a system. Your brain is conscious because its parts can’t be reduced without losing coherence.
Karl Friston: The prophet of Free Energy Minimisation. Consciousness is an emergent property of systems that seek to reduce prediction error. The brain is a Bayesian engine, and the self is its best guess about how to survive.
So What Is Consciousness?
A hallucination. A recursive illusion. A predictive dashboard. A statistical artefact. A phi score. A phenomenally transparent model. Take your pick.
None of these theories fully agree, but most converge on one elegant horror: you are not what you think you are. The sense of being a continuous, stable, indivisible “I” is a construction. A simulation. The dream from which there is no waking because waking is part of the dream.
This is not despair; it is clarity. Just as wetness does not cry when told it is not a substance, the self need not mourn its own illusion. It is a marvellous fiction, worth inhabiting.
Conclusion: Through the Mirror
To be conscious of consciousness is to stand in the hall of mirrors and realise none reflect the original—because there is no original. The mirror is the thing.
But if the theatre is empty, the play goes on. Scripts are written, models simulated, selves performed. And perhaps, in this strange recursion, we find not meaning, but the possibility of coherence.
So raise a glass to the illusion. May your predictive model stay optimised, your narrative stay plausible, and your hallucinated self remain just this side of transparent.
For further hallucinatory episodes, consult your local philosopher, neuroscientist, or AI researcher. Side effects may include derealisation, epistemic vertigo, and mild enlightenment.
In The Death Lottery, Johnny Thompson of PhilosophyMinis poses this question:
In 1975 the philosopher John Harris gave us one of the most interesting and challenging thought experiments in moral philosophy it’s inspired lots of science fiction since and it’s a great intuition pump to test how you feel about the value of human life it goes like this imagine at the hospital down the road three people are dying from organ failure and there are no organs to donate and so everybody is given a lottery ticket and if your ticket is chosen then you are killed your organs are harvested they’re given to the dying and your one life will save three and as harris puts it no doubt a suitable euphemism for killed could be employed perhaps we would begin to talk about citizens being called upon to give life to others Harris is keen to add that everybody in this scenario is as innocent as each other so none of the patients did anything in their lives to merit their organ failure and so what is wrong with this system or this world if we say that we value human life then surely saving three lives is three times better than saving just one it might be said that death shouldn’t be determined by the luck of a draw but surely this is what happens anyway one person gets cancer another does not one person is in a car crash another is not luck is the biggest single killer of humanity so what do you think is wrong with harris’s thought experiment and is one life ever more valuable than three?
Video: YouTube inspiration for this post.
This fits rather nicely into a recent theme I’ve been dissecting — The Dubious Art of Reasoning: Why Thinking Is Harder Than It Looks — particularly regarding the limitations of deductive logic built upon premises that are, shall we say, a tad suspect. So what’s actually happening in Harris’s tidy moral meat grinder?
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
Let us begin at the root, the hallowed dogma no one dares blaspheme: the belief that life has value. Not just any value, mind you, but a sacred, irrefutable, axiomatic kind of value — the sort of thing whispered in holy tones and enshrined in constitutions, as though handed down by divine courier.
But let’s not genuflect just yet. “Value” is not some transcendent essence; it’s an economic artefact. Value, properly speaking, is something tested in a marketplace. So, is there a market for human life?
Historically, yes — but one doubts Harris is invoking the Atlantic slave trade or Victorian child labour auctions. No, what he’s tapping into is a peculiarly modern, unexamined metaphysical presumption: that human beings possess inherent worth because, well, they simply must. We’ve sentimentalised supply and demand.
Now, this notion of worth — where does it come from? Let us not mince words: it’s theological. It is the residue of religious metaphysics, the spiritual afterbirth of the soul. We’re told that all souls are precious. All life is sacred. Cue the soft lighting and trembling organ chords. But if you strip away the divine scaffolding — and I suggest we do — then this “value” collapses like a soufflé in a thunderstorm. Without God, there is no soul; without soul, there is no sacredness. Without sacredness? Just meat. Glorified offal.
So what are we left with?
Null values. A society of blank spreadsheets, human lives as rows with no data in the ‘Value’ column. A radical equality of the meaningless.
Now let’s take a darker turn — because why not, since we’re already plumbing the ethical abyss. The anti-natalists, those morose prophets of philosophical pessimism, tell us not only that life lacks positive value, but that it is intrinsically a burden. A cosmic mistake. A raw deal. The moment one is born, the suffering clock starts ticking.
Flip the moral equation in The Death Lottery, and what you get is this: saving three lives is not a moral victory — it’s a net increase in sentient suffering. If you kill one to save three, you’ve multiplied misery. Congratulations. You’ve created more anguish with surgical efficiency. And yet we call this a triumph of compassion?
According to this formulation, the ethical choice is not to preserve the many at the cost of the few. It is to accelerate the great forgetting. Reduce the volume of suffering, not its distribution.
But here’s the deeper problem — and it’s a trick of philosophical stagecraft: this entire thought experiment only becomes a “dilemma” if you first accept the premises. That life has value. That death is bad. That ethics is a numbers game. That morality can be conducted like a cost-benefit spreadsheet in a celestial boardroom.
Yet why do we accept these assumptions? Tradition? Indoctrination? Because they sound nice on a Hallmark card? These axioms go unexamined not because they are true, but because they are emotionally convenient. They cradle us in the illusion that we are important, that our lives are imbued with cosmic significance, that our deaths are tragedies rather than banal statistical certainties.
But the truth — the unvarnished, unmarketable truth — is that The Death Lottery is not a test of morality, but a test of credulity. A rigged game. An illusion dressed in the solemn robes of logic.
And like all illusions, it vanishes the moment you stop believing in it.Let’s deconstruct the metanarratives in play. First, we are told uncritically that life has value. Moreover, this value is generally positive. But all of this is a human construct. Value is an economic concept that can be tested in a marketplace. Is there a marketplace for humans? There have been slave marketplaces, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what this aims for. There are wage and salary proxies. Again, I don’t think this is what they are targeting.
This worth is metaphysical. But allow me to cut to the chase. This concept of worth has religious roots, the value of the soul, and all souls are precious, sacred, actually. One might argue that the body is expendable, but let’s not go there. If we ignore the soul nonsense and dispense of the notion that humans have any inherent value not merely conjured, we are left with an empty set, all null values.
But let’s go further. Given anti-natalist philosophy, conscious life not only has value but is inherently negative, at least ex ante. This reverses the maths – or flips the inequality sign – to render one greater than three. It’s better to have only one suffering than three.
Ultimately, this is only a dilemma if one accepts the premises, and the only reason to do so is out of indoctrinated habit.
Postscript: Notes from the Abyss
David Benatar, in Better Never to Have Been, argues with pitiless logic that coming into existence is always a harm — that birth is a curse disguised as celebration. He offers no anaesthetic. Existence is pain; non-existence, the balm.
Peter Wessel Zapffe, the Norwegian prophet of philosophical despair, likened consciousness to a tragic evolutionary overreach — a cosmic misfire that left humanity acutely aware of its own absurdity, scrambling to muffle it with distraction, denial, and delusion. For him, the solution was elegant in its simplicity: do not reproduce. Shut the trapdoor before more souls tumble in.
And then there is Cioran, who did not so much argue as exhale. “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” He understood what the rest of us politely ignore — that life is a fever dream from which only death delivers.
So if the question is whether one life is worth more than three, we must first ask whether any of them were worth having in the first place.
The answer, for the brave few staring into the black, may be a shrug — or silence.
A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning.This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast discussing this topic.
Constraint Is Not Freedom
The ergonomic cage of compatibilist comfort
“You are not playing the piano. You are the piano, playing itself — then applauding.”
Compatibilists — those philosophical locksmiths determined to keep the myth of free will intact — love to say that constraint doesn’t contradict freedom. That a system can still be “free” so long as it is coherent, self-reflective, and capable of recursive evaluation.
In this view, freedom doesn’t require being uncaused — it only requires being causally integrated. You don’t need to be sovereign. You just need to be responsive.
“The pianist may not have built the piano — but she still plays it.”
It sounds lovely.
It’s also false.
You Are the Piano
This analogy fails for a simple reason: there is no pianist. No ghost in the gears. No homunculus seated behind the cortex, pulling levers and composing virtue. There is only the piano — complex, self-modulating, exquisitely tuned — but self-playing nonetheless.
The illusion of choice is merely the instrument responding to its state: to its internal wiring, environmental inputs, and the accumulated sediment of prior events. What feels like deliberation is often delay. What feels like freedom is often latency.
Recursive ≠ Free
Ah, but what about reflection? Don’t we revise ourselves over time?
We do. But that revision is itself conditioned. You didn’t choose the capacity to reflect. You didn’t choose your threshold for introspection. If you resist a bias, it’s because you were predisposed — by some cocktail of education, temperament, or trauma — to resist it.
A thermostat that updates its own algorithm is still a thermostat.
It doesn’t become “free” by being self-correcting. It becomes better adapted. Likewise, human introspection is just adaptive determinism wearing a philosophical hat.
I died in March 2023 — or so the rumour mill would have you believe.
Of course, given that I’m still here, hammering away at this keyboard, it must be said that I didn’t technically die. We don’t bring people back. Death, real death, doesn’t work on a “return to sender” basis. Once you’re gone, you’re gone, and the only thing bringing you back is a heavily fictionalised Netflix series.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this content.
No, this is a semantic cock-up, yet another stinking exhibit in the crumbling Museum of Language Insufficiency. “I died,” people say, usually while slurping a Pumpkin Spice Latte and live-streaming their trauma to 53 followers. What they mean is that they flirted with death, clumsily, like a drunk uncle at a wedding. No consummation, just a lot of embarrassing groping at the pearly gates.
And since we’re clarifying terms: there was no tunnel of light, no angels, no celestial choir belting out Coldplay covers. No bearded codgers in slippers. No 72 virgins. (Or, more plausibly, 72 incels whining about their lack of Wi-Fi reception.)
There was, in fact, nothing. Nothing but the slow, undignified realisation that the body, that traitorous meat vessel, was shutting down — and the only gates I was approaching belonged to A&E, with its flickering fluorescent lights and a faint smell of overcooked cabbage.
To be fair, it’s called a near-death experience (NDE) for a reason. Language, coward that it is, hedges its bets. “Near-death” means you dipped a toe into the abyss and then screamed for your mummy. You didn’t die. You loitered. You loitered in the existential equivalent of an airport Wetherspoons, clutching your boarding pass and wondering why the flight to Oblivion was delayed.
As the stories go, people waft into the next world and are yanked back with stirring tales of unicorns, long-dead relatives, and furniture catalogues made of clouds. I, an atheist to my scorched and shrivelled soul, expected none of that — and was therefore not disappointed.
What I do recall, before the curtain wobbled, was struggling for breath, thinking, “Pick a side. In or out. But for pity’s sake, no more dithering.” In a last act of rational agency, I asked an ER nurse — a bored-looking Athena in scrubs — to intubate me. She responded with the rousing medical affirmation, “We may have to,” which roughly translates to, “Stop making a scene, love. We’ve got fifteen others ahead of you.”
After that, nothing. I was out. Like a light. Like a minor character in a Dickens novel whose death is so insignificant it happens between paragraphs.
I woke up the next day: groggy, sliced open, a tube rammed down my throat, and absolutely no closer to solving the cosmic riddle of it all. Not exactly the triumphant return of Odysseus. Not even a second-rate Ulysses.
Here’s the reality: There is no coming back from death. You can’t “visit” death, any more than you can spend the afternoon being non-existent and return with a suntan.
Those near-death visions? Oxygen-starved brains farting out fever dreams. Cerebral cortexes short-circuiting like Poundland fairy lights. Hallucinations, not heralds. A final, frantic light show performed for an audience of none.
Epicurus, that cheerful nihilist, said, “When we are, death is not. When death is, we are not.” He forgot to mention that, in between, people would invent entire publishing industries peddling twaddle about journeys beyond the veil — and charging $29.99 for the paperback edition.
No angels. No harps. No antechamber to the divine. Just the damp whirr of hospital machinery and the faint beep-beep of capitalism, patiently billing you for your own demise.
If there’s a soundtrack to death, it’s not choirs of the blessed. It’s a disgruntled junior surgeon muttering, “Where the hell’s the anaesthetist?” while pawing desperately through a drawer full of out-of-date latex gloves.
And thus, reader, I lived. But only in the most vulgar, anticlimactic, and utterly mortal sense.
There will be no afterlife memoir. No second chance to settle the score. No sequel. Just this: breath, blood, occasional barbed words — and then silence.
If you are reading this, you are likely familiar with David Chalmers’ idea of the Hard Problem of Consciousness—the thorny, maddeningly unsolvable question of why and how subjective experience arises from physical processes. If you’re not, welcome to the rabbit hole. Here, we’ll plunge deeper by examining the perspective of Stuart Hameroff, who, like a philosophical magician, reframes this conundrum as a chicken-and-egg problem: what came first, life or consciousness? His answer? Consciousness. But wait—there’s a slight snag. Neither “life” nor “consciousness” has a universally agreed-upon definition. Oh, the joy of philosophical discourse.
Video: Professor Stuart Hameroff and others promote the idea that consciousness pre-dates life. A fuller version is available at IAI.
Audio: Podcast on this topic.
For the uninitiated, Hameroff’s stance is heavily flavoured with panpsychism—the idea that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, like space or time. In this worldview, consciousness predates life itself. From this vantage, Hameroff’s proposition seems inevitable, a tidy solution that fits neatly into a panpsychistic framework. But let me stop you right there because I’m not signing up for the panpsychism fan club, and I’m certainly not prepared to let Hameroff’s intellectual sleight of hand go unchallenged.
To make his case, Hameroff engages in a curious manoeuvre: he defines both life and consciousness in ways that conveniently serve his argument. Consciousness, for him, is not limited to the complex phenomena of human or even animal experience but is a fundamental property of the universe, embedded in the very fabric of reality. Meanwhile, consciousness eventually orchestrates itself into life—a secondary phenomenon. With these definitions, his argument clicks together like a self-serving jigsaw puzzle. It’s clever, I’ll grant him that. But cleverness isn’t the same as being correct.
This is the philosophical equivalent of marking your own homework. By defining the terms of debate to fit his narrative, Hameroff ensures that his conclusion will satisfy his fellow panpsychists. The faithful will nod along, their priors confirmed. But for those outside this echo chamber, his framework raises more questions than it answers. How does this universal consciousness work? Why should we accept its existence as a given? And—here’s the kicker—doesn’t this just punt the problem one step back? If consciousness is fundamental, what’s the mechanism by which it “pre-exists” life?
Hameroff’s move is bold, certainly. But boldness isn’t enough. Philosophy demands rigour, and redefining terms to suit your argument isn’t rigorous; it’s rhetorical trickery. Sure, it’s provocative. But does it advance our understanding of the Hard Problem, or does it merely reframe it in a way that makes Hameroff’s preferred answer seem inevitable? For my money, it’s the latter.
The real issue is that panpsychism itself is a philosophical Rorschach test. It’s a worldview that can mean just about anything, from the claim that electrons have a rudimentary kind of awareness to the idea that the universe is a giant mind. Hameroff’s take lands somewhere in this spectrum, but like most panpsychist arguments, it’s long on metaphysical speculation and short on empirical grounding. If you already believe that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality, Hameroff’s arguments will feel like a revelation. If you don’t, they’ll feel like smoke and mirrors.
In the end, Hameroff’s chicken-and-egg problem might be better framed as a false dichotomy. Perhaps life and consciousness co-evolved in ways we can’t yet fully understand. Or perhaps consciousness, as we understand it, emerges from the complexity of life, a byproduct rather than a prerequisite. What’s clear is that Hameroff’s solution isn’t as tidy as it seems, nor as universally compelling. It’s a clever sleight of hand, but let’s not mistake cleverness for truth.
Perception of Reality™ is akin to having relative pitch. Unlike pitch, where some people have perfect pitch – the ability to name a note or chordal composition without any other reference – it is unlikely that anyone has or will have access to objective reality – analogically: perfect pitch for reality.
As I’ve mentioned, I believe that all our experiences and interactions with reality are relative, if not wholly subjective. There may exist an objective reality, but for reasons already noted – cognitive and sense perception deficits –, we can never access it.
Musically, If someone plays and identifies a reference note, say A (or do in movable do solfège), and then plays a major fifth above (or sol), a person with relative pitch can hear that fifth interval and identify it as an E. Everything is about relationships. In music, the relationships are intervalic, but we know where we are based on where we’ve been. A person with perfect pitch requires no such priming. They can identify the first A note without prompting.
Our experience with reality is also relative, but no one has the equivalence of perfect pitch. No one has access to objective reality – if there even is one.
I don’t deny that there could be an objective reality. I just believe it’s inaccessible. I am a qualified realist – so, not a physicalist –, but I don’t believe in supernatural or paranormal events. A so-called ‘supernatural’ event is merely an event that hasn’t yet been described in ‘natural’ terms.
Now that I got that off my chest, what are your thoughts on objective reality? Lemme know.
jimoeba mentioned that he enjoyed an interview with Vervake and Fridman in a comment, so I thought I’d give it a listen. It turns out there are several including a 3-plus-hour version. Arbitrarily, I chose this one. Even if it’s not the particular interview on the meaning crisis, it gives me a sense of the two and their dynamics. I’m glad I listened to it. I like Vervaeke. I can’t say I’m much of a Fridman fan on first listen.
John Vervaeke and Lex Fridman interview: Human civilisation is facing a meaning crisis
This interview content provides an orientation of where Vervaeke is coming from. It helps to clarify his position. His claim seems to be that many people today identify as having no religion but being spiritual. By extension, he posits that this cohort is searching for meaning. I can’t disagree. What it tells me is that I am not in his target demographic. I have no religion, as I am an atheist. I have no spiritual void to fill. This is Vervaeke’s goal—to find something to perform the function of the religion without the, perhaps, baggage and dogma.
I sympathise with his goal. He brings up Nietzsche’s “God is dead” quote, famous or infamous depending on your worldview. Essentially, he wants to answer Nietzsche’s query of what to do now that it’s been revealed that humans created God, not the other way around. His aim is to replace the font of wisdom for this generation.
For me, wisdom is a heuristic, part of the Gestalt McGilchrist mentions. McGilchrist’s work is even referenced here. Of course, I interpret McGilchrist’s references in this space to be metaphorical. It seems that he views it as ‘real’. I’m not sure where Vervaeke places it. Somehow, I feel that if there is a spectrum, Vervaeke leans closer to McGilchrist than me, and that’s OK. They just happen to be wrong.
I still don’t get the need for meaning. I don’t feel despondent that there is no inherent meaning in anything, but we are free to invite or adopt one or many. I remember a Christian mate of mine who explained that people have a God-sized hole that can only be filled by God. Essentially, Vervaeke is making a similar claim, but his void is filled by wisdom. I suppose that I don’t feel I have a void doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
Philosophics 