Neoplatonism and the Path of Transformation | Dr. John Vervaeke

This is Dr. Vervaeke's keynote talk from the Consilience Conference.

This approach aims to cultivate wisdom through the connection between science and spirituality. Dr. Vervaeke delves into the importance of strong transcendence within naturalistic terms and proposes extended naturalism as a more comprehensive account of explanation. He outlines his plan to construct meta-convergent arguments to support his claims, including discussions on emergence, emanation, conformity theory, and the relationships between knowing and being.

Timecodes:
00:03:00 - Deep consilience as a connection between science and spirituality.
00:04:06 - Defining strong transcendence and its impacts.
00:04:44 - Extended naturalism as a comprehensive account of explanation.
00:11:42 - Generalization-discrimination trade-off and its importance.
00:15:22 - Probability in rolling a die and real information based on differences.
00:19:26 - Hole's argument about living things' causal power.
00:22:30 - Causal signals in living organisms and the need for higher level redundancy.
00:28:36 - Convergence of arguments supporting emergence and emanation framework.
00:32:31 - Where does actualization come from if the bottom level of reality is pure possibility?
00:34:22 - The need for both emergence and emanation in ontology.
00:38:14 - Emergence and emanation as completely interpenetrating.
00:41:34 - Pickstock's argument against gap-preserving distinctions.
00:44:22 - Debunking the theory-data distinction.
00:46:55 - Conformity theory and the interweaving of knowing and reality.
00:52:03 - Transjectivity being more real than subjectivity and objectivity.
00:53:14 - The inherently transjective nature of truth, relevance, life, and perception.
00:57:21 - Strong transcendence within extended naturalism.
01:02:17 - Reductionism as a presupposition causing difficulties in physics.
01:04:35 - Unifying knowledge and consilience for addressing the wisdom famine.
01:08:26 - Complexification of cognition and its relation to complexification in reality.