Metacognition -Cultural and Spiritual

[Starbuck]

Lockdown has meant I have spent a lot more time indoors with relatives and acquaintances over the last year - which has got me thinking about differences and similarities between people, particularly across generations, and social groups/classes.

I particularly notice a distinction between younger and older in terms of cultural references and ways of thinking. I would vaguely identify this as pertaining to all things 'meta'. As a now middle-aged man, I certainly caught the first waves of post modern theory as it assimilated into modern education, the advertising industry, film/music/arts, and just the way people within that paradigm talk and relate to each other. I see this trend increasing in millenials and the following generations.

Sometimes around the dinner table there seems to be two conversations going on - one is laced with meta content (self knowing, ironic/surreal, and occasional cynicism/sarcasm). The other 'older' conversation is more concerned with things 'as they are' without all the layering.

The 'younger' conversation is clever - it intuitively sees through prescribed narrative, augmenting it with a deeper or a counter narrative. Often veering into politics and discussion about how the older generations don't 'get it'. There is something of youthful rebellion in this, but I would also extend it to a broader cultural zeitgeist that encompasses older people like myself. To be culturally meta is to be 'about' something. To use guile and learning to take an outside stance, in which something is understood in a larger context, with a very 'knowing' knower perched above. We see this in academia, where the ability to meta cognise is synonymous with greater abstraction. Greater abstraction entails greater applied consideration and depth, which is esteemed as a form of superior cognition and self awareness. This seems to become a cultural feedback bubble in which an entire demographic produces and consumes according to this new post modern orthodoxy. I am reminded of examples from the advertising industry. In the 1950s they would sell soap powder in a very direct way - "this is soup powder, it works, and its inexpensive!". We have come along way from that to the current day. You might now see a soup powder commercial which makes no direct reference to soap powder at all. Or you might see an advert that knowingly addresses the consumer "I know you're tired of us trying to flog you the same old powder with bells a whistles, so here! soap powder!". We know that you know that we know etc etc.


I am a meditator, where my particular training entails what has been termed 'choiceless awareness'. Rather than employing any guile as the 'one who knows', this practice is more concerned with developing the 'beginner's mind'. Choicelessly and silently acknowleging whatever comes up. The analogy often used is that of the mirror, in which there is no distortion, just pure reflection and ultimately absorbtion. It is interesting to me that this is also a form of meta cognition that entails knowing in a broader context. But not abstracted knowing, not constrained by my preferences, and not sabotaged by an implicit desire to 'appear' in a certain way to impress or gain advantage. We could describe this as wordless/languageless knowing. Metacognisance without any backstory.


So can we call these two entirely different forms of metacognition, or just aspects of the same thing? Does the former lead to the latter?

[SanteriSatama]

I think of metacognition as the discourse cognition, and we can recognize the linguistic turn aka "PoMo" as discourse becoming playfully metameta self-aware of how it is moving and what it is doing, while trying to avoid getting trapped in the unconscious of an ideological possession by this or that metanarrative.

Silent knowing is another non-story.

Both can observe how they interrelate.