Ep. 29 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Getting to the Depths of Relevance Realization
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•Anchor: anchor.fm/john-vervaeke
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Books in the Video:
• Harold Brown - Rationality
• Christopher Cherniak - Minimal Rationality
• Zenon Pylyshyn - Things and Places: How the Mind Connects with the World
• Dan Sperber - Relevance: Communication and Cognition
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Facebook: / vervaeke.john
Twitter: / vervaeke_john
Twenty-ninth episode of Dr. John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
Damn, this one was over my head.
I apologize Shawn. This video and the next two are challenging in being so abstract I ask for your patience as I try to present a more formal scientific theory. I promise that it will thereafter get to more psychologically and existentially accessible and relevant material.
@@johnvervaeke you don't need to apologise. I appreciate your rigor and believe in your mission. I'm a technician at a factory with no formal background in philosophy. I am your autodidact trying to right myself.
Shawn Růžek I appreciate your effort and your graciousness with me and my work.
Same here, until the end of the video when he mentioned that we cannot have a scientific theory of relevance. My pulse dropped, wait, what. Then he said that ultimately that is no reason for despair. Pulse went back up. Then, he mentions all we ever needed was a theory of relevance realization. Energy kicks back - is this the great turning point... Never have I imagined I would be so captivated by a philosophical series. This is like Netflix for the mind.
Same here, but I’m fairly certain he redefined superpowers.
It's Friday, Friday
Cog-Sci time on Friday
Everybody's looking inward for some meaning
Friday I'm in love
@@sennewam It's the cure!
So what the cliché "work smart, not hard" is really saying is "Make sure you have the correct problem formulation and thus the relevant info to avoid combinatorial explosion".
I guess the second doesn't roll of the tongue quite as well.
The last couple of lectures have been more difficult than the first 25 for me, but I kept going as John earned my trust throughout the series. At the end of this episode I was rewarded for my patience and willingness to keep listening and watching.
Life-changing course ❤
"Perspectival knowing ultimately depends on how well the agent and arena fit together and generate affordances of action."
holy shit, John.
I just realized we all have been on this journey for over six months. Awesome!
A relevant realization.
I’m drunk at a party so I am going to say that we have been on the journey for 13.7 billion years technically. 🤔😂
I think I’ve been going through this series for a year now. Loving every moment!!
Depending on how you look at it, for me it has been either 13 billion years, 4 billion years, 28 years, 7 years, or 4 days. 4 days ago being when I started this series.
Thank you..... I didn't think i could think so hard.....
OMG. The crazy thing about this is you're basically helping us realise the relevance of Relevance Realisation over and above Relevance itself.
a very hegelian thought....
Again John! Super inspiring, connecting the dots... For me it really clicked how everything depends on the participatory!
Thats helping me in organising and faciliating my work! Thank you for your time!
WOW!!! This lecture is incredible! Fair amount of overlap with the Trinity College lecture, which is how I was introduced to Vervaeke’s work. There are so many great points here. What a gem. Thank you, John, for this wonderful teaching.
Super salient this time to me: "Cat, meow meow the animal that pretends to love you! Actually I know some cats that I am actually convinced do actually love me, so I have to amend my usual comments about cats!" 🙂
Why is it that these remarks are so gorgeous ... there is also something happening in the brain there, like opening up and refreshing, and then going on ... very interesting :-) love it.
Hi John, second watch-through of the series, I'm not an expert, but the idea of relevance realization has been really valuable and transformative over the last year. Your explanation of Heidegger describing being human as 'beings who's being-ness is always in question' has, funny enough, really grounded my sense of self-being. Thanks for all your work, looking forward to the next lecture series!
well said! inspiring, too.
so are you more `fuzzy` today or is it back to solid materialistic and "all clear" daily dose of Samsara?
The hominculus problem, and the circularity problem. Figuring out how the brain works is a prototype of this problem since people view it as a discrete finite structure. Definitely enlightening.
As far as the cat thing, there’s research on that. Their pleasure centers light up when they hear their “persons” voice, not just anyone. So yeah. 🥰
Love what you said about properties of theory vs the thing described. Omg a HUGE source of misunderstanding. Word!
I recognise you from Curt’s chat
@@ToriKo_ Thanks. Curt is awesome…
this ended so well I cannot not roll right into the next lecture , very smooth, i love it!
@John Vervaeke, you rock! With every episode, it feels like the world with `me` in it is getting more intelligent and self-organizing. Cleaned my room today! Say hello to Jordan :)
RR = Relevance Realization
... some nice schemes depicting the connection from world to consciousness using concept of RR.
49:16 attention has to move out to the gestalt, and down to features. RR happens at both levels highly integrated. you cannot point to ONE place to call it a place of RR, because it happens in multiple levels of congition simultaneously in self-organizing fashion. capable of insight and correction.**
52:40 auto-poetically internal systems. deep connection between RR and being a living thing.
53:55 problem. we cannot have a scientific theory of RR. depth of nature of relevance. irony: all we need is a theory of RR
** Why I find this important? Because for me it explains that one cannot come up with ONE best idea, that there is no single IDEOLOGY, no ONE interpretation. Here is a twist: does the first statement contradict with the idea that we are ONE, ONEness?
I am so anxious to find out how all recent problems will circle back to Meaning Crisis and the Awakening... so much information, so little time.
Thank you
It just keeps getting better.
I feel like you are on the verge of something profound. I'm ready.
Where there is emotional trauma and how that disturbs relative realization and cognitive ability to function productively, In an orderly fashion🤔
I hope all your work can help people sort themselves out and have a understanding through dialogue... I want to support your institution a whole new mental health Model from These perspective and understanding...
Thank you for the work you were doing...🦋🕊
Prediction: Next video’s theory of relevance will be like Darwin’s theory of fitness. You cant ever define fitness but you can describe the mechanism by which fitness comes about.
Good insight! :D
Thanks John.
Hi Prof, thank you very much for this series!
I am commenting about the distinction between recursive and circular explanations because it seems like a relevant point to raise.
My guess is that students unfamiliar with recursion will not easily see the difference between a truly circular explanation and a recursive one. Recursive explanations look circular but aren't. The distinction is subtle enough to easily fool me unless the arguments are made using equations. Only then does the difference become easy to see.
For example, it is perfectly fine to explain the Fibonacci sequence as a sequence where
Fibonacci(x) = Fibonacci(x-2) + Fibonacci(x-1) and where Fibonacci(0) = 0 and Fibonacci(1) = 1.
Here the explanation of a Fibonacci sequence invokes the notion of a Fibonacci sequence, so superficially it looks circular, but it's not. We can turn this explanation into a computer program that correctly generates the Fibonacci sequence. It's recursive not circular.
I think it would be helpful to explicitly verify that a theory you are criticizing for being circular is in fact circular and not recursive. To prepare students for such an argument a quick intro to recursion would be helpful.
I think an argument that a candidate theory of relevance realization is inadequate because it needs to invoke relevance realization is incomplete until it is explicitly verified that the required invocation of relevance realization is actually circular and not recursive.
“Danger, Will Robinson!” At last, a reference I know 😅 Thank you for bringing me along on this journey. I’m learning a lot and am encouraged to know my brain is still firing.
This is better then college
I so very much appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄 every part in this series is so thought provoking and i love every second! Its taking me longer and longer to get through these episodes having to rewind to repeat terms and whole sections i need repeating so i grasp it fully, and i love it! I’m learning more words and terms than I imagined this is giving me so much more than I could have expected watching, listening, and reading along with this series(with the cc turned on) helps me immensely! I Can’t thank you enough much love ❤️
Thank You!
Great as always.Thanks
The inter-dependancy of your different knowings theory is brilliant
Thank you for continually breaking apart my "mind". A place where etymology, syntax, and ineffibility are cohering to relevance realization. When are you opening your Mystery/Wisdom Cultivation schools, John? 🙏🏻
I feel I need to go back and reread Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I think I would get more out of it after my new background, :), in cogsci. This is amazing stuff. As an engineer, I feel the world obsesses about material progress, but what good is this if we don't have wisdom to better understand and manage our mind and cognitive processes. It does make me think of the Bible verse about what would it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul. I wonder if the materialism of our present societies are incrementally doing that. Thanks for being at the center of making the world a better place for humanity by helping us sort the details of our thought processes, and doing it in a scientifically valid way.
Thank you
John, loving the series! Would love to hear your take on modern interpretations of James Gibson's ecological dynamics..it seems like you're moving that direction with the rejection of representation, computation, and modularity.
If anyone needs a transcript we've made them for this & all episodes here: www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-29-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-getting-to-the-depths-of-relevance-realization/
Wow!! Very cool!
Mmmhhmm, the sweet smell of "right understanding":)
This all has clear implications about the current setbacks of advancing AI to AGI. I can identify many pitfalls a computer would fall victim to that humans seem to take for granted in this episode; computers struggle to find "relevance" between things, they don't make the connections we do, it's all ones and zeros to them. We evolved, they are built. Still, the GTP-3 system shows promise in this regard.
I allways leave so exited and expectant.
A thought I had last episode was that:
I have access to meaninglessness in various different ways.
-“Something bad is going to happen” is one way
-“(Don’t look now) but there is a hole in the bottom of the world”
-What do I want? And then I come up empty
-Death being the convergent and elegant solution to so many problems. (This actually makes Death meaningful and very salient, and the bigot-like responses from others actually support this)
-maybe some others
-Notice that all of these are actually quite Propositional, and that often times meaninglessness is much more that just Propositional
It seems like John is attempting to help you find Meaning by co opting relevance realisation to answer the “What do I want?” question. And this might seem very useful for the reasons you used to ask yourself that question in the first place. It may have the downfall of not addressing the rest, which (if it even does anything) may or may not be enough.
Btw to anyone reading, this is meant as a personal note as I use a lot of subject terms that I haven’t clarified
This is out of context but I love that shirt on you.
Uff... Talking about cathegories and concepts! And everything began with arena-agent relationship. This one was superb and I loved it. A bit difficult because this is not my mother tongue but maybe we need a vocabulary from the beginning. I will see if I can contribute with this, so I can also clarify my knowledge and you guys maybe can help me? Well, I hope you do
Though I'm repeating myself somewhat to get a better grasp on my own ideas, I think meditative bliss or "love-bliss", where love and bliss are happening as one, is somehow autopoetic, although it needs the right conditions of the mind or consciousness to become more effortless, or entirely effortless; and when sufficiently advanced, expanded, and intensified, love-bliss does not acknowledge itself as constrained to the body or nervous system it scientifically appears to exist in, nor does it recognize itself as constrained to the whole of existence, nor does it recognize itself as constrained to thought, and it raises the level of phosphenes or inner light experiences, where these things make it hide within everyday or presently normal human consciousness and make it more difficult to realize (and this is generally how it is talked about in the Vivekachudamani, Ribhu Gita, Ashtavakra Gita, and Avadhuta Gita).
So I think the concept of the "light body" partially came about as a stage or level of love-bliss realization, where the phosphenes or inner lights in combination with love-bliss appear to be non-linguistically confined to the body, creating the perception of a "light body", but where the "glow of Being" or the glow of outer phenomena, where outer phenomena appears more luminous as a result of drugs or meditative consciousness, can happen with how one sees the outer light of their body as a result of sufficient love-bliss.
And I think Brahman is beyond this, which now I think is potentially dangerous depending on if it is perceived as a threat, and maybe somehow in how it is approached (for example with it being more dangerous by abusing effective Kundalini techniques)-- where with Brahman, the intensity of prolonged love-bliss leads to a spontaneous sensation of exiting out of the top of the head, into a combination of inner light experiences and the entirety of existence and consciousness, where everything including every atom of the individual self appears as profound loving bliss and light that is the same autopoetic essence.
I think an example of relevance realisation being central to our meaning making is our understanding of the difference between the terms of being care-free and being careless.
Hi John, really enjoying your work, thanks for taking the time and energy to make it available to us. I wondered if you, or anyone here more familiar with John's work, could recommend resources for getting a better handle on the types of knowing you reference - propositional, procedural, perspectival and participatory - particularly the last two.
Also, can you or anyone else let me know if there is an overview of the meaning crisis narrative of the first 25 episodes, I’ve listened to them all, and have the gist, but it would be really useful to be able to read through the key points in one place, does this exist anywhere, or do I have to wait until the book comes out?
Thanks again for all your work, may the force be with you!
I'm also looking for more information on the types of knowing.
As for your second question check out these essays parts 1 through 4.
www.snsociety.org/spirituality-and-responding-to-the-meaning-crisis-part-1-the-meaning-that-was-lost/
They seem to be a pretty good synopsis of the key points in the first 25 episodes written by Vervaeke about 6 years ago.
@@dsuleyma Very, very cool (though not very surprising) to see John at the Spiritual Naturalist Society.
There’s a really nice video nowadays on TH-cam that will come up when you search those terms
Before watching the video, my assumption was that relevance is derived ultimately from natural selection; relevance has efficacy in the application of tools and the achievement of goals, thereby outperforming irrelevance.
When I'm playing chess I know that I can't think about all the implications of every move, and somehow it seems that I can use cues like the proximity and the importance of every piece to filter insignificant paths of thinking. Training chess seems to be training this ability. Is this ability similar to this relevance realization?
Yes that is a clear example of RR.
@@johnvervaeke Are dreams and hallucinations fake conclusions from the RR without the real "here and now" sensory input? It's clear to me that dreams can't create a Virtual Reality kind of world...
@@FabioFerrari8 hey I know I am extremely late but you may wanna watch some previous videos on states of consciousness to understand dreams and hallucinations
42:30 The Skill of Judgement
51:50 Constitutive Goals
So much of this early stuff was rich and cognizable.
This recent cogsci stuff requires a lot of background just to get the jokes lol
Awesome lecture as usual. However, I couldn't help thinking that the modularity theory of RR was given a bit of a short thrift. My understanding is that it does NOT stipulate a specific center in the brain where RR occurs, rather, it says that RR is an emergent result of the interaction of a very large (how large is a matter of debate) number of brain modules each highly specialized in a given aspect of the world. That specialization (and the relevant aspects) being, of course, the result of natural selection for specific problem solving in given environments, some of these environments dating back to tens or hundreds of thousands of years, even millions or tens of millions (the "reptilian brain"). In other words, the micro-relevance of each module was decided by survival. Anyway, I would have liked to see a deeper treatment of the subject.
You make a very good point. I was addressing a specific version centred on the idea of a central executive that is prevalent in Psych. In Fodor’s seminal version the modules are specifically incapable of doing RR; that is handled by central systems which he argued need a theory of RR. The massive modularity hypothesis, in which there is no central systems and only very many modules, you face some serious problems. There is the coordination problem in which the issues of selecting and coordinated between the modules quickly becomes combinatorially explosive. There is the massive metaphorical nature of cognition in which information from very disparate domains are regularly connected together. Thus undermining the informational encapsulation central to how the modules avoid relevance problems. Finally there is the increasing evidence for the massive redeployment hypothesis which radically undermines modularity. I hope this is a more complete treatment.
@@johnvervaeke It certainly is. Thank you for taking the time, it's a great honor. I'll have to ponder your excellent points some more. This is an extremely complicated issue, and you still have quite a few lectures ahead which I am sure will answer many more of my questions. On a somewhat related topic, I believe I have found a proof that physical determinism and reductionism cannot be true. This has serious implications regarding Free Will, for example. I wonder is you would be interested in discussing and/or reviewing my paper (I also have a Power Point version). I am not an academic, so frankly I am not sure how to proceed with my finding (try to publish it in an academic journal?). And yes, I am aware my claim seems preposterous at first (given the fact that this is still a subject of debate after 2,500 years+ of philosophy and science), but actually I am very confident about it. I know you are quite busy so I do not wish to impose, but this would not take long. Thank you for your consideration.
Check out Deacons "incomplete nature" his teleodynamic framework among a great many other things suggests that the locus is distibuted an decentralized, embodied as a higher order emergent constraint.
@@johnvervaeke The combinatorial explosion issue is not the only issue...related to this is the problem (you allude to it in this talk) of the fundamental unprestatability of future context and relatedly the fact that for a given ontology, the list of its uses or functions to an agent is unpresteable and it is impossible to even make meaningful probability statements about it because we cannot enumerate the sample space ( see S A kaufman in reinventing the sacred for a thorough exposition on this). In "incomplete nature" Deacon introduces a framework ( teleodynamics) that suggests that the "executive" is an decentralized and distributed, embodied as an emergent higher order constraint ( where a constraint is understood to be that which makes some allowable dynamical pathways extremely unlikely and consequently makes others overwhelmingly likely). The framework offers a naturalist non-homuncular explanation for the emergence of mindlike and purposeful properties in the biosphere begining with simple dissapative structures ( in his autogen model the relavent disspative processes are collective autocatalysis and self-assembling polymer structures) that is testable experimentally and with simulations.
@@waynelewis425I'm currently investigating Stuart Kaufman's work just because of the considerations you mention. Pretty much along my lines of thought anyway.
I love this series but this episode seems to be founded on several subtle, pervasive errors. The cornerstone of one of the errors seems to be at 28:55 that "representations are semantic" - this is incorrect, representations are pre-semantic; you can't have semantics until a representation has been created. (I'm trying not to write paragraphs on this, its hard not to... but in short, at 27:00 you cannot have an enactive, demonstrative reference to something, until you "see it" first. If it's unrepresented, invisible, it cannot be referenced or discussed. At 18:00, you cannot judge something relevant if it is invisible. Things without representations are "unknown unknowns")
The other error is founded on the concluding statement at 54:45, that there's no scientific theory of relevance. The confusion there is due to human-focused cognition. Lets look at jelly-fish instead - a much simpler neural net. If a predator nibbles on a corner of a jelly-fish, the network will perceive this as a threat, the jelly-fish will attempt to flee. The nibble is salient, and it's relevant, and you have a direct mechanistic model with which to ponder salience, relevance and representations. (Viz. the firing of certain neurons are a "representation" of being attacked, and that representation is no deeper than this. The "semantics" arises because this "representation" is coupled to the action mechanism (contractions to create fleeing motions)).
A nice article that reviews simple neural systems: "Forced moves or good tricks in design space? Landmarks in the evolution of neural mechanisms for action selection", Tony J. Prescott (2007)
I think you’re getting this wrong.
The point is:
Relevance Realization comes before the creation of the representation.
In other words the representation of the thing you „see“ is dependent on what you want/need to see at any particular moment, so it’ s dependent on what‘s relevant to you in a given situation.
So, like he said, you need something to write - you see a pen.
You need something to stab - you see a „stabbing device“.
It‘s not like when you are looking for a weapon you see the „pen“ first and then think „oh I could use this to defend myself against that guy“. No, you immediately perceive the object as a thing-with-which-I-can-defend-myself.
That‘s the whole point of the argument.
And that, in my conclusion, means that you can never perceive anything „objectively“. All perception is subjective.
The question then is: Is there an objective reality outside of consciousness?
Or rather, what do we even mean when we say something is „real“?
@@floriansebastianfitz2697 Yes .. we are using different definitions for the word "representation". When I use it, I am referring to something pre-verbal, pre-conscious; I envision bundles of neurons that track the external world as a matter of routine, whether you are paying attention or not. Consciousness, attention, awareness roams over that representation, focusing on this or that, denoting it as "important" at this instant. Relevance realization (for me) sits in between these two layers: between full awareness and the much deeper representations.
FWIW, these are my pragmatic definitions; I use these in creating AGI systems, primarily in something called "the opencog learn system". This will get search hits; if interested in deeper discussions, email me (or the mailing list).
52:58, does this internal self goal also raise a massive problem? It feels like this is starting to separate the world from our mind again....
Hi John, I wanted to ask: Why did you undergo this search for meaning?
I assume people undergo the brutal and desperate search for meaning because they are facing the terrifying insurmountable meaninglessness of their lives.
id you start this search from a similar position as those other people or somewhere else?
In your developement of implication and inference here, Pierces abdcutive reasoning seems to be what we are talking about.
🙏
I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated
re the theory that relevance realisation (RR) is a function of consciousness, what do we make of this in light of the fact that there is some subconscious mode of thinking we all have direct experience with (an answer to a problem suddenly coming to us when we weren't even thinking about a problem). So how does that subconscious/diffuse mode of thinking access functions of RR, as it's pretty clear that problems are solved in the context of some RR function in the subconscious, and that it doesn't suffer combinatorial explosion due to a limitation in the scope of the RR function. So it's hard for me to make a model where those two things sit together.
I thought John was going down that road when he spoke about the 'here and now' conceptualisation of things (29 mins in approx) but he returned very quickly to the conscious mind and started talking about computation. Maybe it's related to what he calls the impossibility of a theory of relevance as opposed to one of relevance realisation. The theory of relevance perhaps cannot by definition apply to an autopoietic system. Relevance is processed within that system, realised in an unconscious process when asleep and realised consciously when awake. I hope he returns to it next week.
Interesting question
That doesn't seem like a direct experience of the subconscious. It seems like a conscious realisation of an unseen subconscious process.
@@Valosken sorry I explained myself badly and my point got lost. Firstly, there is a theory (not John's but he alluded to it) that THE function of consciousness might be for relevance realisation, literally the reason it exists. However if you accept that the subconscious has some problem-solving capacity then that undermines the theory that the function of consciousness is relevance realisation, if RR-dependant problem solving can be shown to function subconsciously also. My assumption here is some Jungian view of the subconscious mind with problem solving capability, and not a mere pre-staging area for what will inevitably be conscious thoughts. And I know not everyone feels this way. My comment about first-hand experience is that (without knowing the mechanisms at work) it's clear that fully-formed solutions to problems can delivered into consciousness (presumably from the subconscious)
29:35 John makes a really interesting point that the core machinery of sub-linguistic relevance realisation (Attention, which may be translated as Here-ness & Now-ness) can be linked to reports of *altered states of consciousness (he claims Altered Relevance Realisation); that they are ineffable, and of Here-ness and Now-ness.
* This argument is bound by what I have put in brackets. It is also bound by assuming a specific type of Altered state, and that might be a good way to investigate the limits of this argument
Also, you may want to look at the idea of a notion to see how this isn’t a perfect theory, or how it uses circular reasoning
RIGHT....a theory of relevance can be and is argued against in the biosphere as a whole ( in all organisms by extension) by Kaufman with aclear aguments that the biosphere is non ergodic ( historical and contingent) and that even probability theory fails because we cannot prestate the sample space. Deacon's work among other things begins with physical arguments to explain the emergence of systems with endogenous aims capable of undergoing evolution and with the ability to form interpretants. Relevane Realization is i would argue a process that all organisms engage in and have from the begining of anything properly called life. Of course, here we are interested in the most complex example in humans (themselves the product of 3.5 billion years of evolution). I wonder if you think situating the work you are doing in cognitive psychology in the context of the evolution of relevance realization can add to our understanding.
At the end of the talk, it is clear that you are thinking along similiar lines as Deacon
34:00 "an inference is when you're actually using an implication relation to change your beliefs" - whoa, cool.
The last 10-15 minutes of this stimulating lecture made me think about wicked multi-dimensional optimization problems. But what is the objective function? Is it meaningful to say that this objective function generates the meaning? Or is this circular reasoning? 🤔
25:40 I’m just being picky, and this isn’t a thought out thought, but:
Isn’t This vs That mental grouping? This is linguistic based though, since it seems like we do a more pure form of salience tagging in experience that isn’t based on This vs That
Humuicular Fallacy, how pervasive in my thinking. Being aware of this alone will completely change how I frame my beliefs and logical thinking.
Also! “Here” and “Now” and salience tagging, how interesting! Is this perhaps a way we get derailed in a project or pursuit? We are following the thing (or goal) but find it difficult to judge in real-time how the form of it (category) has changed.
I am in too deep in the series to give up at this point, but I think I am lost how the content is relevant to the meaning crisis anymore
The proposal is that relevance realization is the connectedness that is meaning in life. If we can understand it in sci dutiful terms that Jane can integrate meaning in life back into the scientific worldview and also learned to enhance religio.
@@johnvervaeke Thank you professor. I think I shouldn't binge it. Need to digest new concepts more when you introduce. I wish my professors were as quick and coherent in reply back in college
can relevance realisation (RR) be obtained throughout an evolutionnary process ? we culturally inherit RR (via mimetism), and we just have to refine it a little bit, but tinkering with it... at least until now. Maybe it will change with a theory of RR ?
Is this related to abstractional resolution?
Polymath Park NOTES!
The propositional depends on the procedural, the procedural depends on the perspectival knowing. [martial arts example] This is your ability to do salience landscaping, formulate problems well and appreciate nature by consciously shifting your awareness to the “foreground”, and consciously managing the background. “Foregrounding what’s relevant in the situation”, so “your procedural knowing precedes your perspectival knowing.A problem in PSYCHOLOGY!! The use of the term “Central Executive” instead of “Homunculus”“To be living is to be the goal of preserving the self-organization that is giving rise to you.” This is autopoietic, “constituted to promote their own self-organization”SUMMARY: We can’t use representations to explain relevance. Salience tagging, hereness and nowness in identifying a thing. Looking for the mechanics of thought, not its cause. It must “account for the self-organization provided by insight”.The propositional depends on the procedural, which depends on the perspectival which is grounded in the participatory.
But, wait. My cat and I actually do understand each other. Maybe even on a better wavelength than all this cognitive science is. Anyway, I'm loving all these awesome lectures, and trying hard to absorb these complex ideas. Slowly, I think some or most of it is sinking in, over time, the more I listen to these complex ideas and terms. Makes my head hurt, in a good way. Fascinating stuff. But my cat has already figured out how to be happy. No meaning crisis there. It's just us/ we poor Humans who have to sort all this confusing computational stuff out in order to get past 'Go' on the board. Cats have it built in out of the gate. I still can't jump from the floor to the top of the refrigerator yet.
I'm still waiting for a video on Heidegger.
I don't think you're gonna get one, though Heidegger is here in the background. I'm guessing John is leaving it out for the sake of brevity but in other talks he's said Heidegger comes into his theory of Relevance Realization in large part through the work of Hubert Dreyfus (What Computers Can't Do).
@@dsuleyma which episode is that?
pre nuptials it’s not in this series. He mentions it in an interview he had with Jonathan Pageau.
It’s a really good overview of John’s project and in it he mentions briefly how Heidegger makes it into 3rd gen cognitive science through Dreyfus.
m.th-cam.com/video/2PGglfl5j_I/w-d-xo.html
26:44 when people say postmodernism debunks itself
Would experience work as the potential origin of relevance realization? I don't mean just personal experience, aka the experiences gained throughout one's life, but all experience. In this I include evolution as a type of experience, as in the species will experience different situations, and it's biology adjusts its relevance realization. The only problem I have with this is the process by which experience can do this, maybe random success or failure, luck, could be used as a driving factor? Luck in biology for evolution or luck in an individuals life could give a spontaneous insight that permanently effects relevance realization. This experience by an individual can, at least with humans, be passed to others in the form of psycho-technologies. But I feel luck is a weak explanation, because there are many times when insight gained through experience is not purely luck, for example, one of meditation's advantages seems to be a way to 'wipe away' parts of your current relevance realization structure in order to shift one's view. Maybe I'm just spewing out word spaghetti though.
47:38, seems like you're going down a similar worth with participation instead of experience
I wonder... could reality itself be a Relevance Realisation Engine?
This is a very informative series. I’ve learned a lot and my has been expanded!
However, I have a sneaking suspicion that this series is not going to live up to how John is selling.
Now I intend to finish the entire series and give it serious thought. But I’m a bit skeptical of John’s intentions.
I am only at the beginning of this episode, and still reeling from the series up through the last episode. Even if get nothing more out of this than what is provided at this point, I am way ahead of where I used to be.
So I wonder what the expectations are. For me, just in the area of Artificial Intelligence, and the potential impact, I recognize that most people, even educated and intelligent people working in the field of computer science, fail to appreciate the implications of artificial intelligence. And of those who do recognize the impact, most simply rely on deep equivocation to say anything about intelligence, knowledge and wisdom. My deeper interest is in collective intelligence, where the components of relevance realization are happening between us, not simply in my head alone. Being able to fully appreciate our current psycho-technologies, and then recognize the need for much more potent psycho-technologies for our culture to continue beyond this crisis is mind-boggling. But at least I think this series provides a basis for people to come together and recognize that there is something here worth striving toward.
My cat loves me😂
Considering Jerry Fodor was mentioned again in this clip, I was reminded of the wiki page on Thomas Khun's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions about incommensurabiilty. Here Fodor challenges the interpretationalist perspective of the independence of reality from the conceptual categories of the experimenter!
"Incommensurability and perception
The close connection between the interpretationalist hypothesis and a holistic conception of beliefs is at the root of the notion of the dependence of perception on theory, a central concept in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn maintained that the perception of the world depends on how the percipient conceives the world: two scientists who witness the same phenomenon and are steeped in two radically different theories will see two different things. According to this view, our interpretation of the world determines what we see.[61]
Jerry Fodor attempts to establish that this theoretical paradigm is fallacious and misleading by demonstrating the impenetrability of perception to the background knowledge of subjects. The strongest case can be based on evidence from experimental cognitive psychology, namely the persistence of perceptual illusions. Knowing that the lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion are equal does not prevent one from continuing to see one line as being longer than the other. This impenetrability of the information elaborated by the mental modules limits the scope of interpretationalism.[62]
In epistemology, for example, the criticism of what Fodor calls the interpretationalist hypothesis accounts for the common-sense intuition (on which naïve physics is based) of the independence of reality from the conceptual categories of the experimenter. If the processes of elaboration of the mental modules are in fact independent of the background theories, then it is possible to maintain the realist view that two scientists who embrace two radically diverse theories see the world exactly in the same manner even if they interpret it differently. The point is that it is necessary to distinguish between observations and the perceptual fixation of beliefs. While it is beyond doubt that the second process involves the holistic relationship between beliefs, the first is largely independent of the background beliefs of individuals."
Why is the word contact merely a metaphor?
The metaphor of physical contact, actually. Because it is like determining the presence of things by touching.
@@L4sz10 I realize that. But I am questioning whether the Mind makes real contact. Under the material assumption that the mind is contained within the brain that would not be possible. But there are other construals.
@@marykochan8962 would you agree that their must be a mind-body or mind - world relationship? If yes to either then the relationship aspect would be how they 'contact' metaphorically ... irregardless of whether it was a system (brain) or body or world. If you agree to any one of the above then the form(s) of contact is the question - linear causational, circular causational, vector (convergence) causational, vector (divergence) causational, correlational, coincidental, etc.
That's my reading of it so far anyway
@@notmyrealpseudonym6702 I don't have an answer for how they make contact, that is to say how the mind makes contact with the body or how mind makes contact with the world. It is a mystery. I'm just trying to say that I think the contact is real, not merely metaphorical.
Would it be fair to say that many mental health conditions are akin to issues with relevance realization? It seems that the generalized advice of gurus and sages to “be here now” is another way of telling people that they need to make an adjustment to what they find relevant.
Honestly this is helping me understand my CPTSD much better! When I get triggered, or I dissociate, I am finding relevant something from the past, and becoming blind to what is actually happening in the here and now. It’s hard to put words to the experience as it’s mostly bodily sensations but this framing puts me at ease.
Just feeding the algorithm.
The enactive demonstative here- & nowness sounds awfully similar to Iain Mcgilchrists characterization of the Right Hemisphere which is the holistic base for the subsequent separation and abstract conceptualization of the Left Hemisphere. The latter tries to deduce reality from bits and pieces which it arbitrarly proclaims to be inherent of the 'thing'. Whereas the former is always intuitively connected to the whole. They represent two modes of being, the Left is the spotlight and easily sees itself superior to the otherwise 'mute' Right, yet its 'being' is wholly reliant on the Right.
This has real world and serious implications because this is bound up with the Fragmented way that certain people describe and prescribe the "Disorder" that is ADHD.
Soft seelpping 😊😉
So if "intelligence" is synonymous with the capacity to identify relevance, what is wisdom? Could "wisdom" be the ability to enact the meaning of that which has been identified as relevant by the consciousness.
Possibly that conjexture is genuinely meaningless jargon babble.
Prof John: Your argument may benefit from "An Essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent" by St. John Henry Newman. BR.
Hegel was right
anyone who is finding the repeated "this. this. THIS." at 23:15 kinda psychedelic might LOVE this half-hour guided meditation which is all about that:
th-cam.com/video/GmVo9LxJA3o/w-d-xo.html
I've done it a few times and it's guided me towards some very trippy experiences (including maybe the "pure consciousness event" that John talks about in ep9)
I will have to see where your views end up, but so far I disagree with the implication that rationality/intelligence is a binary. It seems like a lot of theories are suggesting that successful relevance filtering is the pre-requisite, rather than the attempt at relevance filtering. The fact that useable measures of intelligence produce hierarchies to me implies that the underlying source is some force that is motivating towards an unreachable ideal, otherwise you could theoretically have 100% IQ.
"FISTNG is not a linguistic phenomenon"
Sensing a Wisdom-convergence event. Reminded of "Attention is All You Need", the seminal paper that sparked the so-called "Transformer" NN architecture. IIRC it realizes intelligence as massively self-attentive predictive coding. Winds up doing complex tasks (like story writing) at a beautiful and near-human level. See arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
Example you can play with: www.talktotransformer.com
Explanation video for the paper: th-cam.com/video/iDulhoQ2pro/w-d-xo.html
from the beginning to especially now, i am anticipating the classic, 11th hour: 'everything's gonna be alright' or 'everything is beautiful/meaningful because _____', which actually just translates to: "because i brought children into this world so i need to believe there's a reason/justification beyond my own selfishness/mammal-ness."
Who hurt you?
@@Vantyler66 though i understand the reward you seek in terms of communal narcissism, as well as a potential refuge from your obviously unacknowledged, yet quite inevitable guilt and remorse (parental complex) through the evocation of group speak/group think in your use of social media mass-personae, i am deeply skeptical as to its efficacy. in fact, your passive aggressive tendency is a textbook demonstration of post-protestantism's failure to protect the individual subject from the same subtle forms of abuse that you will invariably, pavlovian-ly inflict upon your own predetermined offspring. the only saving grace to these family traditions is that contemporary procreations will not survive to sexual maturity by virtue of the imminent bottleneck. thus you may be among the first generation spared their children's mandatory, if conventionally repressed, hatred as a result of the masochistic selfishness that necessarily led to any possibility of their intentional conception. so congratulations! how many little miracles have you got, anyway?!
@@briancarroll3541 you commented on a video series that I can tell you clearly either haven't watched or have paid little attention to and only picked up on tiny pieces of information that confirm your biases. Your response did not warrant an intellectual reply which is why I commented a basic, robotic and dismissive reply.
@@Vantyler66 you are patently incorrect in your assessment, but duly noted, bot. and thx for being honest re; being a bot.
At 47:40 John asserts in which way the four forms of knowing are dependent on each other. This is a core point but I’m not following 100%
John, i've created this today, inspired by you. It's meant to teach people in Brazil, so if you don't understand portuguese it might get complicated. :P
Thank you for putting thoughts into words so brilliantly.
th-cam.com/users/shortsQZAeWBXclPY
If I try to specifiy the rules, I get what ? I get ... the law ! Is the law combinatory explosive ? maybe ! That's why nobody should ignore the law : because it's impossible. lol
Has anyone made it this far from (and through) the Lex Fridman show?
I"m here now. The talk with Lex was my starting point. So deeply grateful to both.
@@mariaaleixo3747 Hope you're enjoying the ride. I got to Vervaeke through Peterson, but I noticed a year ago his Lex interview was his single biggest piece of media by views, so I was curious:)
On behalf of John, thank you for your time and attention
Based cat hater
So... 29 episodes containing over 24 hours of talking, and there's still no conclusion.
Sincere question: how is it that after this much talking and thinking, one THINKS they are getting closer to truth?
I understand reality at its most fundamental level. I tell you that systems of thought are mechanisms to produce more thought. Your ATTENTION/interest is the fuel that runs the mechanism.
There is no purpose to thought other than to produce more thought.
Can you stop thinking? Why is the entire human species helplessly addicted to the screen and all that thought has created?
That which appears to be leading to truth is actually that which projects the illusion
The reason why philosophy and all systems of thought never reach conclusion is because the purpose of thought is to produce more thought. The content of the thoughts matter only in so much as it attracts and holds your ATTENTION
i think purpose of though is to act
Dasani? I've lost what respect I had for you.