Ep. 30 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Relevance Realization Meets Dynamical Systems Theory

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Thirtieth episode of Dr. John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.

[@johnvervaeke]

I am holding a live Q&A next Friday the 16th at 4 PM/1600 EST. You can support my work and gain priority questions here: www.patreon.com/johnvervaeke

[@SapientEudaimonia]

The disappointment I feel when John says "triangle" in his normal voice, instead of the homuncular way.

[@Travthewhite]

"triangle"

[@dalibofurnell]

lol hahaha I know right? I find myself tending to voice a tiny "triangle" echo in my tiny voice to help me with this issue, but I appreciate the "dimension" voice he makes

[@BritikoBeats]

I was just thinking that when this comment popped up 😀

[@Blaze92NL]

😂😂😂😂😂

[@Gongchime]

Right?

[@Thereisnosky]

The siren that you hear almost every lecture is the ambulance getting to the people that had their illusions destroyed!

[@yafz]

Finally someone said it! 😂

[@martinmosna2732]

😆

[@martinmosna2732]

Yasss! I love how it’s coming together!

[@kevin_heslip]

“This blackboard is white.” -John Verveke, 2019

[@RobinTurner]

The cognitive linguist in me loves this. If I was still an academic, I reckon I could have written a whole paper on it.

[@ieatburgersalot]

Relevance is inherently contextual. Switch to an objective perspective and relevance becomes the degree to which at thing influences it's surrounding, the degree to which it's potentials are actualized and the degree to which the thing actualizes the potentials of other things. Objectively everything is "relevant", because otherwise it wouldnt exist at all. What I am saying is that relevance, in itself, has an essence. But it is a transcandental, describes all things, and so we can't know it. Relevance is a way of talking about the Good.

[@Hooz97]

Thanks John, favorite video yet. Drawing the parallel to natural selection was extremely valuable. I use to want a final solution to life but between the emptiness of a theory of relevance and the problem of combinatorial explosion you have helped me escape an ideal of certainty, optimization, perfectionism and science as a religion. I am so excited to try and learn how to make these trade offs between efficiency and resilience and to hopefully become more dynamic while remembering to not try and search the whole problem space.

[@SapientEudaimonia]

❤🙏🏻

[@matthewheadland7307]

I connect with this

[@panjakpanjak]

Not only do you expand my capacity for investigating consciousness, history and reality, you make me laugh: "horses and stables". Joy and knowledge, the two most valuable gifts. Thank you.

[@mcharbo8726]

I LOLd haaard at that one. I love how this guy ties together such profound concepts, and keeps it all together with amazing clarity (how tf does he remember which episode he's talking about this thing or that, off the top of his head?), and then still crack jokes!

[@alisaruddell3484]

55:53. The concept of having “slack” built into the system to avoid over-efficiency is present in the Jewish practice of the Sabbath. Having a day “left over,” intentionally unaccounted for, off the books, for the purpose of rest and rejuvenation. It’s also in the Hebrew Bible in the commandment about gleaning- leaving the fringes of the field un-harvested so the poor can feed themselves. Maximum efficiency would harm the community. It also shows up in the cyclical fasting/feasting practices of the church calendar (Mardi Gras then Lent, then Easter celebration; the Advent fast followed by the Christmas festival). It’s interesting to see the parallels between evolutionary opponent processes, efficiency-resilience, and these ancient communal wisdom practices.

[@Beederda]

I appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄

[@wcropp1]

The efficiency vs. resiliency distinction is very interesting to consider-thank you, Professor, for all your hard work.

[@feruspriest]

This video in particular articulates several ideas I've wrestled with for the last few years in a clarifying way.

[@Andrew.baltazar]

This was a huge episode for me. Felt unbelievable satisfaction when I could finally tie the loose strings together. Thank you Prof. Vervaeke!

[@KingRyanoles]

First time watching this and excited to see where you continue to take it. Your discussion of the trade off between efficiency and resilience parallels the work of Nassim Taleb and his concept of anti-fragility. His distinction seems helpful here in that living things are more than resilient; they are not just tough or capable of surviving randomness. They need randomness to grow. They are the opposite of fragile.

[@avak19808]

Professor Vervaeke, you are amazing. Using the theory of evolution to explain RR 🔥

[@stephen-torrence]

48:26 "WAAAAA" Someone please GIF this! 🤣

[@MrStumpmeister]

Thanks John

[@indianastoned8234]

Really enjoying this section of the series. The history of thought was helpful and great but it's exciting to see new ways of thinking being presented in this way. Interested to see you tie them together.

[@marykochan8962]

It's always the tigers that are after us. We must owe a great deal to those darn tigers.

[@ccruzqwerty]

Vervaeke has done it again. Another great episode.

[@LinasVepstas]

"Things have no essential design" (31:15) Ah, but they do! It has taken bleeding-edge research to spot it, to see it, but it seems that they do. In a super-short summary: its "the network". The network of linguistic relationships, the network of biomolecular interactions, the social network, the network of photons and atoms, the network of capitalist money-flows, the network of gravitational interactions between galaxies. The "essence" of networks can be described with numbers. Out of many authors, Max Tegmark has some nice writings on this.

[@SimonMaurerBewegung]

Thank you John! Really enjoyed that! Especially the end ❤

[@peterrosqvist2480]

Thank you so much for these lectures John! I really love the work you've done and are doing

[@heatherm.3055]

Dr. Vervaeke, you are the best teacher I never had. I appreciate so many things about this series.

[@jerrysstories711]

The material around 54:00 could be summarized as "optimized = brittle". Pre-COVID, we had supply chains magnificently optimized to deliver exactly the number of small soft home-use toilet paper rolls and giant coarse workplace rolls to exactly when and where they're needed. Then the early lockdowns had everyone wiping at home instead of at work. The machinery that made workplace TP couldn't just be instantly switched over to make home TP, the contracts for delivery couldn't just be broken when we weren't sure how long this would be, and the logistics of delivery were equally hard to shift over because there are tens of thousands of people and schedules involved. So there was a genuine shortage, which led to hoarding, with lead to a greater more serious shortage. Optimal requires predictions. Resiliency accounts for uncertainty and accepts some waste as a cost of business.

[@saintsword23]

I'd hypothesize that a lot of this has to do with the environment. Western countries have been so stable and free from external threat for so long that efficiency has long been the way to outcompete others. In a less predictable environment, resiliency would mean a lot more. As engineers know, failures almost always happen in the transitions. The best systems are going to be ones that can transition quickly, with minimum disruption, from an efficiency to a resiliency paradigm and back again. Both of these paradigms are adapted to their times.

[@jerrysstories711]

@@saintsword23 interesting point. Europe is not as addicted to stability as we are.

[@Finn959]

I haven’t been watching the episodes for a while so I gotta catch up a lot but I want you to know that I am very grateful for this video series and I hope you never delete it! 👌 Keep up the good work John!

[@mosesgarcia9443]

Wow. This one was tough. I love it....🤣🤣🤣 Thank you.

[@Timboooo]

These just keep getting better.

[@leedufour]

Thanks John.

[@austinkuipers6087]

I am uneducated in philosophy and ICBM range away from genius, but John makes this stuff so clear. I still had to watch these last few episodes a few times lol. Late night thoughts I had. -Organisms instance "fitness" within a process comparable metaphorically to a waveform, the "wave" being the propagation of a self-preserving informational structure (the genome) throughout time. It reminds me of how waveforms appear to collapse into points when instanced through observation. The parallel between natural selection and relevance realization makes consciousness seem like a potentially advantageous way of allowing the genome to more rapidly respond to the forces of selection. A more granular bracketing of time in relation of the survival of the genome. This can backfire (nukes and mad scientists with bats come to mind) but also allows life to make it off-world, which is perhaps the best way to ensure continued existence. Our sun will sear away our oceans in a billion years and we took 3 billion years to get here, humanity might be the only shot earths original mother cell has to make it to a younger solar system. Consciousness is consequently her hail mary. -This fits in with many of the traditional claims made about souls. To "sell ones soul" might be defined in this context as "regearing your salience heuristics to serve something other than the continued success of your genome and consequently betraying something eons older than yourself that otherwise might last eons into the future". -Introspection allows a brain to finst the otherwise subperceptual heuristics and memetic machinery our minds use to identify relevance, altering them and thus participating in a feedback loop between the products of prior relevance realization and how those heuristics will approach future stimuli. -It would be interesting to see if people with multiple personality disorders and religious folk who have imported Tulpas into their minds have multiple independent relevance realization networks as part of each personality.

[@nugzarkapanadze6867]

Thank You!

[@hsainal-shihabi5308]

if I'm really focused, sometimes I can mentally imagine where John is going with an idea... but the reveal about the unscienceability of relevance in the middle of the lecture was a massive reveal. I clutched my pearls.

[@polymathpark]

My personal notes! Feel free to critique! EPISODE 30: DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS THEORY AND RR Science works through “Inductive generalization”. Aiming toward a “powerful way of reliably predicting the world, and explaining the world.” “If you can’t generate an inductive generalization in your endeavor, then you aren't doing science. This is why pseudosciences don’t work; they cannot do inductive generalizations” Homogeneous - essence Must be stable Must retain new definitions of words, lest ye fall into equivocation. “Equi-vocation” (over-equalizing in language) Properties of the objects need to be intrinsic, inherent “Things are relevant one minute, irrelevant the next.” “Relevance is not intrinsic to something. There can be no essence to relevance. Nothing is essentially relevant. Relevance is not stable, it is constantly changing.” “There is no essence to design.” (in terms of darwinian evolution) Vervaeke coins “fittedness” as a way of describing evolution for the individual organism, it’s adaptive. “I don’t need a theory of fittedness, I just need a theory of how fittedness is constantly being realized in self-organizing fashion. That’s exactly what the theory of evolution is.” This is a dynamical systems theory. “This is a non-homuncular system, this can generate intelligence without itself being an intelligent process.” “Its constantly evolving its cognitive fittedness to the environment”... This is what we are always doing, consciously or not. “We need a set of properties that are sub-semantic, and sub-syntactic(sub-lingual?), self-organizing, multi-scale, auto-poetic. These are bioeconomical properties. Addendum: Bio-economical properties brings to mind a couple of theories: Lisa Feldman-Barret’s theory of emotional construction as well as Bronfenbrenner’s Bio-ecological systems theory. I won’t go into huge detail about these but I highly recommend you research the former, and familiarize yourself with the concept of the latter. Emotional construction theory relies on a “bio-ecological budget” of sorts, Feldman-Barret refers to it as a “body budget” that impacts how we process emotion, and subsequent decisions. This too is something that an AGI would struggle to relate to. This is something I love witnessing in good science: two independent scientists arriving at the same conclusion, heavily solidifying its validity. ---- - ---- --- Arousal/affect Autonomic nervous system - how much your metabolic resources are being converted into the possibility of [managing] action. Sympathetic and parasympathetic are interdependent.??? Vervake examines this dichotomy the body budget/bio-economy manages, and progressively, and sometimes exaptively integrates with to better its fittedness and self-organization. The dichotomy between efficiency and resilience. Time to think like a bio-machine! Efficiency is a selective constraint Resiliency allows you to encounter new things, to deal with damage or threat. These two are in a trade-off relationship. “What if I set up a virtual engine in the brain that makes use of this trade-off relationship? That virtual engine bio-economically, logistically shapes my sensory-motor loop with the environment so it’s constantly evolving its fittedness” SUMMARY: A scientific theory of relevance cannot be had, but one of RR can. The Embodied, embedded brain has a virtual engine bio-economically, logistically shapes my adaptive, and exaptive interaction with my environment.

[@RobinTurner]

Thanks for this!

[@GingerDrums]

Loving this series in august 2021!

[@mecoides]

Thanks for the great series (so far), John. I am an Economist and appreciated your use of economic language and tools in this lecture. I have long been thinking about the essential trade-off between efficiency and risk (what you call resiliency), and their application in situations from the macro level to the micro level (in and out of economic contexts). I'm particularly interested in money and was delighted to see you highlight it as a problematic object of scientific enquiry. In terms of the value of money, economic theory (efficiency) provides an historical account and financial theory (risk) provides a predictive (future) account. A present day account might focus on liquidity constraints. Perry Merhling, an American Economist at Boston University, is quite a well-spoken voice on this topic. I wonder if pushing your metaphor further in this direction might have productive application to your work?

[@stephen-torrence]

This is the best exposition on the Buddhist concept of Impermanence I have ever seen come out of Science. Dude Groks the Dharma. 👍

[@Dialogos1989]

I had a basset hound named Dharma. She is dead now

[@RobinTurner]

"Dude groks the dharma" made me feel like a teenager again - thank you! Come to think of it "grok" is probably what John is talking about with "participatory knowing".

[@jasonmitchell5219]

What a great analogy and how much it has enhanced an already detailed, coherent and reasonably well understood set of concepts/theory and a lot of others you don't mention. Cheers dude.

[@TheBotuto]

Greetings from Barcelona Spain

[@nicolaslg1421]

And greetings from Andalusia

[@Wamagirii]

I have to watch this again to understand....scratching my head...

[@brendantannam499]

Me too. Once doesn't do it for me anymore.

[@darylcumming7119]

As an visual artist l find the series fascinating .

[@KRGruner]

Really great stuff.

[@hollycamara8007]

If anyone needs a transcript we've made them for this & all episodes here: www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-30-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-relevance-realization-meets-dynamical-systems-theory/

[@LKRaider]

Thank you!

[@RobinTurner]

Thank you! If there's any episode in the series that needs notes more than the others, it is this one. And a note (haha) for anyone watching this for the first time: read these notes or take notes, or you will need to go back later like I just did!

[@WovenPsychology]

This video was dope

[@MrMarktrumble]

This is very interesting, and I am still just trying to apprehend and understand the arguments. I like the analysis of relevance by using theory from philosophy, economics and science, and I like the creative application of what was taken. Watching this helps me to understand disciplines that are drawn from, and the object (or should I say phenomenon) of analysis. I think I am learning. Thank you.

[@jeoffreywortman]

Thanks for that.

[@stephen-torrence]

36:00 From an ontology of Nouns to an ontology-ing of Verb-ing.

[@reikyfoxxe1847]

John: “For you the day you found this video series was the most important day of your life.” John: “For me? it was an event that happens on tuesdays”

[@SapientEudaimonia]

It was tough to get through the abstract relevance realization part, but worth it!

[@intrograted792]

You should upload these as a KZbin 'Premier' so viewers can comment and converse in real-time.

[@sachielband3624]

Anyone else see the introduction of the phenomenology of spirit in this?? Great stuff

[@lordbyron7918]

Hello community! I want to ask a question to make sure wether I understand an idea put forward in this episode. Starting at 15:56 John claims that there were various categories for which we cannot form scientific theories, because they are not homogeneous. The category "white things" is given as an example: Though we can categorize things as either being white or not, we cannot induce other properties of an element from its pertinence to this group alone. With the group of "horses" on the other hand, John claims, inductive generalizations could be made. My question now is: Isn't the term "powerful inductive generalization" highly context dependent? I mean as John pointed out we cannot deduce the geomatrical shape or physical makeup of a thing from the mere fact that it is white. But we could for example deduce that it emits light of a certain wavelength. The same holds true for "dogs". Whereas the group "dogs" serves for powerful inductive generalizations in the context of veterinary medicine it might be to heterogenous of a group to allow for such when it comes to determining the character of different cartoon figures. (There are dogs with very different characters in the cartoon world.) Maybe I'm missing/misunderstanding something? Maybe this context dependency is implicit in John's reasoning? What do you think?

[@majojok]

As someone studying for a major in economics, it's very cool to see the the tradeoff of maximizing expected value contra reducing risk here. In the context of a sole proprietorship, the example of efficiency vs resilience laid out here is very apt, the owner's risk aversion can incentivize reduced efficiency / expected profit. It becomes interesting when taking the analogy to publically traded companies, or the entire economy. When everyone can diversify their holdings, even small investors trough index funds, only the systematic risks affecting the entire economy are costly. So called idiodyncratic risks do not in theory affect stock prices, only expected profit (which of course depends on the type of risk e.g. only downside risk --> less expected profit) and correlation with market performance. I haven't thought this out, but an interesting topic is then comparing mind in the extended, Hegelian sense, to the market. To compare the resilience of that shared cognitive distribution and the cognitive ineractional fittedness of that extended mind to the stability and efficiency of the market. Both are wholes that affect the individual, but of course its the individuals who constitute the system. For an individual, resilience of cognitive interactive fittedness would be threatened by a ton of unique factors. Only the most general of these would be tied to the "performance" / "health" of the entire extended mind, like the "market risk" of individual stocks. If you learn your mom hates you, that's an idiosyncratic risk to your ability to get a grip on the world. Society learning that the earth revolves around the sun, now that's a systematic risk. Finally: Damage to the entire network due to insufficient resilience, perhaps in the pursuit of reckless efficiency on the scale of society, maybe that's a way to frame an analysis of both meaning crisis and market collapses. Maybe the reckless expansionary monetary policy of today is surprisingly similiar to Luther's contraction of mind and world. These are just some immediate thoughts, will have to think and watch more of this series. Thank you so much for this journey!!

[@polymathpark]

"Bio-economical properties" aligns very well with a couple of theories: Lisa Feldman-Barret’s theory of emotional construction as well as Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological systems theory. I won’t go into huge detail about these but I highly recommend you research the former via her books, and familiarize yourself with the concept of the latter. Emotional construction theory relies on a “bio-ecological budget” of sorts, Feldman-Barret refers to it as a “body budget” that impacts how we process emotion and subsequent decisions. This too is something that an AGI would struggle to relate to. This is something I love witnessing in good science: two scientists independently arriving at a similar conclusion, heavily solidifying its validity.

[@puma7171]

Please use a nice shirt (more like the one here) for your next series, as this is going to be what you will be remembered as. Like Plotinos' damaged nose ;) Thanks again for this marvellous series!!

[@waynelewis425]

john, for resilience/efficiency i find it very useful to use pathway diversity. The most efficient processes (think Ford assembly line) utilize a signle shortest path to completion of a task with maximum flux, or perhaps using a minimum of labor energy...BUT because of the very tight essential path dependence they are inherently fragile, resilient processes are distirbuted across systems and often between scales as well...they typically are not global or even local maxima for flux or energy but have the benefit of being much more stable to stressors (perturbations). In living evolutionary processes including organisms, ecosystems, and economies of all kinds we observe a balance between maximum efficiency, and maximum resillience. There is simulation work (idealized networks ) by ulianowitz and Lietar that defines generic ballance numbers on a scale between maximum efficiency and maximum resillience.

[@AleksandraBoguslawska]

I got extremely interested in this concept of efficiency and resiliency - where does it come from? Can you recommend some works where I could read about them, or similar pairs?

[@jeffr4475]

39:00 Virtual Engine that is Regulating the Sensory Motor Loop. Could this be the 'thing': -That is able to detect when something is out of place in your environment?? - Automates Processes such as Walking & Driving (especially if you've been down that same route multiple times)? 51:30 Optimizing Systems

[@keyframe5806]

I feel like in the end everything is going to boil down to vipassana.

[@dsuleyma]

KeyFrame5 Based on what I’ve gathered from other talks/ lectures vipassana is at least 1/3 of it.

[@doubleBbooks]

Listening to this as Coronavirus spreads with numbers of confirmed cases rising in most European countries rising at 20% per day - the question of resilience vs efficiency suddenly becomes relevant in our lives as long, 'just in time' supply chains suddebly look remarkably fragile.

[@akmalwasti4745]

since relevance realization doesn't have an essence in any way, isn't it possible that there are some forms of relevance that are detectable, an example maybe a bear hiding in the cave while your in the cave, it is obviously relevant to you but you have yet to detect it?

[@LinasVepstas]

The "essence" of a two-player game (12:45) is described by J.H. Conway, "On Numbers and Games" (1976) Academic Press

[@MrRhetorikill]

Could it be that we have sets of pattern recognition heuristics that we constantly access depending on the situation that map onto what is relevant? For example, I could have a pattern recognition map that relates to "lunch" and one for "cooking". These maps might layer on top of one another and interact to create relevance.

[@F0itz]

Where is the red cup?

[@stefan24georgiev]

John, Thank you for this amazing lecture, I would like to ask though , do you think that we could still have inductive generalizations about white things if those inductive generalizations strictly remain within the limits of the property(in this case whiteness) we used to create the category. So if we have a theory of why white things are white, what makes them more white or less white etc. In contrast the category of horses have a lot more shared properties which make the category have a larger space of possible inductive generalizations. So does this mean you can still have science of "white things" if you just limit the theory to only be limited to talking about the "whiteness" ?

[@waynelewis425]

money is a great example and particularly relavent right now

[@enjerth78]

Intention is part of the participation, and I think it's highly influential in finding relevance from our participation and perspective to inform the procedural and propositional. It's just a slow process of finding through the procedural and propositional to grow beyond the initial frame of solving our immediate needs that become apparent as we discover what is relevant to maintaining participation (life). Participation is the first level of relevance, and finding it relevant is psychologically necessary for continued play (as in the example of suicide giving up on participation for the lack of relevance). Is that circular? Is intention necessarily a part of relevance? An intention can be to find some relevance, but is that necessarily a recursive relevance in itself? Or intention depends on what we find relevant? That would make it a causal relationship, not an implicit one? And that makes me wonder if it's errant to rule out all language that describes something equivocated with relevance when describing relevance, as relevance is a subjective construct that depends on it's context defining it's value and not in itself. Seems like it's a trap to exclude everything of "relevance" when defining relevance. Relevance is a dependency tree where we need to find, at the root, the abstract of all relevance. But that's still probably centered around individuality, starting with some arbitrary participation (as Vervaeke framed God's work of creation itself, arbitrary, and in the midst of that explosion we find relevance... but then, that initial creation can't exactly be arbitrary if we go back to intention in participation).

[@cameronhashemi569]

How do "absolute efficiencies" and "absolute inefficiencies" play into the model? It seems that there are properties which benefit both sides and some which harm both (e.g. death or injury are bad for short- and long-term efficiency). There are definitely properties which trade off, but we can't say that every inefficiency serves resiliency. Or can we? If there are these absolute efficiencies, are they relevant for our purposes?

[@waynelewis425]

So i might make the claim, that in the biosphere for anything that can be said to have a function, purpose, or use this functional property is always relational and the set of uses for anything is both indeterminate ( but probably finite) and non stable precisely because the teleos is a function of context, and context is dynamic and unprestateable.

[@teacher.camilo]

Hey John! at 37min you say that the self-organizing process of evolution is not intelligent process but can generate intelligence. That's where I think we need to be cautious. The fact that the potential of our rational intelligence comes from it, and also the potential for greater intelligence and skills, makes the feature of consciouness and auto poetic knowing seeded on the self-organizing process on itself. How can reality and the self-organizing process of evolution contain intelligence without itself being able to grasp it? Intelligence is embeded on the way reality can create itself! My point is: Vector equilibrium, Homeostasis, the Interdependence of living systems and so on - How can we put away a sophistaced intelligence as an active participant?

[@nathanael2572]

I'm not a philosopher, historian or cognitive scientist; just some chump trapped in a world that feels starved of meaning. I've been watching every episode. I *really* enjoyed the historical tour, which clarified so much of the cognitive firmware that I have inherited (so to speak), with all of its advantages and trade-offs. I've been less engaged by the cog-sci episodes. So in my eagerness to bring things back to meaning (and ultimately leading a fulfilled life), I might be jumping the gun here; but, whether this is where the series is going or whether correct or not, it was a leap while watching this episode to suppose that searching for a sense of meaning or purpose that is homogenous, stable, and especially intrinsic may be a huge trap -- much ado about nothing.

[@jamesgl]

Is this an edit or an error in the sound: 57:00

[@bigpicsoccer]

John, are you familiar with Newell's constraints model and the whole field of ecological psychology? I always feel like it's what you're going towards without ever referencing it

[@nickshelbourne4426]

Ecological psychology is based around J.J. Gibson's work. J Vervaeke is part of 4E cog sci. The following is a quote from Embodied Mind - Varela, Thompson, Rosch. "In a nutshell, then, whereas Gibson claims that the environment is independent, we claim that it is enacted (by histories of coupling). Whereas Gibson claims that perception is direct detection, we claim that it is sensorimotor enactment. Thus the resulting research strategies are also fundamentally different: Gibsonians treat perception in largely optical (albeit ecological) terms and so attempt to build up the theory of perception almost entirely from the environment. Our approach, however, proceeds by specifying the sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided, and so we build up the theory of perception from the structural coupling of the animal." Personally I always thought there was something wrong with ecological psychology, and I've read a number of their journal articles. It didn't FEEL right, I think the above quote elucidates why that might be the case.

[@KRGruner]

Just a note: "autopoietic" (from "autopoiesis"), not "autopoetic."

[@Jacob011]

What is the difference?

[@KRGruner]

@@Jacob011 Well, it has to do with poiesis (from the Greek "to make"), not poetry.

[@jiggybau]

@@KRGruner They share the same root, because creation is central to both. Poet etymology: from Greek poētēs, variant of poiētēs ‘maker, poet’, from poiein ‘create’.

[@KRGruner]

@@jiggybau True, but what is important here is WHAT is being made.

[@Demosophist]

There is no automatic guarantee that oppositional autonomic systems will seek to optimize unless there is something to optimize for, nor would such a thing come into being without there being a pre-existent substance for which to optimize. So you're back to the homunculus problem and you've just played a word game to hide the pea. A more general construction had already been conceived during the 1200 years of the Latin project as the triadic sign relation. This construct was retrieved by C.S. Peirce and was expanded by him into a theory of action. Nothing about this construct rests on the presumption of either materialism or scarcity. All it requires is the notion of "inquiry".

[@Demosophist]

Language is problematic because it forces us to presume agency, so John counteracts that pernicious conspiracy by resorting to a panoply of emphatic and phatic gestures, facial expressions, etc. on the theory that gestural communication is something other than language. Well, it was the making of tools that developed by exaptation the acuity in humans for gestural mimesis, so it's basically a tool making skill used for communication, which is why most gesture has this characteristic of "shaping the air between". And McLuhan's insight was that technologies or tools are words (i.e. utterances or outerances). So what is "between" in gestures is the "resonant interval" or tactility (also presumed in the otherwise incoherent notion of an oppositional autonomic system, whether economical or not). None of this is problematic unless you're a materialist, since materialism can't adequately describe or define the world of knowing subjects, especially knowing subjects capable of knowing that they're knowing subjects.

[@davidfost5777]

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

[@SensemakingMartin]

Ken Wilber is definitely worth a look if you haven't come across him yet

[@siarez]

I don't understand why we can't have relevance realization in non-autopoietic systems. All we need is that the system has some goals. So an artificial agent with an arbitrary goal should be able to do relevance realization, no?

[@azarak34]

I might be wrong here, but Prof. argues that nature of machines where they use only calculation processes by definition cannot use simplifying heuristics of RR (decreasing search space). Even succesful attempts, in debating AI or playing Go (AlphaGo) don't intelligently decrease their searching space, but use pre-made simplifying architecture to achieve illusion of intelligence. Compare it to a human Go player, who will constantly focus on local battle or whole board (i.e. shift relevance). Interesting point here is that RR in some cases is not enough to ouperform machine with higher computational power and benefitial architecture. Then there is issue of AGI (general inteligence): arbitrary goal, by definition is not fundamental. As such it will not provide salience landscape in enough aspects and categories to substantiate enough complexity for general inteligence. Or rather we would have to give such machine so much context that again we would arrive at mechanism rather that organic conscientiousness.

[@hansjorgmixdorff5766]

Thanks for this episode. However, how do you square your belief in Darwin's theory with recent doubts (à la David Berlinski) that natural variation/selection just takes too long and entails combinatorial explosion?

[@notmyrealpseudonym6702]

JV mentions working with a Dan 'Chappie' is DL Chiappe, has work on reaearchgate.

[@jeoffreywortman]

attribution of properties is contingent on a-la Wittgenstein atomic facts. If those atomic facts are contended, then the attribution of those properties fall.

[@ToriKo_]

26:46 Relevance seems to always be relative. You state earlier that Science is only applicable to instances of categories with elements that are non-attributed (non-relative to us). We can’t do science on Tuesday-events for various reasons. But I’m not sure of this, I have a notion that something somewhere in what you’re saying is wrong. Note to come back to this (if I find it relevant enough lol)

[@awaking_]

many categories don’t have essences... please give example

[@tatsumakisempyukaku]

I wonder if vervaeke was talking about fittness as a temporal essence.

[@johnvervaeke]

That is an interesting proposal.

[@tatsumakisempyukaku]

@@johnvervaeke well, I realized that you mentioned that there was no one organism with the essence of fitness. But it’s not the organism that has the fitness. It’s the environment that has fitness if you will. And the organisms are just asymptotically approaching or approximating fitness. And it’s endless. Idk though.

[@mathematikexplained6144]

I don’t think so. It’s what he talks about, the organism has an optimal grip on the world and it is an dynamic process.

[@lenavoyles526]

Fittedness and The Evolution of Fittedness sounds humuncular to me. Where does the capacity for adaptation come from? Where does the drive for reproduction come from? Where does the change in conditions that necessitates the adaptation come from?

[@accadia1983]

00:20 last time .. Relevance Realization (RR).. * representations don't work for salience (hereness, nowness) tagging, meaning in life, connectedness. we need explanations, not working principle. * rules don't work (Syntactic level) * RR system: goals that govern RR initially have to be constituent based on auto-poetic: self-preserving, self-organizing, multi-scalular. 23:35 professor demonstrates some of his moves on chicks on Tuesday night

[@ToriKo_]

55:00 I think I have an issue with your Efficiency vs Resiliency argument, coming from Complex Systems arguments. It might be easy to critique the argument as you use corporate downsizing as an example, which has a lot of Complex Systems critiques Something along the line of: Your whole Efficiency Vs Resiliency dichotomy is a misframing when in a complex system, and failure to recognise a complex system is not necessarily evidence of Efficiency in action, when stated that there is a misframing

[@bonafidecius]

17:00 Now, in light of all that, could you, please, once and for all, answer the question, 'What is a woman?' Jokes aside, would you say the category of 'woman' has an essence? Have you perhaps discussed the gender ideology from this perspective somewhere on a podcast or in a lecture that I could watch/listen to? Very curious to hear your answer.

[@RobinTurner]

FWIW my dissertation was partly about this, but it was more about the distinction between WOMAN and GIRL in different languages than between WOMAN and MAN. (Caps are a convention here to indicate that we're talking about the category, not the word.) Classical semantics tells us that WOMAN is a category with three features: +HUMAN +FEMALE +ADULT, and GIRL has the features +HUMAN +FEMALE -ADULT; of course each of those features is itself a category, but classical semantics holds that you eventually get down to "semantic atoms" - i.e., a category that has no features other than itself. Eleanor Rosch's prototype theory, which John mentions I think in the previous episode, says that this is not how we decide someone is a woman: we simply judge on her similarity to the prototypical woman we have in our head. The first approach is Aristotelean, the second, Platonic. What I was trying to do was reconcile the two by proposing two types of features: defining features, which sort out the boundaries of a category, telling us, for example, why an ostrich is a bird but a bat is not (at least in English), and typical features determine centrality in a category (why a robin is more birdy than an ostrich, or why we are more likely to class a person with breasts as a woman, even though breasts in no way define a woman). (This owes a lot to Linda Coleman & Paul Kay's "weighted feature bundle" model.) These in turn can be divided into strong and weak features, and a weak defining feature like +/-ADULT can be overridden by a contextually salient typical feature, which was why "women's sports" generally includes sports for girls, and my octogenarian grandmother still talked about "going out with the girls". I was particularly interested in the way weak defining features and strong typical features changed places in different languages; for example English "girl" has -ADULT is a weak defining feature, while Greek "koritsi" has -MARRIED and Turkish "kız" has +VIRGIN, but both Greek and Turkish keep -ADULT as a strong typical feature, which can lead to what I call "category stress", a kind of awkwardness when referring to someone or something that has the defining features but lacks some strong typical features. Anyway, this being the 1990s, I regarded the feature +/-FEMALE (or +/-MALE if you prefer) as relatively unproblematic. How wrong I turned out to be! I sometimes think of writing a blog post taking these ideas into the MAN/WOMAN distinction, but the discourse has got so toxic, I'm not sure if I can be bothered to put up with the inevitable outrage any treatment of this subject generates. Suffice it to say that the conversation seems to be taking an interestingly Platonic twist in that the essence of "woman" is increasingly seen as independent of its physical manifestations. Anyway, in case anyone's interested, the citation is “'How do you know she’s a woman?' Features, prototypes and category stress in Turkish ‘kadin’ and ‘kiz’." In June Luchjenbroers (ed.) Cognitive Linguistics Investigations: Across languages, fields and philosophical boundaries. John Benjamin.

[@bonafidecius]

@@RobinTurner Interesting. Thank you for your extensive reaction. I would say, go for it, write the article! Do what is right and meaningful, despite the fear. These are strange times. Too many confused people could really use the clarity as well as more courageous examples to look up to.

[@danielhoward7310]

I enjoyed the pun

[@be1tube]

Why is fitness not the essence of fittedness? I think I'm not understanding the way JV uses "essence."

[@tiagovasc]

49:00

[@tatsumakisempyukaku]

I’m probably wrong here but when vervaeke says “there are no essences of fittedness,” and then goes off giving examples of the particular instances of the essence of fittedness….would not that mean there is an essence? What I mean is that he seems to be trying to find the essence IN particular, where that seems to be the wrong way to think of essences. Idk though, bc I’m not on his level, vervaeke, but I have read a lot of Plato, and have scratched my head on this whole relation between the Forms and particulars. Who knows

[@jerrysstories711]

The material starting around 21:00 really pricked up my ears, because Jordan Peterson was my gateway drug to John Vervaeke. I remember a podcast where JP said that the value of a thing is inherent to the thing, it does not exist merely in the mind of the value-er, and that Sam Harris seems to be “denying the science” on this point. I'm no Sam Harris fan, and I don’t disagree with JP lightly, and maybe I didn’t fully understand what I was hearing, but JP's implication that scientific analysis supports the existence of value seemed way off to me. One point for Slytherin.

[@TLMS654]

Seems the process called 'selection' could appear to reintroduce a pseudo-'intelligent designer' whereas if nature by definition kills all life eventually and kills the unfitted before reproduction we ought to continue the search for causation (?meaning). Aren't what it mean for objects to have attributes of gold-ness, bottle-ness, white-ness or play (games), mental characteristics (?qualia) - rather than characteristics of the objects themselves, which we can't know?

[@abejar99]

Hi mom!

[@richardoberhammer1730]

Around minute 32 John Vervaeke says “There is no essence to fittedness.” kzbin.info/www/bejne/jZbbYmV9nbp5p6c I disagree. All Living Things must obey the second law of thermodynamics, must be fitted in the sense of acting in such ways as to eat, to bring in the resources needed by metabolism. More at: kzbin.info/www/bejne/a5TMgXaPYs6lacU

[@bonafidecius]

I still don't really understand how a chair or game do not have an essence. You can't just call anything a chair or a game, so there are clearly defining characteristics, otherwise these words would be meaningless. And sure, it isn't as clear as the essence of a triangle, but does that mean these categories have no essence? E.g. you can sit on a chair. Not everything you can sit on is a chair, but can we call something you can't sit on a chair? I'm pretty confident to say that we can't. So doesn't that mean that part of the essence of a chair is that you can sit on it? Am I missing something?

[@johnvervaeke]

Somethings eg gold do have an essence and science discovers which categories have essences. That means learning about one piece of gold tell you a lot about other pieces of gold. What about the property that I can sit on something. How much does that tell me about the next think I can sit on? Not much. ThT is why a definition/essence has to be a set of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. For categories without an essence there is a set of subgroups where each pair of the subgroups share overlapping features. But it is not the same set of features shared through. Hence the idea of a family resemblance. All the fibres of a rope overlap with other fives but there are no fibres that run the length of a rope. BTW. Do you sit or lay on deck chairs?

[@bonafidecius]

@@johnvervaeke Thank you for your quick reply. I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my comment. I see what you mean. Still trying to wrap my head around the implications of this distinction, especially in this context. Lots of complex concepts tied together. I may have to watch this (and the previous couple) lecture(s) again.

[@RobinTurner]

@@johnvervaeke What we seem to be looking at here is a difference between categories where membership is determined by a feature bundle (to use Coleman and Kay's term) and categories where membership is determined by function, like CHAIR. (The fact that there is a fuzzy boundary between CHAIR and BED into which deckchairs and daybeds fall is interesting, but fuzziness is not unique to functional categories - the boundary between TREE and SHRUB is also fuzzy.) With all due respect to Wittgenstein, you can define "game" functionally as a "structured activity designed to facilitate play." This excludes metaphorical uses like the games of game theory or transactional analysis and a few historical anomalies like gladiatorial games ("games" is not a perfect translation of "ludi"), but I think it includes pretty much anything that is called a game in everyday, non-metaphorical speech. Our culture has a strong bias in favour of feature-based categories; in fact, I once read an interesting paper that claimed people from pre-industrial cultures often score poorly on IQ tests because those odd-one-out questions favour feature-based answers instead of function-based answers. For example, someone from a hunter-gatherer society might group objects that a researcher might deem unrelated because they fall into the category of "things you might take on a long journey". And just as categories may be based on prototypes, the category CATEGORY also has a prototype: in our culture, the prototypical category is a class of physical objects, so we are more amenable to the idea that it has an "essence".

[@diarmidbaillie]

Can anyone explain the 'Canadian solution' reference. Is it a joke about moderate, centrist political tendencies?

[@ClassPunkOnRumbleAndSubstack]

I thought it was about Canadian politeness.

[@gomino14]

Why do you say fittedness instead of fitness?

[@jiggybau]

I feel like he dodged an issue there with the category of white things, because you can clearly make generalization based on their whiteness, relative to how they interact with light, which he dismisses too easily. You can predict that a white thing will not get as hot as a black thing when left in the sun.

[@RobinTurner]

Good point. You can also make a science of things that happen on Tuesday - it just wouldn't be a very interesting one.

[@ragnarmartinson9189]

Well, my "white" vanilla ice cream left in the sun will not behave the same as my white joghurt. Sure you can find similarities, but you can't make useful, general predictions from it.

[@saintsword23]

I'm unconvinced about your argument about essentialism for two reasons: 1) Statistics. If 80% of objects in a set behave a certain way, isn't it appropriate to say, "Objects in this set are most likely to have this behavior, but sometimes they do not." You can totally have a science of such objects even though this 80% property is not part of their "essence." But you say that one cannot have a science of something that doesn't have an essence. 2) I'm really confused on the term "essence." Part of the term essence, as I understand it, is that an essence "lives in" the objects. It's a distinctly external thing. In that sense, three-sidedness and angles that add to 180 degrees "live in" triangular shaped objects. But this whole idea was destroyed vis a vis Kant. What I'm saying is that the term "essence" carries no useful distinction apart from the terms "abstraction" or "set" if it's just referring to a priori concepts, and the distinctiveness of the term renders it a poor concept when held in the light of Occam and Kant. No objects or concepts hold an "essence" within them, but there may be a defining property over all objects in a set. These are two distinct things to say.

[@tmrws_ultrabeam]

Hi everyone! I recently wrote a blog post about the confluence of cognitive science and spirituality. I mentioned Vervaeke's work a few times and thought this is the perfect community to share it with. Find the link below if you're interested! thomaschronicles.home.blog/2019/08/12/how-science-and-the-cognitive-revolution-point-to-spirituality/(opens in a new tab)

[@SensemakingMartin]

You've broken your URL there