From: jimruttshow8596
John Vervaeke describes relevance realization as an emerging framework in cognitive science, attempting to explain how cognitive agents navigate the complex and ever-changing world by continually identifying and focusing on what is relevant [00:38:19]. It is not an algorithm but rather a mechanism or dynamical system by which relevance is constantly evolving [00:37:19].
Historical Context and the Meaning Crisis
The concept of relevance realization is introduced within the broader context of the “meaning crisis.” Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is Dead” is presented as a “focalization of the meaning crisis,” signifying the end of humanity’s ability to derive meaning from the worldview provided by the Axial Age and its associated experiences of sacredness [03:27:00].
After this announcement, two prominent pseudo-religious movements, Marxism and Nazism, emerged in the 20th century. These movements attempted to fill the void of meaning by politicizing the quest for it, asserting that “politics is the road to meaning” [08:31:00]. This approach, however, proved catastrophic, leading to immense suffering and global conflict [01:06:00]. Vervaeke notes that these movements exemplified the “exaltation of the propositional,” believing that a set of propositions (ideology) could replace the complex machinery of worldview attunement, religion, culture, ritual, and transformative practices [09:13:00].
Nietzsche, however, did not see the solution to the meaning crisis as political [09:50:00]. From Vervaeke’s perspective, a key shortcoming of Nietzsche’s approach was his failure to address the “machinery for dealing with self-deception and essentially raising the capacity of the human so as to be able to deal more strongly with rationality and overcoming self-deception” [05:46:00].
Despite the “death of God,” Axial Age thinking still perseveres in popular culture, with a significant percentage of people still believing in God or a higher power [01:46:00]. Vervaeke argues that while critics of Axial Age thought are important, simply being an atheist is insufficient [01:34:00]. A deeper understanding of religion’s functionality is needed to “replace it and renovate it and go beyond recreate it” [01:44:00].
The Three Orders of Stability
Augustine’s model of the world provided an “extraordinarily rich sense of stability” [01:14:00] through three interconnected orders:
- Narrative Order: The sense that one’s personal story, experienced as an autobiography, fits within a larger, authoritative story of the world, providing a sense of purpose [01:50:00].
- Normative Order: An account of how self-transcendence makes sense, allowing individuals to improve and become “more real,” contributing to a sense of depth and significance in existence [01:28:00].
- Nomological Order: An account of the relationship between agents (ourselves) and the world, forming a “meta-meaning system” that makes the world coherent [01:09:00].
These three orders collectively afford a fourth, crucial factor: mattering, which refers to how connected an individual feels to themselves, the world, and others [01:31:00].
Meaning Cultivation
Vervaeke advocates for meaning cultivation rather than imposing or simply finding meaning [01:41:00]. This metaphor, like cultivating a plant, implies active engagement with processes both internal and external. It seeks to move beyond the “empiricist Lockean model” (blank slate) and the “romantic model” (empty canvas), both of which are seen as “decadent versions” in modern culture [01:54:00]. Meaning cultivation aligns with how insight and flow states are developed: you cannot force them, but you can create conditions that increase their likelihood of taking on a life of their own [01:52:00].
Relevance Realization and Intelligence
Vervaeke argues that relevance realization is at the core of general intelligence (g) [01:19:17]. He critiques the early artificial intelligence (AI) approaches of Newell and Simon, who erroneously thought that “all problems are basically the same kind of problem,” specifically well-defined problems where initial states, goal states, and operators are clear [02:10:00]. This view overlooks the critical importance of problem formulation and dealing with “ill-defined problems” [02:30:00], such as educating a child to be a useful and happy adult [02:35:00].
The “combinatorial explosion” is a fundamental challenge addressed by relevance realization [02:11:00]. This refers to the arbitrarily large number of ways to divide the world meaningfully from raw sense data [02:24:00], and the overwhelming number of possibilities when trying to think through even simple actions, like driving [02:51:00].
Vervaeke references Jerry Fodor’s distinction between “modules” (hard-coded, algorithmic solutions for transduction, like basic perception) and “central systems” (higher-level processes not operating in a hard-coded fashion) [02:09:00]. While perception was traditionally considered modular, Vervaeke points to evidence of “cognitive penetrability” in perception, where higher-level semantic understanding can influence even the earliest moments of perceptual experience [03:10:00]. This implies that relevance realization is not just a conceptual process but “reaches into the guts of our experience” [03:04:00].
The “No Free Lunch Theorems” (Walpert & MacReady) are central to this understanding, as they mathematically prove that no single search algorithm can be generally optimal for all problems [03:41:00]. This supports the idea that there is no general problem solver and necessitates specialized heuristics [03:54:00]. Vervaeke argues that relevance realization operates by putting various heuristics into an “opponent processing relationship” to overcome the No Free Lunch Theorem [03:39:00].
Relevance realization is not defined by an essence but by its adaptive function, akin to Darwin’s concept of adaptivity constantly being remade and redefined [03:45:00]. This is understood as a dynamical system theory where a “virtual engine of constraints on a feedback cycle” shows how adaptivity continually evolves [03:30:00]. The brain, similarly, uses an analogous evolutionary mechanism of “variation and selection” to remain cognitively adapted to a constantly changing environment [03:44:00]. This is seen in processes like the wake-sleep algorithm in deep learning [03:58:00].
Beyond Propositional Levels
Relevance realization is grounded in an “economic slash pragmatic model” [03:56:00], meaning it operates at a bioeconomic level below semantic or syntactic representations. It is a response to the “infinitary predicament” where a cognitive agent has limited time and processing resources, facing “growing opportunity costs” with every commitment [04:46:00]. Therefore, every act of relevance realization is “affectively laden” [05:08:00], as the agent “cares about the information we’re processing” because it pertains to their self-preservation [05:18:00].
Relevance realization is always in a context of “caring, affect, salience” [05:17:00]. An example is the autonomic nervous system (sympathetic and parasympathetic systems) constantly calibrating arousal levels, dynamically balancing the need for threat/opportunity response with rest/recuperation [04:51:00]. This “opponent processing” is fundamental to relevance realization and extends from basic biology to higher cognition [04:38:00].
Relevance realization is “preconceptual” and “pre-propositional”; it operates prior to our beliefs [01:52:00]. It is an underlying process that organizes up to attention [05:22:00]. Attention itself is described as a process of “prioritization of signal,” operating both bottom-up and top-down, constantly evolving and balancing between “default and task focus” [05:41:00]. There is a strong correlation between general intelligence (g) and attentional measures [05:42:00].
The Phenomenology of Relevance Realization and Spirituality (Religio)
Vervaeke uses relevance realization to describe the core features of what people refer to as spirituality, which he terms religio (derived from the Latin religare, meaning “to bind” [01:00:54]). He argues that spirituality can be reduced to four or five core features:
- Primordiality: It is deeper than conceptual, normative, or experiential levels [01:00:04].
- Transactivity: It involves a dynamic coupling between the individual and the world [01:54:00].
- Connectedness: Provides a sense of mattering and belonging [01:54:00].
- Self-Transcendence: Facilitates “qualitative development” and moments of insight [00:58:00].
- Saffiential: It affords wisdom but can also drive self-deception [00:58:00].
Religio is seen as a “transjective trajectory flow state” [01:18:03], meaning it is neither purely subjective nor objective but rather that which relates and makes possible subjectivity and objectivity [01:16:00]. This process involves “transframing,” a neologism referring to a transformative insight that alters one’s entire way of framing problems, going beyond individual problem-solving to change the agent-arena relationship [01:17:00].
The mystery of religio is presented as a phenomenological mystery, not a theoretical one [01:11:48]. While a scientific theory can explain the underlying mechanisms of relevance realization, one cannot experientially step outside of their own relevance realization machinery to observe it as an object [01:13:15]. This is akin to the inability to experience one’s own death or unconsciousness from a first-person perspective [01:11:59]. It relates to William James’s distinction between the “I” (the observing self, which remains a mystery) and the “Me” (the observed self) [01:12:08].
Sacredness and the Sacred
Vervaeke distinguishes between sacredness and the sacred [01:21:26].
- Sacredness: Refers to the psycho-existential aspect—the experience, realization, and transformation that involves intense affective arousal, deep connectedness, and a sense of “the really real” that calls for personal transformation [01:21:12]. This includes feelings like wonder and awe, which open up the agent-arena relationship and cultivate appreciation for how things become meaningful [01:08:50].
- The Sacred: Refers to the metaphysical proposal about the cause of this sacredness [01:22:29]. Vervaeke notes that while the experience of sacredness (numinous, sense of being “homed” in the world, protection from “domicide”) remains constant across cultures, the metaphysical proposals for its cause (e.g., God, Dao) vary significantly [01:25:00].
He argues that the function of religion is to create a “meta-meaning system” [01:26:41] that coordinates the agent-arena relationship, allowing specific meaning systems (legal, moral, aesthetic, economic) to be possible. This meta-meaning system protects individuals from “absurdity, alienation, culture shock, domicide” [01:28:45].
Symbols and Their Role
Vervaeke discusses symbols in a broader sense than typical semiotics (e.g., Peirce’s icon, index, symbol) [01:31:47]. He defines a symbol as a metaphor that allows individuals to hold something in mind that cannot otherwise be grasped, and which “exacts machinery” in the brain for proper engagement [01:36:31].
- Metaphor: At the core of a symbol, metaphors are “linguistic conceptual devices for provoking insight” by altering the “salience landscaping” and creating “stereoscopic awareness of important similarities and differences” [01:33:17].
- Symbolic Function: A symbol, like the blind woman holding scales for justice, allows us to engage with complex, abstract concepts (like justice) by activating underlying cognitive machinery (like balance) [01:35:00]. This involves “circuit reuse and cognitive exaptation” [01:35:39].
While symbols are powerful for finding meaning and fostering community, they are also “exceedingly dangerous” [01:37:41]. Vervaeke cites Paul Tillich’s work on symbols, particularly the distinction between an idol and an icon. An idol is a symbol to which unquestioning devotion is given, losing its “translucency” or “symbolic nature” [01:38:09]. When a symbol becomes an idol, it can lead to “foolish” and “reactive” participation, as seen in historical atrocities committed under the banner of religious or national symbols [01:38:12]. Engaging with symbols wisely requires remembering their symbolic status and looking “beyond it while remembering what it is” [01:39:04].
The “religion that’s not a religion” or “enlightenment 2.0” aims to leverage the functionality of religio and symbols, understanding their underlying mechanisms, to address the “meta-crisis” faced by humanity [01:29:34].