Ep. 28 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Convergence To Relevance Realization

Vervaeke continues his lecture series on the cognitive science of intelligence, arguing that relevance realization and insight via problem framing underpin general intelligence and wisdom.

Key Takeaways

General intelligence depends fundamentally on relevance realization, the capacity to zero in on what matters.
Problem formulation and reframing via insight are essential for avoiding combinatorial explosion in ill-defined problems.
Heuristic cognition is adaptive but susceptible to bias, so self-correction through insight is crucial.
Categorization and pragmatic inference rely on relevance rather than fixed essences.
Cultivating insight is a path toward wisdom and self-transcendence.

What the video covers

Recaps Newell and Simon's work on intelligence as general problem solving and the naturalistic imperative avoiding the homunculus fallacy.
Explains heuristic versus algorithmic processing and why human cognition must rely on heuristics that are adaptive yet prone to bias.
Critiques Newell and Simon's essentialist heuristic, arguing that not all problems are essentially the same and problem formulation matters.
Distinguishes well-defined from ill-defined problems, noting most real-world problems are ill-defined.
Uses the mutilated chessboard example to show how covering versus parity problem formulations determine whether combinatorial explosion occurs.
Presents insight as the process of reformulating or reframing problems, which avoids combinatorial explosion and corrects self-misdirection.
Argues that insight is recursively self-organizing and central to cultivating wisdom.
Builds a convergence argument that many lines of intelligence research point to relevance realization as the core of general intelligence.
Discusses categorization, noting categories are not defined by essences but by relevance and family resemblance.
Uses the robot-and-battery frame problem to illustrate the difficulty of relevance realization and side-effect checking.

Chapters

What is the main argument of this lecture?

The lecture argues that many converging lines of research show general intelligence rests on relevance realization, the ability to identify what is pertinent in a situation. Insight, through problem reframing, is presented as the mechanism that enables this and underlies wisdom.

Why does Vervaeke criticize Newell and Simon?

He argues they fell into the essentialist heuristic, assuming all problems are essentially the same and so treating problem formulation as trivial. This blinded them to the importance of distinguishing well-defined from ill-defined problems.

What is the mutilated chessboard example meant to show?

It shows that the way a problem is formulated determines whether a solver faces combinatorial explosion. A covering strategy leads to exhaustive search, while a parity strategy makes the solution obvious.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis so we have been looking at the cognitive science of intelligence and we've been looking at the seminal work of new orleans simon and we've seen how they are trying to create a

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plausible construct of intelligence to drive many different ideas together into this idea of intelligence as the capacity to be a general problem solver and then they're doing a fantastic job of applying the naturalistic imperative which helps us to avoid the homonka door

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fallacy because we're trying to analyze formalize and mechanize our explanation of intelligence explaining the mind ultimately in a non-circular fashion by explaining it in non mental terms and this will also hopefully give us a way of resituated the mind within the

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scientific worldview we saw that at the core of their construct was the realization via the formalization and attempted mechanization of the combinatorial explosive nature of the problem space and how crucial relevance realization is and how somehow you zero

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in on the relevant information they proposed a solution to this that has far-reaching implications for our understanding of meaning cultivation and of rationality they propose the distinction between heuristic and algorithmic processing and the fact that most of our processing has to be

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heuristic in nature it can't pursue certainty it can't be algorithmic it can't be Cartesian in this fashion in that fashion and that also means that our cognition is susceptible to bias the very processes that make us intelligently adaptive help us to ignore

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the combinatorial explosive amount of options and information available to us are the ones that also prejudice us prejudiced us and bias us so that we can become self deceptively misled this was a powerful that they deserve to be

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seminal figures and that they exemplify how we should be trying to do cognitive science and they exemplify the power of the naturalistic imperative but there were serious shortcomings and New Orleans Symonds work they themselves and this is something we should remember

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even as scientists the scientific method is designed to try and is a psycho technology designed to try and help us deal with our proclivities towards self-deception they fell they fell prey to a cognitive heuristic that biased them they were making use of the

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essentialist heuristic we can which is which is crucial to our adaptive intelligence it helps us find those things that do those classes that do share in essence and therefore allow us to make powerful predictions and generalizations of course the problem

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with essentialism is precisely it is a heuristic it is adaptive we are tempted to overuse it and that will make us miss see that many categories do not possess an essence like the Kim Stein famously pointed out the category of game or

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chair or table New Orleans Simon thought that all problems were essentially the same and because of that how you formulate a problem is a rather trivial matter because of that they were blinded to the fact that all problems are not

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essentially the same that there are essential differences between types of problems and therefore problem formulation is actually very important this is the distinction between well-defined problems and they'll define problems and I made the point that most real-world problems are

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ill-defined problems what's missing in an ill-defined problem is precisely the relevance realization that you get through a good problem formulation we then went into the work in which Simon himself participated the work of Kaplan and Simon to show that this self same

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relevance realization through problem formulation is at work in addressing combinatorial explosion we took a look at the problem of the mutilated chessboard in that and that if you formulate it as a covering strategy you will get into a combinatorial explosive

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search whereas if you formulate it as a parity strategy if you make salient the fact that the two removed pieces are the same color then the solution becomes obvious to you and very simple to do problem formulation helps you avoid

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combinatorial explosion and helps you deal with ill-defined Innis and this process by which you move from a poor problem formulation to a good problem formulation is the process of insight and this is why we have seen throughout insight is so crucial to you being a

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rational cognitive agent and that means that in addition to logic being essential for our rationality those psycho technologies that enhance our capacity our insight are also crucially important indispensable we know that an insight relevance realization is recursively self-organizing restructuring itself in

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a dynamic fashion so insight of course is not only important for changing ill-defined it nests so this is what problem formulation is doing or as all later call it problem framing it's doing this right it's also doing this it's

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helping me avoid combinatorial explosion but it's also doing something else something that we talked about and saw already before with the nine dot problem it's helping you to overcome the way in which your relevance realization machinery is making the wrong things

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salient and obvious for you so insight is also a way right in which this process is self-corrective in which the problem formulation process is self corrected because you can mislead yourself be misdirected so insight deals with converting ill-defined problems

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into well-defined problems by doing problem framing problem formulation or doing reframing when needed it helps us avoid combinatorial explosion by doing problem formulation or reframing as with the person who's shifted from a covering strategy to a parent sorry yet from a covering

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strategy to a parity strategy in the mutilated chessboard or it also helps us correct how we limit inappropriately our attempts to solve a problem by what we consider salient or relevant and it allows us to reformulate reframe and

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break out of the way we have boxed our cognition and our consciousness in so insight is crucial and the cultivation of wisdom I want to go on now what we're seeing is many long what so we're we're doing this

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thing where we're understanding intelligence and we're seeing many things just converting on converging on the idea of being a general problem solver and then we're we're seeing right many instances already within that right once we get this notion of trying to

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come up with a general problem solver we see that that in turn right many different things are feeding into this issue of relevance realization as what makes you capable of being a general problem solver so we have many things

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feeding into this and then we're analyzing so this right it has tremendous potential right I'm trying to show you a plausibility structure many converging lines of how we measure and investigate talk about intelligence lead to understanding intelligence as a

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general problem solver and then we're starting to see that many of that many lines of Investigation are converging on what makes you generally intelligent is your capacity for relevance realization I want to continue this convergence I want to make it quite powerful for you

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right so presumably one of the things that contributes as I mentioned to your capacity for being a general problem solver is your capacity for categorizing things I already alluded to that when I just discussed this issue last time your

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ability to categorize things massively increases your ability to deal with the world if I couldn't categorize things if I couldn't see these both as markers I would have to treat each one as a raw individual that I'm encountering for the

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first time kind of like we do when we meet people and we treat them with proper nouns so this would be Tom and then this would be Agni and meeting Tom doesn't tell me anything about what Agnes is going to be like and we talked

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about this when we talked about categorical perception right but if I can categorize them together I can make predictions about how any member of this category will behave it massively speeds up my ability to make predictions to abstract important and

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potentially relevant information it allows me to communicate I can communicate all of that categorical information with a with a common noun marker your ability to categorize is central to your ability to be intelligent so what is a category a

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category isn't just any set of things a category is a set of things that you sense belong together now we've note we noted last time that your sense of things belonging together right isn't necessarily because they share an essence that's the common

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mistake all right how is it that we categorize things how does this basic ability central to our intelligence operate I'm not going to try and fully explain that that's I don't know anybody anyone that can do that right now all I

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need to do is show you again how this issue of relevance realization is at the center the standard explanation the one that works from common sense is the one you see in Sesame Street right you know you you give that you give the child you

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know here are three things three of these things right you know here are three is these things they're kind of the same one of these things is not like the others three of these things are kinda the same and you have to pick out

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the one right and so these go together this one doesn't these are categorized as markers that's the Sesame Street explanation what's the explanation I noticed that these are similar right I noticed that this one is different I mentally group together the

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things that are similar I keep the parts that the things that are different mentally apart and that's how I form categories isn't that obvious well again explaining how it becomes obvious to you and why how you make the

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correct properties salient is the crucial thing why well this is a point made famous by the philosopher Nelson Goodman great name what a great name Goodman what a great name right Nelson pointed out that we're often well I'm gonna use our language I think this

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is fair but we're often equivocating when we invoke similarity and how obvious it is between a psychological sense and a logical sense and in there in that sense we're deceiving ourselves that we're offering an explanation so what do I mean well what does what does

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similarity mean and logical sets well remember the Sesame Street example kind of the same similarity is partial identity kinda the same okay but does partial identity mean well you share properties you share features and the more features you share the more

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identical you are the more similar you are there you go well that's pretty that's pretty clear well Nelson once you agree with that Nelson Goodman's gonna say well now you have a problem because any two objects are logically overwhelmingly similar

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because pick any two objects say a bison right and a lawn mower all right all I have to do is list Lots that's to get an S I don't know what a by zhanna's I have to pick properties that they share in

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common okay well they're both found on in North America neither one was found in North America 300 million years ago both contain carbon both can kill you if not properly treated both have an odor both weigh less than a ton neither one

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makes a particularly good weapon in fact the number of things that I can say truly that are shared by this and this is indefinitely large it's common are totally explosive it goes on and on and on and on and this is Goodman's point

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they share many many indefinitely large number of properties now what you you I imagine you're saying is yeah that's all true I didn't say anything false notice how truth and relevance aren't the same thing I didn't say anything

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false but what you're saying to me is yeah but those aren't the important properties you're picking trivial on and no that's what you're doing you're telling me that I haven't zeroed in on the relevant properties the ones that

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are obvious to you the ones that right stand out to you at salient so what you're now doing is you're moving from a logical to a psychological account of similarity in what matters right for psychological similarity is not any true

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comparison but finding the relevant comparisons and the thing about that is that doesn't seem to be stable bars Alou pointed this out so I'm going to give you a set of things is it a category okay so it's your wife pets works of art

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gasoline explosive material is that a category works of art your children your spouse gasoline explosive material is that a category you go no they don't share enough in common now here's what I say to you there's a fire oh wait

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all those things belong together now because I care about my wife I care about my kids but in fire can kill them Pat's an explosive stuff and flammable stuff is dangerous now it forms a category in one context not a category and another cat

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in another context a very tight and important category now the logical sharing has not changed what shared psychologically is what properties or features you consider relevant for making the comparison out of all of what is logically shared you 0 end you see on

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the relevant features for comparison you do the same thing when you're deciding that two things are different because any two objects any objects you find think are really the same also have an indefinitely large number of differences and when you when you are

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holding things as different it's because you've zeroed in four in here you know shape and use are relevant differences so at the core of your ability to form and use categories is your capacity again for zeroing in on

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relevant information now one thing that people sometimes say to me when I start talking this way as they say oh you know Darwin Darwin Darwin Darwin and we'll talk about Darwin again right and Darwin's very important and we'll talk

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about it his work but what they mean by that it's like you're doing all this abstract you know but you know concrete survival situations right I just got to make a machine that can survive right that's just obvious right it avoids this

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and it finds that well first of all is it so one of the things a machine has to do for example is avoid danger danger Will Robinson right danger what set of features do all dangerous things share don't tell me

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synonyms for danger I mean holes are dangerous bees are dangerous poison is dangerous knives are dangerous lack of food is dangerous what do all of those share and don't say well they lead to the damaging of your tissue that's what

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danger those are synonyms for danger of all what they're talking about our causes of danger what do they share how to use zero in on them you still say wow I sort of get that but still you know just moving around the

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world finding your food okay well let's do that let's try and make machine that's gonna find it's gonna deal with that very basic problem it's gonna be a cognitive agent looking for its food now because it's an electronic

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machine it's a robot we're gonna have it look for batteries this is an example from Daniel Dennett so here's my robot it's mobile it's got wheels right this appendage for grabbing stuff it's got all these wonderful centers it's got

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lots of computational power but needed you do to do okay so we know what we need to do in order to make it an agent a cognitive agent that's what we've been talking about from the very beginning it

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has to be different from something merely something that generates behavior everything generates behavior that this behaves in a certain way this behaves in a certain way this behaves in a certain way what makes you an agent I mean this

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isn't all that makes you an agent this is a philosophically complex problem but the crucial thing about what makes you as an agent is the following you can determine the consequences of your behavior I'm using that term very

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broadly you can determine the consequences of your behavior and change your behavior accordingly so this ability to determine the consequences the effects of your behavior is crucial to being an agent so we build a machine that can do that it can determine the

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consequences of its behavior now we give it this problem very basic problem here's the right so here's a wagon right it has a nice handle and on it is a nice juicy battery now the robot right will try and do what you and I do right and

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this this is also a Darwinian thing because for most creatures you have to not only find food you have to avoid being food and so you don't just eat your food where you first find it even powerful predators like leopards move

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their food to another location because it will get stolen they could get preyed upon etc you know each of food where you first come across it and fast food restaurants are somewhat of an anomaly but you know like when you walk into the

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supermarket you just don't start eating you try and take your food to a more safe place you try and share your food with other people because that's a socially valuable thing to do that's why when you're eating something you don't like

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you give it this taste horrible taste it you want to share right you want to use food as a way of sharing experience bonding together so where the robot is programmed to take its food the battery to a safe place and then consume it well

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that seems just so simple right that's so simple well we have to make this a problem because we're talking about being a problem solver and on this right on this wagon is a lip balm the balm is lit which means there's a

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very high probability the fuse will burn down and the bomb will go off and we put the robot in this situation and what does the robot do the robot pulls the handle because it has determined that a consequence an effect of pulling the

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handle is to bring the battery along so it pulls the wagon and it brings the battery along because that's the intended effect right that's the consequence that it is determined is relevant to its goal okay but of course

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the bomb goes off and destroys the robot and we think Oh what did we do wrong what did we do wrong there's something missing and and then we realized ah you know what we made the robot only look

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for the intended effects of its behavior we didn't have the robot check side effects and that's really important right every year this happens people fail to check side effects they go into a situation in which they know flammable gas is diffuse

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but it's dark and so they strike a match because they want the intended effect of making light but it has the unintended effect of creating heat which sets off the gas and explodes and harms or kills them so ah we say ah we have to have the

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machine not only check the intended effects it has to check the side effects of its own behavior okay so what we're gonna do is we're gonna we're gonna give it more computational power right it's gonna write more more censors way more

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censors way more computational and we're also going to put a black box inside DES like they do in an airplane so that we can see what's going on inside the robot and then we're gonna put it into this

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situation because this is a great test situation because once we solve this simple Darwinian problem we'll have a basically intelligent machine so we put it in this situation and it comes up to the wagon and then and nothing happens

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it doesn't do anything and we go what the bomb goes off right why didn't it just move away from the wagon or why didn't it try to lift the battery off well we take a look and we find that the

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robot is doing what we programmed it to it's it's trying to determine all of the possible side effects so it's determining that if it pulls the handle that will make a squeaking noise if it pulls the handle there front one right

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wheel right the front left wheel will go through 30 degrees of Arc the fright without front right wheel will go through 30 degrees of our the back wheel same way back left wheel back right they that there'll be a slight wobbling and

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shifting in the wagon the grass underneath the wheels is going to be indented the position of the wagon with respect to Mars is being altered do you see what the issue is here the number of side effects is

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combinatorial explosive oh crap so what do we do right well we think we'll give and this is something I'm gonna argue later we can't do we come up with a recipe a definition of relevance nobody knows what that is I'm going to in fact

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argue later that that's actually impossible and that's going to be crucial for understanding our response to the meaning crisis but let's say let's give the possibility we have a definition of relevance and that what we'll do is we'll have the robot right

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determine right which side-effects are relevant or not know so that's great so we we add that new ability here we give it some extra computational power we put it in here and it goes up to the bomb and the the wagon and there the battery

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and the bomb goes off and it doesn't it just sits there calculating and what's going on and we notice we look inside and it's making two lists and it's you know here's the wheel turning that's irrelevant and it's judging you that

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that is irrelevant oh here's the change in marker here too relevant and it's making a list and this list is going and it's just yeah it's correctly labeling each one of these is irrelevant but the list keeps going and

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going and going see this is gonna sound like a Zen Cohen you have to ignore the information not even check it the see relevance realization isn't the application of a definition it is somehow intelligently ignoring all the irrelevance and somehow

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zeroing in making the relevant stuff salient standing out so that the actions that you should do are relevant to you are obvious to you this is the problem of the proliferation of side effects in behavior in action this is called the frame problem now

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there's different aspects of the frame problem one was a technical aspect a logical aspect in computational programming and shanahan and I think it's correct that he and others have solved that technical problem but what Shanahan himself argues is once you

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solve that technical version of the frame problem that this deeper problem remains and of course he calls this deeper problem this deeper version of the frame problem the relevance problem right he happens to think that consciousness might be the way in which we deal with

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this problem we'll talk about that later many people are converging on the idea that consciousness and related ideas like working memory have to do with our ability to zero in on relevant information but let's let's keep going because what about communication isn't

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that central to being a general problem solver you bet especially if most of my intelligence is my ability to coordinate my behavior with myself and with others communication is vital to this we see this even in creatures that don't have

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linguistic communication social communication makes many species behave in a more sophisticated fashion and I already mentioned to you there's a relationship between how how intelligent an individual is and how social the species is it's not an algorithm there

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seem to be important exceptions like octopus the octopus but in general communication is crucial to being an intelligent cognitive agent let's let's try and use linguistic communication as our example because that way we can also bring in the linguistics that's in

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cognitive science and see so the point is when you're using language to communicate you're involved with a very particular problem and this is this was made really clear by the work of Grice HP Grice he pointed out that you always

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are conveying much beyond what you're saying it's much more than what you're saying it always has to be and that communication depends on you being able to convey much more than you say now why is that because I have to depend

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on you to derive the implications and that's a logical thing and then but he also called implicature which is not a directly logical thing in order for me to convey above and beyond what I'm saying so I Drive up my car I put my

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window down and I say excuse me there's a person on the street I'm out of gas and the person comes over and says oh oh there's a gas station at the corner thank you drive away okay so notice

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let's go through this carefully so I roll down the window and I just shout out excuse me okay now what would I and actually need to be saying to capture everything that I'm conveying I would have to say I'm shouting this word

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excuse me in the hope that anybody who hears it understands that the me refers to the speaker and that by saying excuse me I'm actually requesting that you give me your attention understanding of course that I'm not demanding that

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you'll give me your attention for like an hour or three hours or 17 days but forms a minimal amount of time that somehow relevant for a problem that I'm going to pose that's not too onerous I'm and again what I'm saying I I mean this

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person making the noises who is actually the same as the one referred to by this other word me I'm out of gas and of course I don't mean me or either speaker I mean the vehicle I'm actually in I'm not asking you to make me more

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flatulent I'm asking for you to help me right find gasoline for my car and I'm actually referring to gasoline by this short term gas and by saying this I know you understand that my car isn't completely out of gasoline there's

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enough in it that I can drive you know some relatively close distance to find a source of gasoline the other person oh by uttering this otherwise meaningless term I'm indicating that I accept the deal that we have here that I'm going to

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give you a bit of my attention and I understand that it's not going to be too long to ownerís I can make a statement seemingly out of the blue and that you will know how to connect it to what you

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actually want which is gasoline for your car that's not completely out of gas I will just say the statement there is a gasoline at there's a gasoline station at the corner you will figure out that that means that you can drive to it I'm

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talking about a nearby corner somehow relevantly similar to the amount of gasoline like this isn't a corner halfway across the continent there's a gasoline station this is what will distribute gasoline for your car it's not forgiving you no helium to blimps

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it's not a little model of a gas station it's not a gas station that's closed and not has been has not been in business for 10 years it's a gas elation that will accept Canadian currency or credit it won't demand your your your your

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firstborn or or or fruits from your field and you know how all of that's going on because if any of that's violated you either find it funny or you get angry if you say excuse me I'm out of gas and the person comes up and blows

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some helium into your car you don't go oh thank you that's that's that's what I wanted I wanted some gas helium yeah it's ridiculous if you drive to the corner and there's a gas station that's been under business for 10 years you go

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what what's going on what's wrong with that person you're always conveying way more than you're saying now notice something else notice I try to I try to explicate what was I gave you a whole bunch of sentences to try

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and explicate what I was conveying but you know what each one of these sentence is is also conveying more than it was saying and exactly if I was trying to unpack what it said but it was conveying and what it says I would

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have to generate all of its sentence its and so on and so on and you see what this explodes into you can't say everything you want to convey you rely on people reading between the lines by the way that is actually what this word

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means at least one of the etymologies of intelligence is inter ledger which means to read between the lines so what the gray said we do well what we do is we follow a bunch of Maxim's we assume that

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we're trying to communicate when we're trying to communicate there's some basic level of cooperation I don't mean social cooperation just communicative cooperation and we assume that people are following some Maxim's so you're at a party alright and you hear me say

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write somebody and you asked me well how many kids do you have and I say oh I have one I have one kid you know okay and then later on I'm talking and you overhear me somebody asked me the same

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committee case you have oh I have two I have two sons I mean what you come up to me you say what's wrong with you why did you lie and what I didn't lie if I have two kids I necessarily have one child I

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didn't say anything fault saying I have one kid and you'd say what an because I didn't provide you right with the relevant amount of information I didn't give you the information you needed in order to try and pick up on

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what I was conveying you spoke the truth the logical truth right or I did in this example but I didn't speak it in such a way this is again why you can't be perfectly logical I didn't speak it in

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such a way that I aided you in determining what the relevant conveyance is so gray said we follow four Maxim's we assume the person is right trying to convey the truth right and then a maximum of quantity they're trying to give us the right

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amount of information this is actually often called the maxim of quality it has to do with truth though right and then there's a maximum of manner and then there's a maximum of relevance right use so this is basically people we

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assume that people are trying to tell the truth they're trying to give us the right amount of information they're trying to put it in in the kind of format that's most helpful to us in getting what's conveyed beyond what's

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said and they're giving us relevant information there it is again oh look there's the word relevance then Sperber and Wilson come along writing a very important book which I'll talk about later I've criticisms out but it's the book is

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entitled relevance and what's interesting is that they're proposing this not just as a linguistic phenomena but about more general cognitive phenomena they argue that all of these actually reduce to the one maximum be relevant okay so manner this just just what is it

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to be helpful to somebody well it like present the information away that's helpful them well what you do is you try and make salient and obvious what's relevant okay that's easy quantity give the relevant amount of information what

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about this ah and you say ah John I gotcha you can't reduce this one because this is truth and you have been hitting me over the head since the beginning of this series that truth and relevance are not the

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same thing you're right so what did suburban Wilson do about that while they do something really interesting they say we don't actually demand that people speak the truth because if we did we're screwed because most of our beliefs are

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false what are we actually asking people to do we're actually we're actually we're asking people to be honest or sincere that's not the same thing you're allowed to say right what you believe to be true not what is true

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okay so what'd you say well that means the maxim is actually be sincere what does sincere mean well convey what's in your mind everything that's in your mind everything that's going so when I when you ask me you know how many

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kids do you have I've got all this stuff going on in my mind about you know this marriage is failing I what am I gonna do to take care of these kids you know I love this kid but it's oh but I convey all of that

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and all no no oh man if you've been trapped with somebody that's like getting drunk and they talk like that at a party it's horrible you're trapped it you say one a relative you have any kids and you're trapped for three hours so

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that's not what we mean we don't mean tell me everything that's in your mind right now convey it all to me John give it to me all that's not what we mean what do we mean we mean convey what is

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relevant to the conversation or context out of all of the possible implications and implicatures zero in on those that you might think are relevant to me our conversation and the context so that also reduces to relevance so at the key

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of your ability to communicate is your ability to realize relevant information notice what I'm doing here I'm doing this huge convergence argument again and again and again what's at the core of your intelligence what's at the core of

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your intelligence again and again and again is your capacity for relevance realization it's even more complicated than this put it putting things together that we there's so much more I could teach you all remember this all of the information

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available the environment overwhelming combinatorial explosive you have you have to selectively attend to some of it so this is doing relevance realization selective attention and then you have to decide how to hold in working memory what's going to be important to you Lin

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hashers excellent work showing that working memory is about trying to screen off what's relevant or irrelevant information you're using this in your problem-solving right you're using this and here is where you are trying to deal with the combinatorial explosion in the

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problem space all that stuff we talked about that's also interacting with the proliferation of side effects like we saw with the robot in the battery when you try to act so you're trying to select you know what do I hold in mind

Speaker A

right how do I get move through the problem space once I start acting what side effects do I pay attention to which ones do I not pay attention to and all of that has to do with out of all the

Speaker A

information in my long-term memory how do I organize it how do I categorize it how do i improve my ability to access it long term memory organization and access is dependent on your ability to zero in on relevant information and this of

Speaker A

course feeds back to here this feeds back to here it's feeds back to here right feeds back to here right these are interacting these are interacting this is the relevance problem that that's the problem of trying to determine what's

Speaker A

relevant it's the core of what makes you intelligent now why does that matter what I'm trying to show you is how deep and profound this construct is this idea of relevance realization is at the core of what it is

Speaker A

to be intelligent and we know that this isn't just cold calculation right your relevance realization machinery it has to do with all this stuff the stuff we've been talking about salience obvious 'no sobota veyts you what arouses your energy what attracts your

Speaker A

attention relevance realization is deeply involving it's at the guts of your intelligence your salience landscaping your problem-solving okay so what do I want to do what I want to do is the following I want to propose to you right that we can continue to do

Speaker A

this we can I can show you how all of this is I could do more right but how it's all converging on this then I want to do two things I want to try and show how we might be able to analyze

Speaker A

formalize and mechanize this in a way that could help to coordinate our consciousness our cognition or attention our access to our long-term memory how old is working then what do I want to do with this I want to try and show you how

Speaker A

we can use relevance realization in a multi app fashion to try and get a purchase on these things we have been talking about it the historical analysis can we use relevance realization how it's dynamically self-organizing in this complex its

Speaker A

self-organizing within each one of these number I showed you how an attention is bottom-up and top-down at the same time all of these are powerfully self-organizing and how the whole thing is self-organizing we know it's self-organizing an insight can I use

Speaker A

relevance realization to explain things that are crucial to wisdom to self transcendence to spirituality to meaning that's exactly what I'm gonna do I'm gonna use this construct once I've tried to show you how it could potentially be grounded building the synoptic

Speaker A

integration across the levels and then do this kind of integration and think about why this makes at least initial plausible sense relevance realization is crucial to insight and insight is central to wisdom relevance realization and you're getting a hint of it seems to

Speaker A

be crucial to consciousness and attention and altering your state of consciousness we've already seen can be crucial to wisdom and meaning-making and that would make sense look isn't it sort of central that what makes somebody wise is exactly their capacity to zero in on

Speaker A

the relevant information in this situation to take an ill-defined messy situation and zero in to pay attention to the relevant side effects the relevant consequences to get you to pay attention to what are the important features to remember the right similar

Speaker A

situations from the past Yeah right well you say okay I sort of see that what about the softer incentives well we already see that this is a self-organizing self-correcting process we already know that there's an element of insight the very machinery

Speaker A

that makes you capable capable of insight is the machinery that helps you overcome the biases or helps you to overcome the self-deception and it helps you right solve problems that you couldn't solve before we talked about this with systemic insight okay so

Speaker A

consciousness insight wisdom but what but what about meaning come on like where's all that well here's the proposal that what we were talking about when we talked about meaning in terms of the three orders the Noma logical the

Speaker A

narrative and the normative would yes we're connections that afforded wisdom self transcendence very much but what connections well the connections that were lost and in the meeting crisis there are connections between mind and body the connections between mind and world the

Speaker A

connections between mind and mind the connection of the mind to its to itself these are all the things that are called into question the fragmentation of the mind itself what if that sorry and we saw how this all throughout had to do with again the

Speaker A

relationship between salience and truth what we find relevant in terms of how it's aliens are obvious to us and how that connects up to reality and how it connects member Plato connects parts of us together in the right way the optimal

Speaker A

way what if what we're talking about when we're talking when we're using this metaphor of meaning is we're talking about how we find things relevant to us to each other parts of ourselves relevant to each other how we're

Speaker A

relevant to the world how the world is relevant to us all this language of connection is not the language of largely causal connection it's the language of establishing relations of relevance between things perhaps there's a deep reason why manipulating relevance

Speaker A

realization affords self transcendence and wins wisdom and insight precisely because relevance realization is the ability to make the connections that are at the core of meaning those connections that are quintessentially being threatened by the meaning crisis that would mean if we get an understanding of

Speaker A

the machinery of this we would have a way of generating new psycho technologies redesigning reappropriation alder cycle technologies and coordinating them systematically in order to generate those regenerate that's the word I want to use regenerate regenerative of these fraying

Speaker A

connections real ajith amay tanda ford the cultivation of wisdom self transcendence connectedness to ourselves and to each other and to the world and that's in fact what I want to explore it with you and help explain to you in our next

Speaker A

session together on awakening from the meeting crisis thank you very much for your time and attention [Music] you you you

Topics:relevance realizationgeneral intelligenceproblem formulationinsightcombinatorial explosionheuristicsNewell and Simoncategorizationwisdomcognitive science

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