Speaker A
[Music] you [Music] welcome back to make wakening from the meaning crisis this is episode 31 so last time we were taking a look at trying to progress in an attempt to give at least a plausible suggestion of a
Vervaeke's Episode 31 argues relevance realization is an embodied, embedded, transient process co-created by organism and environment, explained via logistical norms like efficiency and resiliency.
Key Takeaways
- Relevance is not an intrinsic property of objects or subjects but a dynamic, co-created relation between organism and environment.
- A scientific theory of relevance realization is plausible via bioeconomic logistical norms (efficiency and resiliency) rather than logical norms.
- Cognition is fundamentally embodied and embedded; the body is constitutive of cognitive agency.
- Opponent processing and trade-offs between constraints may explain how relevance realization is continuously regulated.
What the video covers
- Recaps prior episode: distinguishes a theory of relevance (lacks systematic import) from a theory of relevance realization, which can be scientifically pursued.
- Draws an analogy to Darwin's natural selection: a virtual engine in the brain continuously shapes cognitive-interactional fitness to a changing environment via the sensory-motor loop.
- Proposes that this engine balances selective and enabling constraints, with logistical (bioeconomic) norms of efficiency and resiliency in opponent-processing trade-off.
- Argues the body is constitutive of cognitive agency, not a Cartesian vehicle; cognition depends on an autopoietic bioeconomy.
- Rejects both empiricist 'detection' and romantic 'projection' accounts of relevance; relevance is a real relation between organism and environment, analogous to a bottle being graspable.
- Explains 'realization' in both objective (making real) and subjective (coming into awareness) senses to triangulate the transjectivity of relevance.
- Uses examples of trade-offs (general vs. special-purpose tools, exploration vs. exploitation, stability vs. change) to illustrate opponent processing across scales.
- Connects relevance realization to multi-scale self-organization, deep learning (wake-sleep algorithm), and differentiation versus integration as systems complexify.
- Links relevance realization to Spearman's general factor of intelligence, suggesting it is a strong candidate for that general capacity.
Chapters
- 00:00Recap of Relevance Realization and the Darwinian Analogy
- 03:50Opponent Processing and Logistical Norms
- 07:58Why Embodied and Embedded: Rejecting Cartesian and Romantic Views
- 15:58Relevance as Transjective Realization
- 20:17Tool Use Example and Trade-offs in Bioeconomic Constraints
- 26:24Exploration vs. Exploitation and Multi-Scale Self-Organization
- 33:20Differentiation, Integration, and Self-Transcendence
- 48:17Relevance Realization and General Intelligence
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
scientific theory of how we could explain relevance realization and one of the things we examined it was the distinction between a theory of relevance and a theory of relevance realization and I made the argument that we cannot have a scientific theory of
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relevance precisely because of a lack of systematic import but we can have a theory of relevance realization and then I gave you the analogy of that which I'm building towards something stronger than an analogy of Darwin's theory of
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evolution by natural selection and that which Darwin proposed a virtual engine that regulates the reproductive cycle so that the system constantly evolves the biological fitness of organisms to a constantly changing environment and then the analogy is there is a virtual engine
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in the embodied brain and why it's embodied will become clear embodied embedded brain will become clear in this lecture but there is a a virtual engine that regulates the sensory motor loop so that my cognitive interactional fitness is constantly being shaped it's
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constantly evolving to deal with a constantly changing environment and what I in fact need as I argued is a system of constraints because I'm trying to write between selectively and enabling constraints to limit and zero in on relevant information and then I was
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trying to argue that the way in which that operates we saw that what needs to be sort of related to an auto poetic system and then the way that operates the self-organisation I suggested operates in terms of a design that you see many
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scales and we need member of multi scale Euler theory in terms of your biological and cognitive organization and that's in terms of opponent processing we took a look at the opponent processing within the autonomic nervous system that is
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constantly by the strong analogy evolving your level of arousal to the environment opposing goals but enter a related function then I propose to you that we could look for the kinds of properties that we're going to be talking about the level at which we're
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going to be pitching a theory of relevance realization which is the theory of bio economic properties that are operating not according to normativity of truth or validity not logical normativity but logistical normativity and the two most important logistical norms I would propose to you
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our efficiency and resiliency and then I made an argument that they would be susceptible to opponent processing precisely because they are in a trade-off relationship with each other and that if we could get a a cognitive virtual engine that regulates the
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sensory motor loop by systematically playing off selective constraints on efficiency second it selective logistical economic constraints on efficiency and enabling economic constraints on resiliency then we could give an explanation a theory deeply analogous to Darwin's theory of the
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evolution were cross individuals of biological fitness we could give an account of the cognitive evolution within individuals cognition of their cognitive interactional fitted Ness the way they are shaping the problem space so as to adaptively be well fitted to
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achieving their interactional goals with the environment before I move on to try and make that more specific and make some suggestions as how this might be realized and the neural machinery of brains I want to point out why I keep emphasizing this
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embodied embedded and I want to say a little bit more about this because I also want to return to something I promised to return to why I want to resist both sort of an empiricist notion of of relevance detection and a romantic
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notion of relevance projection so the first thing is why am I saying embodied because what I've been trying to argue is there is a deep dependency a deep connection and the dependency runs from propositional through to down to
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participatory but there is a deep dependency between your cognitive agency as an right as an intelligent problem solver and a channel you know an intent of an intelligent general problem solver and the fact that your brain exists within a bio economy the body is not
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Cartesian clay that we drag around and shape according to the whims or desires of our you know totally self enclosed or Descartes immaterial minds the body is not a useless appendage it is not just a vehicle so even here I'm criticizing
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sort of certain platonic models the body body is an auto poetic Bioeconomy that makes your cognition possible without an auto poetic Bioeconomy you do not have the machinery necessary for the ongoing evolution of relevance realization the body is constitutive of your cognitive
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agency in a profound way why embedded and this will also lead us into the rejection of both sort of an empiricist and a romantic interpretation all right I embedded the biological fitted nosov a creature is not a property of the
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creature per se right it is a real relation between the creature and its environment is a great white shark intrinsically adapted no it makes no sense to ask that question because if I take this supposedly apex predator really adopted and put it in
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the desert you know the Sahara Desert it dies within minutes right it's adaptivity is not a property right intrinsic to it per se it's out apptivity is not something that it detects in the environment it's adaptivity is a real relation on
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affordance between it and the environment in a similar way well I would argue that relevance is not a property in the object it is not a property of the subjectivity of my mind it is not a property of objectivity nor
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a property of subjectivity it is precisely a property that is who co-created by how the environment and the embodied brain are fitted together in a dynamic evolving fashion it is very much like the bottle being graspable this is not a property of the bottle nor
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a property of my hand but a PI real relation a real relation on how they can be fit fitted together function together so I would argue we should not see relevance as something that we subjectively project as the romantic
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claims we should not see relevance as something we merely you write detect from the objectivity of objects as perhaps we might if we had an empiricist bet I want to propose a term to you I want to argue that relevance is
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in this sense transgenerational between the organism and its environment we should not think of it as being projected we should not think of it as being detected this is why I have consistently used the term we should think of relevance as being realized
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because the point about the term realization is it has two aspects to it and I'm trying to triangulate from those two aspects what do I mean by that there is an objective sense to realization which is to make real and if that's not
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an objective thing I don't know what counts making real that's objective but of course there is a subjective sense to realization which is coming into awareness and what I'm I'm using both these words I'm using both these senses
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of the same word I'm not equivocating I am trying to triangulate to the trans Jetty of relevance realization that is why I'm talking about something that is both embodied necessarily so and embedded necessarily so notice how non or perhaps better anti Cartesian this is
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the connection between mind if what you mean by mind is your capacity for consciousness and cognition right and body is one of dependence of constitutive need your mind needs your body we're also talking not only about it being embodied embedded it is inherently
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a transient realization the world and the organism are co-creating Co determining Co evolving the fitted nasaw let's now return to it the proposal now before before Lia turn notice what this is going to notice what this is telling us this is telling us
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that a lot of the grammar by which we try to talk about ourselves and a relationship to reality the subjective objective both of these are reifying and they--and and their inherent claims they're the idea that relevance is a thing that has
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an essence that in here's in the subject or @ relevance is a thing that has an essence that in here's in the object both of those that standard grammar and the adversarial right partisan debates we often have I am arguing need to be
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transcended need to be transcended and I would then propose to you that that's going to have a fundamental impact on how we interpret spirituality if again by spirituality we mean a sense and a functional sense of connectedness that
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affords wisdom self transcendence etc so back to the idea of efficiency resiliency trade-offs I would point to to the work of Marcus breed and he's got work sort of mathematically showing that when you're creating networks especially neural networks you're going to optimize
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and we talked about optimization again in the previous video you're going to optimize between efficiency and resiliency that's how you're going to get them to function the best you can and what I want to try and do is try to
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show you the relationship right the poles of the transductive 'ti and how that's going to come out or at least point towards the generative relationship that can be discussed in terms of these poles so I argued that initially the machinery of relevance
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realization has to be in kernel now again this is why I just did what I did when I say internal I don't mean subjective I don't mean inside the introspective space of the mind when I'm talking about the the goals are internal
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I mean internal to an embodied embedded right brain body system an autopoietic system of adaptivity in fact there's many people who are arguing cognitive science that those two terms are interdependent just like I'm arguing that relevance realization is dependent
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on Auto police's being an adaptive system and being an auto dependence sorry an auto poetic system are also interdependent system can only be continually self making if it has some capacity to adapt to changes in its environment and a system is only
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adaptive if it is trying to maintain itself and that only makes sense if it has real needs if it's an auto poetic thing so these things are actually deeply interlocked relevance realization Auto paresis and adaptivity so as Marcus breed has
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argued and other people and I'm giving you independent argument you you want to get a way of optimizing between efficiency and resilience that you don't want remember with the autonomic nervous system this doesn't mean getting some average or right stable Mead it means
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the system can move sometimes giving more emphasis to efficiency sometimes giving more emphasis to resiliency just like your autonomic nervous system is constantly evolving constantly recalibrating your level of arousal now what I want to do is pick up on how
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those constraints might cash out in particular I'll put this a little bit farther over here how these logistical norms understood as constraints can be realized in particular virtual engines so and I want to do this by talking about internal bio economic properties
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and then for lack of a better wait for this contrast and again this does not map on to the subjectivity objectivity I don't have to keep saying that correct okay external interactional properties by external I mean that these right
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eventually are going to give rise to goals in the world as opposed to constitutive goals in the system and what I want to do is show you how you go back and forth now it'll make sense to do this in terms
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of reverse engineering because it will just help to make more sense because I'm starting from what you understand in yourself and then working so often I will start here and go this way so you want to be right adaptive we
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said you want to be a general problem solver and that's important but notice that that means there's two kinds of and people don't like when I use this word but I don't have an alternative word but so I'm just going to use it just if
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there's two kinds of machines you can be by that what I mean by that is a system right that is capable of solving problems and pursuing goals in some fashion if I want to be adaptive what do i what do i what do i what kind of
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machine do I want to be well I might want to be a general-purpose machine now these terms are always when I keep showing you that are always relative they're comparative terms in relative I don't think anything is absolutely
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general or absolutely special-purpose it's always a comparative term alright but let me give you an example my hand is a general-purpose machine right my hand is such that it can be used in many many different contexts for many many
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different tasks so it's very general purpose all right now the problem with being a jack-of-all-trades is that you are master of none so the problem with my hand being general purpose is that for specific tasks it can be out
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competed by a special purpose machine so right although this is a good general purpose machine it is nowhere you know as good as a hammer for driving in a nail no good as a nowhere as good as a
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screwdriver for removing a screw etc etc so right in some contexts special purpose machines outperform general purpose machines but you wouldn't want the following you wouldn't want you know I you're gonna be stranded on a desert island like maybe Tom Hanks and castaway
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and he lost all of his special purpose tools they sink to the bottom of the ocean that causes them a lot of distress literally what he starts with that first is his hands the general purpose machines and the problem you see that
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wow they're not doing very good just if I just had a good knife right but the problem is I wouldn't want well not Tom Hanks but his character forget the character's name I think it's Jack you wouldn't have Jack
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Jack I'm going to cut off your hands and you know that I can attach a knife here and you know a hammer here and now you have a hammer a knife it's like no no no I don't want that either
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I don't want just a motley collection of special purpose machines okay so sometimes your adaptive by being a general-purpose machine sometimes your adoptive by being a special purpose machine so general purpose machine you use the same thing over and over again
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sometimes we make a joke about somebody using a special purpose machine as a general purpose machine right when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail right and the joke there is right and it strikes us as a joke
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because we know that hammers are special-purpose things and everything isn't a nail it's not so much a joke if I say you know sometimes when all you have is a hand everything looks graspable that's not so weird okay so
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what are we what am I trying to get you to see what I'm trying to get you to see is you want to be able to move between these this is very efficient why because I'm using the same thing over and over
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again the same function over and over again or at least the state this same set of tightly bound functions right the thing about special purpose right is I won't use it there you know I don't use it that often I use my hammer sometimes
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and my saw sometimes and my screwdriver Center and I have to carry around the toolbox now the problem with that is it gets very inefficient because a lot of the times I'm carrying my hammer around and I'm not using it so I have to bear
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the cost of carrying it around and I'm not using it so it's very inefficient but you know what it makes me it makes me Trent tremendously resilient because when there's a lot of new things unexpected specific issues that my
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general purpose thing can't handle I'm ready for them I have resiliency I've got differences within my tool box kit that allow me to deal with these special circumstances so notice what I want to do I want something want to constantly trade
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between them I wants to cook I want to constantly trade between them now what I'm gonna do I did that to show you this I'm then now going to reorganize it this way because when I'm going to show you
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what I'm arguing is general purpose is more efficient special purpose is making you more resilient and you want to trade between them okay so okay now those are interactional properties and you said I sort of get the analogy what does that
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have to do with the brain and Bioeconomy right so how would you try to make information processing more efficient well what I want to do is I want to try and make the process I'm using the functions I'm using to be as
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generalizable as possible that will get me general purpose because I can use the same function in many places then I'm very efficient how do you do that how do you do that well here's what I want to pause and I want to introduce just a
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tiny bit of narrative in here when I was writing this paper with Tim little comp and Blake Richards but especially this was Tim's great insight you've got to get in if you're interested in cutting-edge AI you really need to pay
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attention to the work that Tim little crap is doing Tim's a former student of mine he's calling in many ways of course he's greatly surpassed my knowledge and expertise is one of the cutting edge people and artificial intelligence and
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he had a great insight here I was proposing this model this theory to him and he said but you know you should reverse-engineer it in a certain way and I said what I mean what he says well you're acting as if you're just
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proposing this top down but what you should see is that many of the things you're talking about are already being used within the AI community so the paper we published was relevance realization and the emerging framework in cognitive science namely that a lot
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of the strategies are going to talk about here are strategies that are already being developed now I'm going to have to talk about this at a very abstract level because which one of the particular architecture is a particular
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application is going to turn out to be the right one we don't know yet that's still something in progress but I I think Tim's point is very well taken that we shouldn't be talking about this in a vacuum we should also see that the
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people who are trying to make artificial intelligence are already implementing some of these strategies that I'm going to point out and I think that's very telling the fact that we're getting convergent argument that way ok so how do I make a information processing
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function more generalizable how do I do that well I want to I mean you know how we do it and because you we've talked about it before but you do it in science all right so here's two variables for
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example it's not limited to two right right and so right I have a scatter plot and what they taught you to do right was a line of best fit all right this is standard move in Cartesian graphing now
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why do you do a line of best fit you know and my line of best fit might actually touch none of my data points does that mean I'm being ridiculously irresponsible to the data I'm just gauging an arm trust population no why
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do we do this why do we do a line of best fit all right well while we're doing this is because it allows us to interpolate and extrapolate it allows us to go beyond the data now we're taking a
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chance and of course all good science and this is this was the great insight of popper all good science takes good chances right but here's the thing I do this so that I can make predictions right what the value of y will be when I have a
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certain value of x that I've never obtained I can interpolate and extrapolate that means I can generalize the function so this is data compression this is data compression what I'm trying to do is basically pick up on what's
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invariant the idea is that the information always contains noise and I'm trying to pick up on what's invariant and extend that and of course that's part and parcel of why we do this because in science we're trying to do
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the inductive generalizations etc etc so the way in which I make my functionality more general more general purpose is if I can do a lot of data compression so if the data compression allows me to generalize my function and that
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generalization is feeding through the sensorimotor loop in a way that is protecting and promoting my autopoietic goals it's going to be reinforced but what about the opposite what was interesting at the time I think this meant some people have picked this up on
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a term we didn't have a term for this and I remember there was a whole afternoon where Tim and I were just trying to come up with what do we want for the trade-off so this is making your
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information processing more efficient more general-purpose what makes it more special purpose more resilient and so we came up with the term particularization and tim's point and i'm not going to go into detail here tim's point is this is
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the general strategy that's at working things like the wake-sleep algorithm that is at the heart of the deep learning promoted by Geoffrey Hinton who was at U of T and Tim was a very significant student of Jeff's and so this is the abstract explanation
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of how that strategy that's at work in a lot of the deep learning of that's at the core of a lot of successful they are what particular ization is is right as I'm trying to keep more in track with
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the data I'm trying to create a function that over fits in some sense to that data that will get me more specifically in contact with this particular situation so this tends to emphasize what is invariant this tends to get the
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system to pick up on more variations so this will make the system more cross contextual it can move across contexts because it can generalize this will tend to make the system more context-sensitive and of course you don't want to maximize any one of these
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you want them dynamically trading and notice how they are is this the right word I hope so obeying it sounds so anthropomorphic notice how they're obeying the logistical normativity trading between efficiency and resiliency and though there's various ways of doing this right and there's
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lots of interesting ways of engineering this into but that's creating a virtual engine engineering this creating sets of constraints on this so this will oscillate in the right way and optimize that way and so the idea is when you've
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got this as something that's following the completely internal bio economic logistical norms it will result in the evolution of sensorimotor interaction that is going to make a system core an organism constantly adaptively like moving between being general-purpose and being
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special-purpose it will become very adaptive now different organisms will be biologically skewed one way or the other even individuals will be biologically skewed so there are people now proposing for example right that we might understand certain psychopathologies in
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terms of some people are more biased towards overfitting to particular izing and some people are more biased towards compressing and generalizing they these people tend towards right see many connections where there aren't connections right and these people tend
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to be very feature ly bound okay what's another one another oh so this is compression particularization right we called we call this cognitive scope and we called this applicability how much you can apply your function or functions and the idea is if you you can get scope
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going the right way it will it will and there's no other way of it will attach to it will get coupled to it's not representing it will get coupled to right this pattern of interaction which will fit you well to the dynamics of
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change and stability in the environment okay what's another thing well a lot of people are talking about this you'll see people even talking about this in AI very significantly exploration versus right exploiting versus exploration so here's another trade-off this tends to be in terms of
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the scope of your information this has to do more with the timing so here's the question should I stay here and try and get as much as I can out of here or should that's exploiting or should I
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move and try and find new things new potential sources of resource and reward they're in a trade-off relationship because the longer I stay here the more opportunity cost I accrue but the more I move around the less I can actually draw
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from the environment so do I want to maximize either no I want to trade between them I'm always trading between exploiting and exploring there's different strategies that might be at work here I've seen recent work in which you this is you try to you reward when a
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system doesn't make an error and then you reward when it makes an error and of course those are in a trade-off relationship and this sort of makes it more curious this makes it it more sort of conscientious if I have to speak
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anthropomorphic ly one way we thought you could do this is you could trade so one way you can do this is you can reward error all right sorry reward error reduction reward error increase way we talked about in the paper is you can trade-off
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between what's called temporal displacement learning and inhibition on return I won't go into the dynamics there what I can say is there's different strategies being considered and being implemented and and this is cognitive tempering having to do with
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both temper and the relationship between Tom and time right and this has to do with the project-- ability of your processing now first of all a couple things are we claiming that these are exhaustive no they are not exhaustive
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they are exemplary they're not exhaustive they're exemplary of the ways in which you can trade between efficiency and resiliency and create virtual engines that will adopt by constrained by setting up systems of constraints the sensorimotor loop the interactions with the environment an
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evolving manner so exploit wise exploitation efficient because right I don't have to expend very much I can just stay here right but it depends on things sort of staying the same exploration is I have to expend a lot of
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energy I have to move around and it's only rewarding if there's significant difference if I go to be and it's the same as a you know what I should have done state an a so do you see what's
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happening all of these in different ways this has to do with the applicability the scope this has to do with the projected bility that time but all of these you're trading between that sometimes what makes something relevant is how it's the same how it's invariant
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sometimes what makes something relevant is how it's different how it changes and you have to constantly shift the balance between those because that's what reality he is doing that's what reality is doing what's another one well another type of
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one I think there are many of these right and they are not going to act in an arbitrary fashion because they are all regulated by the trade off normativity the opponent processing between efficiency and resiliency notice these are both what are called different
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cost functions they are dealing again with the bio economics how right how you're dealing with the cost of processing right so playing between the costs and benefits of these etc but you might also need to play between these
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alright so it's also possible that we have right what we call cognitive prioritization in which you have cost functions being played off against each other different right so here's a cost function here's a cost function they're playing so cost function one right and
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cost function two for playing off against each other and you may and you have to do you have to sort of decide here and this overlaps with what's called signal detection theory and other things I won't get into you have to be
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very flexible in how you gamble because you may decide right that you will try and sort of hedge your bets and activate as many functions as you can or you may try to go for the big thing and say no
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I'm going to give real a lot of priority to just this function of course you don't want that maximize you want flexible gambling sometimes you're focusing right sometimes you're diversifying you create a kind of integrative function all of this can be and if you
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check in the paper all of this can be represented mathematically once again I am NOT claiming this is exhaustive I'm claiming it's exemplary I think these are important I think scope and time right cost functions and prioritizing between cost functions I think it's it's
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very plausible that they are part and parcel of our cognitive processing what I want you to think about is I'm representing this abstractly think about the each one of these you know here's scope here's tempering and then of course
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there is right the prioritization that is playing between them I want to think it's the you think of this as a space and these functions because they are all being right governed regulated sorry regulated in this fashion relevance
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realization is always taking place in this space and at this moment it's got this particular value according to tempering and scope and prioritization and then it moves to this value and then to this value into this value and then
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to this value and then out to this value it's moving around in a state space that's what it is that's what's happening when you're doing relevance realization but although this is I represented how this is dynamic I haven't shown you how and why it would
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be developmental I'm going to do this with just one of these because I could teach an entire course just on relevance realization okay when you're doing data compression you're emphasizing how you can integrate information remember like the line of
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best fit you're emphasizing integration and because you're trying to pick up on what's invariant and of course that's going to be versus that's going to be verse differentiation now I think you can make a very clear argument that
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these map very well on to the two fundamental processes that are locked in opponent processing that pIJ one of the founding figures of developmental psychology said driving said drive development this is what prj called assimilation assimilation is you have a
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cognitive schema and what is a cognitive schema again it is a set of constraints and you have a cognitive schema right and what that set of constraints do is it makes you integrate it makes you treat the new information as the same as
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what you got you integrate it you assimilate it that's compression what's the opposite for Piaget well it's accommodation and that's why of course when people talk about exploratory emotions like awe they invoke accommodation as a Piaget ting principle
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because it opens you up what does it do it causes you to change your structure your schemas what why do we do this well because it's very efficient why do we have to do this because if we just
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pursue efficiency if we just assimilate our machinery gets brittle and distortive it has to go through accommodation and how straight introduce variation it has to rewire and restructure itself so that it can again respond to a more complex
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environment so not only is relevance realization inherently dynamic it is inherently developmental when a system is self-organizing there is no deep distinction between its function and its development it develops by functioning but by functioning it develops when a system is simultaneously
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integrating and differentiating it is complexify complexification a system is highly complex if it is both highly differentiated and highly integrated now why but if I'm highly differentiated I can do many different things but if I do many different things and I'm not highly
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integrated I will fly apart as a system so I need to be both highly differentiated so I can do many different things and highly integrated so I stay together as an integrated system as systems complexify they self transcend they go through qualitative
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development let me give you an analogy for this notice how I keep using biological analogies that is not a coincidence you started out life as a zygote a fertilized cell a singular cell the egg and the sperm your zygote
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initially all that happens is the cells just reproduce but then something very interesting starts to happen you get cellular differentiation some of the cells start to become lung cells some of them start to become I sell some of them
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start to become organ cells but they don't just differentiate they integrate they literally self organ eyes into a heart organ an i right you developed through a process at least biologically of biological complexification what does that give you
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that gives you emergent abilities you transcend yourself as a system when I was a zygote I could not vote I could not give this lecture I now have those functions in fact when I was a zygote I couldn't learn what I needed to learn in
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order to do this lecture I did not have that qualitative competence I did not have those functions but as a system complexified notice what I'm showing you as a system is going through relevance realization it is also complexified it
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is getting new emergent abilities of how we can interact with the environment and then extend that relevance realization into that emergent self transcendence if you're a relevant realizing thing you're inherently dynamical self-organizing autopoietic things which means you an
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inherently developmental thing which means you are an inherently self-transcending thing I want to make clear an argument that might well I want to respond to a potential argument that you might have was like well I get all of this but
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maybe relevance realization is a bunch of many different functions first of all I I'm not disagreeing with the idea that a lot of our intelligence is carried with heuristics and some of those are more special-purpose and some of the
Speaker A
more general-purpose and we need to learn how to trade off between them however I do want to claim that relevance realization is a unified phenomena and I'm going to do this in a two-part way the first is to first
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assert and then I will later substantiate that when we're talking about general intelligence in fact that's what this whole argument is bit we're talking about relevance realization now this goes to work I did with Leo Ferraro who was a psychometrist
Speaker A
somebody who actually does psychometric testing on people's intelligence and one of the things we know from Spearman way back in the 20s right is in he discovered what's called the general factor of intelligence sometimes called general intelligence and sometimes
Speaker A
there's a debate about whether we should identify those or not I'm not going to get into that right now right what Spearman found was right that how kids were doing in math was actually predictive of how they were doing in
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English and even how they were doing contrary to what our our culture says how they're doing in sports there's right how I'm doing in all these different tasks was how I did one a did an a was predictive at how I did in B
Speaker A
and vice-versa right this is a what's called a strong positive manifold there is this huge right inter predictability between how you do an all these very many different tasks that is your general intelligence many people would argue and I would
Speaker A
agree that this is the capacity that underwrites you being a general problem solver often when we're testing for intelligence were chest testing for therefore general intelligence I'll put the panel up as we go along oh just what Leo showed me we made a good argument is
Speaker A
that the things we study when we're studying right like when you're doing something like the Wechsler test or something that psychometric test right so you will test things like a comprehension the comprehension subset and of course you'll concentrate on
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similarity judgments right you'll also do what right the similarities of pictures other people have talked about your ability to adapt to unpredictable environments there's other work by governments and in others the ability to deal with complex workplaces what I call
Speaker A
G loaded that require a lot now when you trace these back right what this points to is your capacity for problem formulation the similarity judgments in what are called the adduction abilities the ability to draw out latent patterns
Speaker A
right this of course is similarity judgment this is a similarity judgment and pattern finding pattern finding right the complex you know this is basically dealing with very ill-defined dynamic situations the thing is right and adapting to complex environments
Speaker A
so this is general intelligence this is how we generally tempted to general intelligence we test people across all these different kinds of tasks and what we find is a strong predictive manifold there's some general ability behind us but notice these problem formulation
Speaker A
similarity simply you know similarity judgments pattern finding dealing with ill-defined dynamic situations adapting to complex environments that's exactly all the places that I've argued we need relevance realization relevance realization what I would argue is actually the underlying ability of your
Speaker A
general intelligence that's how we test for it this is the things that came out right and you can even see you know comprehension aspects in here all kinds of things so relevance realization I think is a very good candidate for your
Speaker A
general intelligence and so insofar as general intelligence is a unified thing and we have this is this look this is one of the most robust findings in psychology it's it just keeps happening though there's always debates about it
Speaker A
ba bla bla ba and people don't like the psychometric measures of intelligence and I think that's because they're confusing intelligence and relevance and wisdom we'll come back to that they the thing is this is a very powerful measure
Speaker A
if I it it's reliable this is from the 1920s then this keeps getting replicated this is not going through a replication crisis and if I had to know one thing about you in order to try and predict you the one thing that outperforms
Speaker A
anything else is knowing this this will tell me how you do in school how you do in your relationships how well you treat your health how long right you're likely to live whether or not you're going to get a job this crushes how well you do
Speaker A
in a in an interview in predicting whether or not you'll get and keep a job is this the only thing that's predictive of you know and I'm going to argue later that intelligence and rationality are not identical but is this a real thing
Speaker A
and is it a unified thing yes and can we make sense of the this as relevance realization yes is well of its realization there for a unified thing yes so relevance realization is your general intelligence and what I'm arguing at
Speaker A
least that's what I'm arguing and that your general intelligence can be understood as a dynamic developmental evolution of your sensory motor fitted miss is regulated by virtual engines that are ultimately regulated by the logistical normativity of the opponent processing
Speaker A
between efficiency and resiliency so we've already integrated a lot of psychology and the beginnings of biology in neuroscience I want to next and we've definitely integrated with some of the best insights from artificial intelligence what I want to do next time
Speaker A
to finish off this argument is to show how this might be realized in dynamical processes within the brain and how that is lining up with some of our cutting-edge ideas I'm spending so much time on this because this is the
Speaker A
linchpin argument of the cognitive science side of the whole series try to show you how everything feeds in to relevance realization if I can give you a good scientific explanation of this in terms of psychology artificial intelligence biology neuro scientific
Speaker A
processing then it is legitimate and plausible to say that I have a naturalistic explanation of that and if the history is and right pointing towards this what I'm going to then have the means to do is to argue how this and
Speaker A
we've already seen it how it's probably embedded in your procedural respectable participatory knowing it's embedded in your trans jected dynamical coupling to the environment and the affordance of the age and arena relationship the connectivity between mind and body the
Speaker A
connectivity between mind and world we've seen it central to your intelligence central to right your functionality of your consciousness this is going to allow me to explain so much we've already seen it as affording an account of why you're inherently
Speaker A
self-transcending we'll see that we can use this machinery to come up with an account of the relationship between intelligence rationality and wisdom we will be able to explain so much of what's at the center of human spirituality we will have a straw
Speaker A
plausibility argument for how we can integrate cognitive science and human spirituality in a way that may help us to powerfully address the meeting crisis thank you very much for your time and attention [Music] you you [Music]
Topics:relevance realizationembodied cognitionembedded cognitionJohn Vervaekebioeconomyopponent processinglogistical normsautopoiesisgeneral intelligencemeaning crisis
