Ep. 29 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Getting to the Depths of Relevance Realization

Episode 29 of John Vervaeke's series reviews arguments for relevance realization's centrality to cognition, then begins a naturalistic account linking it to meaning, agency, and spirituality.

Key Takeaways

Relevance realization is a unifying construct across problem-solving, categorization, communication, agency, and consciousness.
Intelligence can be understood through the capacity to frame problems and filter relevant information.
Meaning and the sense of connectedness may be explained through relevance realization.
Explicit rule-following depends on tacit, embodied skills of relevance judgment.
Existing theories of relevance are insufficient, motivating a new naturalistic account.

What the video covers

Recaps convergence arguments showing relevance realization is central to problem-solving, categorization, communication, and robotics.
Problem-solving faces combinatorial explosion, requiring right problem framing to zero in on relevant information.
Ill-defined problems require reformulation, linking to insight and shifts in what is considered relevant.
Categorization depends on psychological similarity, which requires judging relevant features and aspects, not purely logical similarity.
Communication relies on conversational implicature, with Grice's maxims collapsing into the maxim of relevance.
Robotics illustrates the proliferation of side effects: agents must zoom in on relevant side effects to avoid paralysis or stupidity.
Consciousness and working memory function as relevance filters, and working memory capacity correlates with general intelligence.
Relevance is proposed as the sense of connectedness underlying meaning, linking it to the three orders of coherence, significance, and purpose.
The episode critiques existing theories of relevance, arguing they are inadequate, and begins outlining a scientific explanation.
Rule-following is grounded in tacit skills of judgment and salience landscaping rather than explicit propositions alone.

Chapters

What is relevance realization according to this episode?

Relevance realization is the cognitive process by which an agent determines what information is significant and worth attending to, especially in complex, ill-defined situations. The episode argues it underlies problem-solving, categorization, communication, and consciousness.

Why does the lecture consider combinatorial explosion a problem?

Combinatorial explosion occurs because the number of possible options grows exponentially, making exhaustive search impossible. Proper problem framing lets an agent avoid this by focusing only on relevant information.

How does the episode connect relevance to meaning?

The speaker suggests relevance is the sense of connectedness that the meaning crisis lost, linking it to the three orders of coherence, significance, and purpose. This positions relevance as a possible naturalistic explanation of meaning.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening from the meaning crisis this is episode 29 so last time I went through with you a series of arguments trying to show you the centrality of the issue of relevance realization I want to review that with

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you and then try and begin an account of how we might come up with a naturalistic explanation of relevance realization and then build that into an overall a plausibility argument about using that notion of relevance realization to explain many of the features that we

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consider central to human spirituality meaning making self transcendence altered states of consciousness and wisdom before I begin that I want to remind everybody of how much the work I'm talking about now has been done in collaboration with other people

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especially the the work with Tim little clap and break Richards in 2012 the article we published the journal of logic and computation with Leo Ferraro in 2013 some current work with Leo Ferraro Anderson Todd Richard woo current work I'm doing with

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Christopher mah stoah Pietro and some past work with Zachary Irving and Leo Ferraro on the nature of intelligence so you want to take a look at what we did last time we did very quickly to remind you a series of arguments a series of

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arguments that pointed towards how central relevance realization is we did arguments around the nature of problem-solving and remember we saw the idea there of the search space as proposed by Newland Simon and we faced a couple of important issues there we

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faced issues of combinatorial explosion and what we need is right problem formulation or problem framing that allows us to avoid combinatorial explosion by zeroing in on relevant information I also propose to you and I'll return to this later that

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problem-solving is our best way of trying to understand what we mean by intelligence your capacity as being a general problem solver also we noted the problem of ill-defined it nests very often a problem formulation is needed in order to determine what the relevant

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information is and what the relevant structure of that information is so that again points us into relevance these two together also pointed towards a phenomena we have we have already talked about insight and the fact that you often have to solve a problem by

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altering your problem formulation and re-determine in what you consider relevant we then took a look at categorization I'll come back to this again in another way a little bit later in this lecture but we took a look at

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how categorization ultimately depends on judgments of similarity and we can get into an equivocation there we can equivocate between purely logical or purely logical notion of similarity in which case any two objects are indefinitely similar or dissimilar to

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each other and if we mean instead of logical similarity which would not help us to categorize psychological similarity then we're talking about making a comparison of two things in terms of the relevant features of comparison the relevant aspects so we're

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in two relevance and we're also introducing an important idea I want you to remember this notion of an aspect a set of relevant features that cohere together and are relevant to us especially in projects like categorization all right so we keep getting this of

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course I mean if you remember doing good I I do a convergence argument to get a trustworthy problem or construct and then I basically do a divergence argument to show how it has the potential to explain many important

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phenomena and establish a relevant balance between them and so that's what I'm building you right now we're on this side how all these things are converging on relevance realization and then as I said can we use this to explain many of

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the features that seem to be central to human spirituality meaning making self transcendence altered states of consciousness and wisdom we then took a look at communication I don't know which order we I think we did we might have

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done the robot first doesn't matter we did communication and we saw the issue here there is the fact that you have to convey more than you can say and then that led us into the work of grace and a

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series of Maxim's that make conversational implicature possible and that got us into write that all of the Maxim's collapsed to the rack maximum of being relevant we then did or we can now remember are doing the issue of robotics

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the actual interaction with the environment here's the idea of being an agent and we saw the robot was trying to pull the battery that also that's on the wagon and that wagon also has the bomb on it and what we saw is the problem of

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the proliferation of side effects you can't ignore all side effects or you'll be grotesquely stupid you can't check all side effects or you'll be crow testicle incapable and so therefore you have to zoom in on their relevant side

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effects so again and again and again everything is centering on this I want you to I want you to also now remember a couple of other things from previous lectures how we talked about the convergence argument this is an

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independent convergence argument when we talked about consciousness not the nature of consciousness but the function of consciousness all the convergence arguments that what's going on in consciousness is doing relevance realization especially in complex ill-defined situations in which our

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agency is directly involved right so consciousness seems to be bound up with relevance realization and we also talked and how this overlaps with how working memory the work of Lin hasher the job of working memory is to be a relevance

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filter and to to screen off your relevant information and allow into processing deeper processing more relevant information and I also pointed out I want you to see how all these connections are forming that there's deep connections between working memory

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and your measures of your general intelligence how intelligent you are so we see that we've getting actually a very powerful convergence argument towards the centrality of relevance realization as how do I want to say this as constitutive as constitutive of your

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intelligence your cognitive agency has significantly contributory towards your existence as a conscious being and then I also suggested to you last time that this notion of relevance realization and this is what we're going to develop today may be a way of explaining that

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sort of fundamental aspect of meaning the kind of meaning that was lost in the meaning crisis that's expressed in the three orders that in which we're pursuing coherence and significance and purpose that that sense of connectedness connectedness and I'm going to try to

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argue that as we understand what relevance is that relevance is exactly that sense of connectedness so there will be deep connections between meaning and relevance and of course we this will make sense right see what I'm arguing here there's deep connections between

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meaning and all this relevance right there's deep connections between relevance and agency that's the whole point about the robot and communicating right and there's going to be deep connections we've already seen between of course meaning an agency that one of

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the whole things about agency is its relationship to the arena the agent of arena relationship and how that grounds how that's the meta meaning grounding of all our other more specific meaning making projects alright so I hope I've

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made at least a good convergence argument for you that many things converge upon many things that were interested in many central defining features of intelligence and agency and aspects of the functionality of our consciousness everything is sort of

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converging on this relevant realization what I want to try and show you now is how you might move towards and this has been sort of the core of my I guess you'd call it my scientific work how you

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move towards trying to offer a scientific explanation of relevance mm-hmm and what that would look like in the difficulties you face doing so I also want to try and argue that there's good reason to believe that we're talking about a unified phenomena a

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unified thing here relevance that this isn't just a family resemblance term for a lot of disconnected things that there's reason to believe this is a central thing let's start with trying to offer theories of relevance and there are good ones out there there's the work

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of Sperber and Wilson and others and I will refer to some of that work as we move along but let's let's let's try and work towards sort of a bit of a at the meta level what do we need for a good

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theory of relevance to do what kind of mistakes do we need to avoid when we're trying to explain relevance the main mistake that I want to point to is a mistake in which we are arguing in a sir

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call if you remember this is part of what goes into things like the homunculus II remember when I try to explain vision with the little man in my head having vision I don't want to use whatever I'm using let's put it this way

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whatever process or entity that I'm trying to use to explain relevance should not itself require relevance but what I mean by that but if I have something X and I'm using that to explain relevance what this cannot this

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cannot itself cannot presuppose relevance for its function because if it does that I'm ultimately arguing it in a circle I have to find processes that are themselves not processes that realize relevance if I'm going to explain though I'm ever going to explain in terms of

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those processes relevance realization itself another way of putting this is I ultimately want to explain intelligence in terms of processes that are not themselves intelligent because if I don't if I'm always playing explaining intelligence in terms of processes that

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are themselves intelligent that is no different than the homunculus fallacy of explaining vision in terms of internal processes that are themselves visual processes okay so that's going to be a guiding methodological principle all right now that turns out to be very

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powerful and as many people have pointed out Fodor famously has pointed out in repeated places it's actually very difficult to explain relevance without presupposing relevance in the machinery that you're using to explain it let's take a look at some candidates we might

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think that we could explain relevance in terms of how we use representations this is very powerful way we think about the mind that there are things in the mind ideas pictures right that stand for represent the world in some

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way we might think that perhaps it's much more that relevance is a function of computation computational processes or we might think that we explain relevance in terms of what's called modularity that there's a specific area of the brain dedicated to processing

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relevance I want to take a look at each one of those and I want to try and argue as to why I think they're inadequate and what that helps us to see and what I want you to see is that and I'll try to

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show this along the way that as we come if if and I'm trying to make it more than an F but if relevance realization is so central to our our meaning making our cognition and our consciousness and our self transcendence etc right as we

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learn about how we have to best try to explain or understand it we should garner lessons about how to best think about and reflect upon human spirituality at least in terms in the terms that I have defined it for us okay

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so representation now this is just a terrifically hot issue both in in terms of interest and controversy within cognitive science in general and I'm not going to try and completely decide this issue right now although I think I'll say things that are pertinent

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to that debate but let's take it that what we mean by a representation is something as I said some mental entity that stands for refers directs us towards an object in the world that's all I need whatever else representations

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are in all that controversy that's all I need for the point I want to make because I want to show you something very important about a representation and I mentioned it a few it's ago and this is a point that John

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Searle has famously made representations are a spec xual okay so I hold this thing up and you form a representation of it right remember all the things we talked about when we talked about categorization we talked about similarity etc so when you form a

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representation you do not write grasped all of the true properties of this object because right all of the true properties the number is combinatorial explosive you've already seen that so out of all of the properties right you just select some subset and what subset

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do you pick well you pick a subset that is here it comes relevant to you are they just a feature list no we've already seen that a long time ago they are right to have a structural functional organization they're made

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relevant to each other so here's what we've got a set of features that are relevant to each other and then a set of features that set of features that have been structurally functional organized so that they have Co relevance is then

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relevant to me that's what an aspect is right so whenever I'm representing anything this is a marker however I could change its aspect you a Latino weapon alright and we do that all the time in fact one of the ways we check

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the people's creativity is to do exactly that we will give some object and say how many different ways can you use it how many different ways can you categorize it how namely how many different ways how flexible are you in getting different

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aspects from the same object so representations are inherently a spectra but notice the language I was using zeroing on relevant properties right out of all the possible properties you're structuring them as how they're Co relevant to each other and then how that

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right structural functional organization is relevant to you a spec shoe allottee deeply presuppose is maybe that's an incorrect arrow let's just put presupposes deeply presupposes the ability to zero in on relevance do relevance realization that means that representations can't

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ultimately be that generators of the creators of relevance they can't be the causal origin of relevance now can our representations feed back and alter what we find relevant of course nobody's denying that that's of course why we use

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representations but what they can't serve they can't serve as the ontological basis the the the stuff in reality that we're trying to use to generate a non-circular encounter relevance realization now that's going to tell us something really interesting

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it's going to tell us that if this meaning and this spirituality is what is bound to relevance realization that the place to look for it is not going to be found at the level of our representational cognition the level of

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our cognition that is using ideas propositions pictures etc once again I am NOT saying that those things do not contribute or effect what we consider relevant what I'm saying is they are not the source the locus of how we do

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relevance realization I want to show you how this cashes out even in an empirical manner this goes to some really interesting work done by Zen and politian right on what's called multiple object tracking and multiple object tracking is really interesting so

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basically what you do is you give people like a bunch of objects on a computer screen let's say I have X's and O's and they'll be different colors they can be different shapes right all kinds of things like this and what I do is I have

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the objects move around and let's say this was the red X and then after it moves around I ask you where's the red X and you have to point I may ask you a where's the green circle where's the blue square you get the task

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now what's interesting is how much you can do this you can track about eight that's on average objects reliably what's really interesting about them what's really interesting is the more objects you track the less and less features you can attribute to each

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object what do I mean by that suppose I'm tracking that that's six but suppose it was eight I was tracking the red X and I have to keep it right if right I can I can after lots of

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movements say oh it's there now it started there and it's there now what I won't notice during that is that the red X has become for example a Blue Square so all of its content properties get lost all I'm tracking and I need you to

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remember this is what you might call the hereness where is it and the nowness of it where is it it's here now it's here now it's here now it's here now it's here now it's here now everything else

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its shape its color its categorical identity all gets lost so he calls this he calls this fin sting this stands for fingers of instantiation his basic idea is like this your mind has something equivalent to putting your finger on

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something I don't I don't know what this is suppose I didn't know what it was I put my finger on it I don't know what it is I just know it's here nowness it's here now it's here now here and now our

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indexical x' these are terms that just refer to the context of the speaker so here now right and it moves around and my mind can keep in touch notice my language in touch and contact in touch with write something but that's all

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that's doing it's just tracking that here nowness well that's really cool now what why do we have this ability well first of all I'm going to propose a way of thinking about this he doesn't this language but I think it'll be

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helpful I don't think it's in any way inconsistent disability to do this is like salience tagging okay when I touch this I'm making this here nowness salient to me this here now is salient image not the bottle not even the flat

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surface because remember I lose all of those particular qualities all I have is the here nowness is salient to me right and we do this with demonstrative terms like this notice the word this is not like the word cat cat refers you to a

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specific thing we add meow the animal that pretends to love you actually I know some cats now that I'm actually convinced you know I do love me so I have to I have to amend my usual comments about cats right but this isn't

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like cat this can go watch this this this this okay it doesn't refer to a specific thing it picks out it does assailing it makes something it doesn't make something it just makes some hearing this and nowness sorry for

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talking about this but this is how we have to talk salient to you now I want you to pick up on something I just said with this terms like this and here and now but especially this these are linguistic

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terms and they do what's called demonstrative reference they do not refer to a particular thing they do not refer to the bottle or to the marker or to wall but this this this this okay all they do is salience tagging this and

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that now why is that important well politian wants you to understand fin sting it fin sting is obviously not a linguistic phenomena I'm not speaking in my head when I'm doing this in fact if you try and speak in your head you're

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gonna mess yourself up so he's demonstrative reference as a linguistic analogy for something you enact so I'm going to try and draw that out by calling it inactive demonstrative reference rather than linguistic demonstrative reference so inactive demonstrative reference which I've tried

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to explain to you with this notion of the salience tagging of hereness and nowness why is this so important well here's where the analogy can help me right I need demonstrative reference I need inactive demonstrative reference a before I can do any categorization

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look if I'm going to categorize things I need to mentally group them together this is mental grouping this this this this this that's what mental grouping is mental grouping is two salient stagg things right and bound them together in

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a salience tagging so what am i showing you what am i trying to show you is any categorization you have depends on inactive demonstrative reference an inactive demonstrative reference is only about salience and here nowness you see all of your concepts are categorical

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that whole conceptual representational categorical pictorial all of that depends on this but this depends on something that is pre categorical pre-conceptual and you say but you're using concepts to talk about it don't confuse properties of the theory with

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properties of what the theory is about of course I have to use words to talk about it I have to use words to talk about Adams that doesn't mean that atoms are made out of words or dependent on words I have to use words to talk

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about anything and I don't want properties of my theory and properties of the phenomena of the theory to be confused I want a theory about for example vagueness to itself be clear I want a theory about illogicality to itself be

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logical I want a theory about rationale irrationality to itself be rational do not confuse properties of the theory with properties of the thing being referred to yes I have to use language and concepts to talk about it but that

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does not mean that the thing itself is made out of or dependent on concepts and categorization I've given you an argument and I've given you empirical evidence towards this claim and they massively right they massively converge together now notice this is a

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fundamental connectedness to reality you're getting with the fence thing with the inactive demonstrative reference when you're getting that initial salience tagging because it's like the mind being in contact with the world that's why politian even uses the metaphor of contact

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all right so the representational level is not going to give us what we're looking for in fact we need to think about ways in which we need to pursue something that is sub representational so this is in the cog side we would call

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that the the representational level is called a semantic level because this is the level at which words have meaning or by analogy at which representations have representational meaning so we have to go sub semantic we have to go sub

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categorical we have to go sub conceptual now is that such up as our claim we saw in higher states of consciousness that people claim to have the most profound sense of meaning and it is precisely ineffable they reliably across

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traditions across historical contexts claim that it is not conceptual it can't be grasped categorically and they use the language of hereness and nowness to describe it it's fully present it's like you know eternal hereness and nowness so this is actually not a bizarre claim to

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consider now it's difficult for us because we habitually identify with that's our ego structure I would say tends to we tend to identify with the way in which we are running representations in our mind in her pictures in her speech etc alright so

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perhaps we could consider the computational level as the level in which we could explain relevance realization because we have found that the semantic level of representations is inadequate this is often called the syntactic level semantics is about how your terms refer

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to the world syntax is about how your various terms have to be coordinated together within some system so for example you know that there's our grammatical rules in English about how you can put certain things together that's the syntax so in computation what

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we're usually doing is we're thinking about the relationship between our symbols I don't mean symbol in the religious sense I just mean the things that we're using within for example a code in program or something like that we're talking about the relationship

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between them now there's been a lot of issues around this and I want to point to a core argument by one of the strongest defenders one of the originators and defenders of the computational theory of mind so this is

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a tradition and you remember it goes back to Hobbes of the idea that cognition is computation that right we talked about this the manipulation of an abstract symbolic symbolic system like generally logical or mathematical symbolic system the manipulation of that

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is what it is to think to think is to do computation now Fodor has pointed out and I think these are arguments in many ways analogous to to Vic in Stine and you have to remember he's a defender of

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the computational theory of mind he's one of he's considered one of its founding figures within cognitive science so and he criticizes it we have to first of all do two things he died not that long ago but we have to

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congratulate him on his honesty as a researcher his the capacity for self-criticism is for me a you know a demonstrative measure of how good a researcher is if you finding people that are incapable of self-criticism in their intellectual pursuits then I suggest you

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get quite a wide berth in how much confidence you place in their work so the fact that he does that is important and the fact that he launches into that self-criticism means he's not being driven he's not being motivated by

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his own particular theoretical bias all that being said what's the nature of the criticism well the nature of the criticism is Right you have to make a distinction ultimately you have to make a distinction between implication right and inference people sometimes confuse

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these together so implication is a logical relationship based on syntactic structures and rules a logical relationship between propositions so here's an abstract symbol so if I have a and B and I know that's true I can conclude that B is true I don't know

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what B is C I don't have any semantic content it is purely syntactic but I can derive that now when we try to think about implications what we have to remember is an inference is when you are actually using an implication relation

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to change your beliefs okay the thing about beliefs is that they have content right so when I'm making an inference I'm not just making an implication I'm using implication relations in order to alter belief changing belief okay you

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say well why does that matter because changing believes to us brings up the important issue right away right the important issue right away is what beliefs should I be changing what beliefs should I be changing let me try

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and show you what I mean any proposition technically it's defined in terms of its logical syntactic structure by all of its implication relations and depends on I mean you know just can get we can get very technical here about where whether or not negation

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and the implication or identical blah blah blah I'm just going to speak very broadly here because that's all I need so a proposition it's logical its computational identity is defined by all of its implication relations to other propositions so for example part of the

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identity of this a and B is that it implies B it also right implies a all kinds of things now the issue that we have and this is a point that was made also independently by chair niak is the

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number of implications logical relations between any proposition and all the other propositions is combinatorially explosive and combinatorially explosive you cannot ever make use of and we talked about this in one how you can't be comprehensively logical right you

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can't make use of all of the implications of any proposition ever you cannot be completely logical ever what you do is out of all of the implications you decide which one of the ones you select right which one of the ones are

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going to be used in an inference right folder and charniak both independently talked about this as a kind of cognitive commitment which of the implications are you going to commit to and this matters to you it matters to you because

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commitment is an act that makes use of your precious and limited resources attention memory time metabolic energy you cannot afford you cannot afford to spend them on all possible ones you cannot even afford to spend them on inferences that are not and here's what

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you knew I was going to say relevant to the context which beliefs do I need to change and that can mean strengthened by the way which beliefs do I need to change with right in this context so notice what out of all of these what am

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i doing I'm choosing and this is what charity Act specifically argues this is his term not mine right what makes according to charity act somebody rational will come back to whether or not this is a good definition of rationality but it's the least what

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makes you intelligent as a cognitive agent is right that you select out of all the possible implications the relevant ones because those ones are relevant to the context because they're going to affect the beliefs that you've already done relevance realization on as

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applying to this situation or representing the situation well so inference massively presupposes relevance realization now you may think well but I can get around that because logic you know logic isn't just implications it's the rules governing the implications and maybe all I need to

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talk about is the rules and then here's the argument that comes from Vic and Stein but I think ultimately goes back to Aristotle is how rules work right and this is an argument that Brown and others have made

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made very very clear rules rules are obviously there propositions they're not just propositions they're propositions that and this is perhaps while you're considering them propositions that tell you where to commit your resources now the problem with that is that of course every rule

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requires an interpretation every rule requires a specification in its application let's just use a moral rule because those are easy the easiest for people to have right a connection to I assume that many of you have this rule

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be kind which means in a situation right I will derive inferences and sorry I will use inferences to derive actions and changes of belief and those will fit together in a certain way that will result in me achieving kindness towards

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others so I have this rule it tells me which implications to pay attention to which beliefs I should make salient etc now what's the issue about this well think about being kind what do I mean by this problem of

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the interpret interpret interpretation by specifying the application of the rule the way I'm kind to my son Spencer what it means to be kind to Spencer should I use that in how I'm trying to be kind to my partner Sora no that would

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be inappropriate it could be condescending could be patronizing now I want to be kind of both of them in fact I love both of them deeply but I'm not gonna be kind to them in the same way most of the time

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well what about how I'm kind to a friend should I be kind to a friend the way I'm trying to either Spencer or Sarah that doesn't seem right either what about how I'm kind to my student is should I should that be like I'm kind to

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a friend know how I'm kind to Spencer no I'm to saw know what about how I'm kind to a stranger should be like I'm kind to my students no how about when I'm kind of myself should it be like any of those well so

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here's the thing and this is bound up with the fact that we have to always convey more that we can say you can probably see that I cannot specify all the conditions of application of the rule in the rule because the rule always

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has to convey much more than it can say if I try to specify it in the rule the rule that we become write unwieldy because it will become combo Lee Hamid Oh totally explosively large it will it will no longer serve well you say well

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what you might do is put in a rule on how to use this rule a higher order rule that's not going to work because the same problem is going to happen here and this was victim Stein's point you can't

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ultimately get an explanation of how you follow rules in terms of just the rules your ability to follow rules is actually based on something else Brown calls this in his book on rationality in 1988 the skill of judgment notice what we've

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moved here we've moved out of the propositional language right of a rule and we've moved into the procedural language of a skill the skill knowing how to judge what is relevant pertinent in this situation now again notice how

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we can't even maintain the two things that are supposed to be central to computation we can't use inference because it presupposes relevance we can't use rules because what is this procedural skill of being able to determine what's appropriate or

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what fits in the context what fits the people or the situation what fits the problem or task at hand well that's the skill of relevance realization so we're seeing that the computational level isn't going to do it for us I want to

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stop here before we go code to this modularity issue and point out something really interesting notice what we got with Fodor and with Vic and Cheyenne and like I said I think this ultimately goes back to Aristotle right notice how the

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propositional and this was one of the concerns famous arguments right ultimately depends on the procedural one of my favorite quotes from Victor 9 is exactly what this he said even if lions could talk we would not understand them

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even if they could use all of our words we would not understand them because their skills of what is relevant or important or central to them would be are very different from ours he called this a form of life their form of life

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that the way they exercise across many contexts the skill of doing judgments of what's relevant what's salient and important to them is fundamentally different from ours because they're cats rather than humans and therefore even if they spoke we

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would not understand them so we see that the propositional actually depends on the procedural but notice and this is really important if I'm exercising a skill so it's not something I've got to throw this or you know do a martial art

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block or something right that depends on what's called situational awareness if I'm a good martial artist I don't just have my skills and just apply them mechanically it's a great thing if you spar with somebody that's fighting mechanically because they don't have

Speaker A

situational awareness now what is situational awareness right when I'm exercising a skill it depends on my situational awareness what is situational awareness well you know what it is we've already talked about it it's your perspective all knowing it's your ability

Speaker A

ooh salience landscaping its ability to foreground background right formulate the problem while it's all that perspectival stuff so my situational awareness is how is my salience landscaping for grounding what's most right relevant to the task how its how is it is it and is it back

Speaker A

rounding what's irrelevant how is it's adjusting as the situation is changing so that the way I'm applying my skill is more adaptive and more fitted to the situation so your procedural knowing depends on your perspective oh well you

Speaker A

know what I'm gonna go with this right your perspective of knowing ultimately depends on how well the agent and arena fit together and generate affordances of action and affordances of at of an intelligibility if the the agent and the

Speaker A

arena need to be in a conformity relationship they need to be well fitted together you've seen lots of arguments to this in order for my salience landscaping to function appropriately so the perspectival ultimately depends on the participatory now of course it goes

Speaker A

this way right they they affect each other in multiple interactions so I was not originally drawing the arrow of causal interaction I just did that but what I was trying to draw originally was the arrow of dependence asymmetric

Speaker A

dependence this depends on this and this depends on this and this ultimately depends on this so we're getting a lot about how we should think about relevance realization where we should look for it and notice it's starting to

Speaker A

give us a way of connecting and thinking about the four kinds of knowing what about modularity what about modularity well the idea would be something like this right and and to be fair this comes up a lot the idea you know here's the mind or

Speaker A

the brain right here's something like here's the central executive or something like that it's weird we use a business term for an aspect of our cognition this is used in psychology and the idea is that central executive is

Speaker A

making all kinds of important decisions well maybe the central executive is responsible for relevance realization and and and and a lot of people and I know this because I interact with psychologists there so oh yeah that's it that's the answer well it's not an

Speaker A

answer it's not an answer at all because if it's right it's ridiculously homunculus what does the central executive have to possess inside the central executive is a capacity for relevance realization I haven't explained it I've just pointed to a

Speaker A

place the problem is you shouldn't okay so first of all I haven't explained it it's a marketer and secondly you shouldn't point to a place look relevance realization can't be in any one place it has to simultaneously you

Speaker A

know this we've talked about this with how attention works remember you know that you're always going from feature to Gestalt and from Gestalt to feature attention has to be moving out towards the gestalt and down to the features

Speaker A

relevance realization has to be happening both at the feature level and the Gestalt level in an highly integrated interactive fashion you can't point to one place and say that's what relevance realization is going on because relevance realization has to be

Speaker A

happening at multiple levels of cognition in a simultaneous self-organizing fashion that's why it it it can lead to insight and as I said pointing to any one thing and then labeling it is not an explanation it is a homunculus right it's a home

Speaker A

ocular diversion that's all it is okay let's try and draw this all together what are we learning well I'm trying to show you we're already learning something very interesting about meaning-making but we're learning what we need the kinds of properties and processes we

Speaker A

need in order to explain relevance realization first of all our account of relevance realization and bear with me on this because there's an important way in which I'm going to modify this right but are an account irrelevant realization has to be completely

Speaker A

internal now what do I mean by that it has to work in terms of goals that are at least initially are internal to the brain and emerge developmentally from it why look any goal in which that's in which the brain is representing or

Speaker A

referring to something in the world can't be the place where we can generate an explanation of relevance because insofar as I'm representing a goal to myself I've already got the capacity for relevance realization the goals that are the originating source of relevance

Speaker A

realization have to be internal to the relevance realization process now what does that mean the goals have to be goals that are constitutive what a constitutive goals constitutive goals are goals that a system or process have that help to constitute it for being

Speaker A

what it is and this is especially the case for autopoietic systems we've talked about this living things are not only self-organizing living things are self organized because they have the constitutive goal of preserving their own self-organization to be alive is to

Speaker A

have maybe even better to be the goal of preserving the self-organization that is giving rise to you it's a constitutive goal autopoietic things are self-organized such that they can protect and promote their constituted to protect and promote their

Speaker A

own self-organization which means we should see that there's going to be a deep connection between your ability to do relevance realization and being an autopoietic thing because relevance realization ultimately has to work in terms of autopoietic systems systems

Speaker A

that have goals that are completely internal in the constitutive sense now that's important because that means there's going to be a deep connection between the doing relevance realization and being a living thing next so when I say internal I mean Otto poetically

Speaker A

internal relevance theory of relevance realization has to talk in terms of processes that are scale invariant relevance realization has to act simultaneously at multiple levels local and global featural digital and it has to do it in a self-organizing fashion

Speaker A

such that it is capable of insight self correction and that means of course and that ties in again with being autopoietic that the relevance realization process has to be fundamentally self-organizing in nature okay now we hit a problem here and it's

Speaker A

a problem that might derail the whole project and might make it might make it sound like the attempt to give a scientific explanation of relevance relevance realization is impossible now notice I've been sort of playing between those and treating them as synonymous a

Speaker A

theory of relevance and a theory of relevance realization that's ultimately because I've been dodging an issue because I'm gonna argue can't identify them because here is what I want to argue or at least I'm going to state what the argument is going to be and

Speaker A

then we're going to pick it up in the next video I'm gonna argue that we cannot have a scientific theory of relevance we cannot have a scientific theory of relevance I'm going to try and argue that that tells us something very

Speaker A

deep about the nature of relevance and therefore something deep about the nature of meaning and our attempts to explain articulate and celebrate our meaning-making capacities but I'm going to ultimately argue that that is no reason for despair as what I'm going to

Speaker A

argue is that the fact that we don't have a theory of relevance doesn't preclude us from having a theory of relevance realization in fact it will give us a good understanding of what a theory of relevance realization is and

Speaker A

that will help us because we were we will realize pun intended that all we ever needed was a theory of relevance realization thank you very much for your time and attention [Music] you you

Topics:relevance realizationmeaning crisisJohn Vervaekecognitive sciencecombinatorial explosionworking memorysalience landscapingconversational implicatureintelligenceconsciousness

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