Hi John and all, I don't understand how specialization gives resiliency and generalization gives efficiency. It seems like the exact opposite. A hammer is not resilient, but hands are. Tom Hanks would not have survived in Castaway with hammer hands, because they're less resilient. But he'd be a horrible carpenter without a hammer, because they're efficient. Am I missing something?

@cameronhashemi569

2 жыл бұрын

BTW this tradeoff is amazing to know and this video provided a great insight there, thank you.

@johnvervaeke

2 жыл бұрын

Hi Cameron. Yes you have put your finger on something important and a way in which I am revising the theory. From an internal metabolic perspective, which is where we start with autopoiesis, the general function is more efficient because it gives the most overall reward for metabolic expenditures, that is, best cognitive profit. However, having specialized units, which cost more to metabolically carry and maintain, nevertheless introduces variation and increase cognitive evolvability. Think of those two as the cognitive genotype. . In the world being a general purpose machine makes you able to survive in many contexts and therefore phenotypically more resilient. Similarly within their niche of application special purpose machinery makes you locally efficient. I am sorry that the video argument was not clear because I had not clearly pulled this levels apart. I had reduced biological to metabolic and not extended it properly to behaviour. I hope this helps.

@cameronhashemi569

2 жыл бұрын

@@johnvervaeke thank you, I think I see it better now. Are we assuming that the choice is between "one general purpose mechanism" VS "many single purpose mechanisms" where the *overall* functionality is always the same between them? In that case, since there's nothing "missing" from the "many-tooled toolbox", then life-or-death resiliency isn't as much of an issue. It's just about one tool vs many, the one being "lighter" and the many being "heavier" but more competent on the whole. Am I understanding that right? Thanks again

@cameronhashemi569

2 жыл бұрын

In episode 31, you mention that the toolbox approach is more resilient because "you may have a tool that the general purpose approach can't handle". But this seems like it could easily swing the other way, where you are missing a tool in the toolbox that the general purpose tool *can* handle. So the presupposition on "functional coverage" is still unclear to me.

@KalebPeters99

2 жыл бұрын

@@cameronhashemi569 I'm struggling a little here too. I keep thinking I've got it but something isn't quite clicking. You've perfectly described my point of contention

Dude... ONE series that touches on Jesus, Heidegger, AND Graph Theory while simultaneously exemplifying its own thesis?!? Let this go down in history as the moment KZread became self-aware.

@johnvervaeke

4 жыл бұрын

Stephen I wanted to thank you for your continual kind words and support.

@malcolm_ocean

6 ай бұрын

Ha, nice to see you commenting here Stephen, a year or two before we met. The social graph is endensifying itself, self-organ-izing. Small world indeed.

An intellectual tour de force!

SMALL WORLD NETWORK FOR THE WIN!!!!

This is some of the most important work I've ever encountered in my entire life

If I could give a tip to anyone watching this. I highly recommend you watch this episode only if you have an extra hour to also watch the next (episode 33) one immediately after. I took a day or two between them and was completely lost haha. I had to come back to this one, watch it again, in order to watch episode 33 again. Took me over 4 hours instead of 2. Hope this helps someone :)

@ToriKo_

2 жыл бұрын

+

@dalibofurnell

Жыл бұрын

Thanks , much appreciated

@talonward2494

Жыл бұрын

I watch these at double speed while I'm eating because he never actually says anything at all. I always wonder if I've queued up the right next episode because he repeats himself SO much.

I keep coming back to 30-35 to water my salience landscape 😂

I thought John was smart until this episode. Now I get that he is a genius. Thoughts truly are things and it makes perfect sense to describe them in reference to computer networks. Infact all our technological infrastructure is our mental structure externalized. Trippy to meditate on.

I think programmers (like me) can really relate to the concepts of compression and particularization: When you start writing code for a complex system, you write some particular functions. Then, when your program complexifies, you need to refactor your code: creating classes and functions to hold related functions together and make those functions share their common functionality. (Compression) This will make a program more maintainable and efficient. After that, when you add new features to your program (particularization), the software becomes more and more complex, introducing the need for refactoring again. This whole cycle creates more and more complex software, in which you need to refactor to support the weight of the added complexity.

Finally a mention about Heidegger! He is one of the philosophers that fascinated me the most when I studied philosophy in uni. Your metatheory of cognition, John, is philosophically very solid and probably scientifically too, which the future may prove. Thank you so much for sharing these very profound and erudite lectures!

My profs at uni would only give a semester worth of lectures and my brain was full but the more John talks the more room there is for increasing amounts of data.

Wow! This series is excellent!!! It’s a shame you have so few views, but I will do my best to get the word out. THANK YOU

John, the first 25 episodes of the series have been life changing for me and my peers. But from ep 26 onward I’m missing the practical relevance. Hopefully it all ties back together somehow to a more practical approach as in the first half of the series. EDIT: Next episode (33) brings back the practicality of the series!!

I appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄 you’re really racking my brain with these last couple episodes lots of rewinding i love it!

back after a few weeks pause while walking 900km on the camino Norte. Good the be back. A bit tough to get into it in the beginning but then really found my curiosity here again! Thank you for your time John

Came here for the philosophy and spirituality… staying for the cog-sci content which is new territory for me... however, so much of the success, failure, and important decisions I have made in life are understood much more clearly through the perspective of RR.

I see similaritys with what John is doing here with science with spirituality and what Hegel did with philosophy and religion from Ep.24. Trying to use new language and perspectives to bolster old concepts. It also reminds me of the new thought movement, which provides a bunch of explanations (in a book ironically titled Science of the Mind) and ties them in with universal terms like here, now, and unity (or togetherness). Granted, John's approach is more true to traditional science. The bridge to reason and relevance realization is being built in my mind. I can not thank you enough John.

Thank You!

"Firing and Wiring, because they rhyme" made me laugh.

I apologize for the delay.

@mrugborg

4 жыл бұрын

John Vervaeke Love your style of teaching and the structural way in which you formulate a train of thought ! You should be on Joe Rogan Podcast for sure

@mrugborg

4 жыл бұрын

Call me Schibboleth Or just the conversation will be hell of a trip by itself

@sennewam

4 жыл бұрын

@Call me Schibboleth drugs confuse relevancy realization, and makes you susceptible to bullshit.

@raresmircea

4 жыл бұрын

@@sennewam :))

@mrugborg

4 жыл бұрын

Teo very insightful !

Thank you!

If anyone needs a transcript we've made them for this & all episodes here: www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-32-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-rr-in-the-brain-insight-and-consciousness/

the moment I turned my screen luminance to its max I immediately found this a lot more relevant and salient

Absolutely loving these last two lessons. I keep running the examples of MacGyver or Sherlock style mysteries or shows like House' - they are fun because they play with your Relevance Realization. The paperclip is now a lockpick, the mud on your shoes allows us to infer X - noticing the small details of things or the obscure uses of the items in the world around us. Native cultures move through the world differently than we do because their brain has been wired to find different things relevant from ours. Thank you for the excellent content. A true gem.

@impancaking

4 жыл бұрын

Arguably native peoples brain hemespheres function more fluidly than our own, with right hemesphere dominance (being able to see the relatedness between things and their potencial function rather than what they *are* which restricts and solidifies function).

Good in blue, John 😊

What a cliff hanger! I do not want to wait another week for the next lecture. P.s. loving the conversations with Paul Vanderklay. Thanks for the great content.

@MattWilkinsonwilkoteq

2 жыл бұрын

I think I just had my frame on life smashed or my sand heap collapsed. I realise I have been going through life trying to get an understanding of reality through the subjective fog of people around me. But now I realise it is better to frame life as if there is no ultimate reality. Everyone has their own take on reality and the goal is to understand their frame. Everything is a dynamic dance in which I do have agency.

This concept of Self-Organising Criticality reminds me of photogrammetry software. When trying to stitch together a collection of photographs into a 3D object, sometimes it will seem to get most of the way through the process and then go: "Nope, actually I was completely misinterpreting the data there. I'll start again from (literally) a new perspective."

Your work here is simply incredible. Thank you for expanding my understanding of myself, human nature, and the nature of the larger world!

My BRAIN just blow. Thank you

The lectures leading up to this thoroughly emphasised the problem of combinatorial explosion. I was hoping that this lecture would explicitly explain how this dynamic, scaling, SOC and SWN model solves this problem and ties up this loose end. It turns out I didn't proprerly absorb that episode 30 was where this was resolved. The solution to the combinatorial explosion is in the preceding idea that this built upon: the economical, logistical properties of the system, and coupling it to the environment. I missed that this was the crux of getting us out of combinatorial explosion. For the interested reader, I also found a nice summary on page 7 of "Relevance Realization and the Neurodynamics and Neuroconnectivity of General Intelligence" [Vervaeke, Ferraro 2013], which points you to all the other work on this.

Thank you, John Vervaeke, for this highly *relevant* series of videos. I hope this line of work will attract many other lucrative scientists and finally solve RR. As a theoretical physicist, this dynamical systems approach seems quite promissing to me (I have read some of your papers and more stuff on Dreyfus' lineage). I want to ask you a few questions, the last of which is a bit long, but seems crucial to me: First, how great is the divide in cog sci between third wave people and more conservative information processing guys? What contributes to closing this gap? Second, one of the puzzling aspects of this dynamical picture of the brain is the apparent stability of our landscapes (I guess there is an analogue problem with long term memory storage, right?). Since the processes in this multi-scale dynamical structure are occuring so rapidly, we need to show either a) some structures that are obtained during processing which endure or b) how the landscape is encoded in a (situated/embodied) brain/cognitive system, so what exactly is the (mathematical?) invariant here (e.g. correlational properties). What exactly allows for the (piecewise) continuity of mental experience? A possible answer would be that the dynamical multi-scale processes somehow have a dual, more simple description, from which we can read off the structure of the landscape itself. Or shoud we think of this as being purely dispositional? Even then, there is structure and continuity in the set of dispositions themselves, right? What guarantees ontologically this structure? Just to give context to my question, the concept of cognitive schema is inapt when it comes to RR, but seems to not suffer so much from this "robustness problem" (we just store a cognitive schema in the brain (how exactly I don't understand), but we can't store a "landscape" in the brain, since this would neglect the 4Es). In sum, the dynamics invoked to solve RR seems too violent to explain how the landscape is stored. Or maybe I am missing something obvious, in which case sorry and thanks for clarification.

@ToriKo_

2 жыл бұрын

I do not know what I am talking about and couldn’t grasp all of your question, but if I was respond to the 2nd I’d note how: Maybe much of the the violent dynamics of RR are “below” experience, or “sub””conscious”, and your mental experience is a construct after the fact that soothes over a lot of that violence. For example, are visual experience is demonstrably separate from our visual perception, and we can say that our brains produce our visual experience in ways that limit the violent RR variability of our visual perception. I’d like to hear what you think of that example?

John, thank you, thank you, thank you. This is incredible. And it warms my heart to talk about you and your work and it is incredibly special to be able to be a part of it, it in itself has had a really good effect so far , and it has so much life to it and fullness I can't imagine the time this took you but I know I don't only speak for myself when I say that both you and this course that you gave ,are quite immensely appreciated, more than you know ❤️ may you be blessed

All in all, this episode is a fascinating insight into how consciousness and relevance realisation is supposed to work! I have just had only my first listen and I can't wait to hear about latest developments into HOW we can promote experience of those 'small world networks'!! Professor Scott Barry Kaufmann, AKA "Wired to Create", has done great research into meditation and the science of practical creativity. I think the key to creating greater relevance realisation and insights will be proven to be, as Professor Vervaeke suggests, to understand better the statement 'As a self-organising system fires, so it will wire and as it is wired, so it will fire'.

Greetings professor and congratulations on hosting a very engaging series. The one thing that I wanted to bring up from the last two lectures was the same concept that tormented an author named Robert Pirsig. He was trying to address how the subjective and objective, in relatively vague terms, formed a, in your terminology, a transjective concept he designated as Quality or what the ancient Greeks would most likely described as Excellence (or the lack thereof). It seems to me from my own studies that besides being efficient or resilient, there is another axis of polarity that interacts with the other two concepts and it most likely can be scientifically measured in an absolute sense. This axis of Quality, as a exponential construct, can work in both directions of 'good' or 'bad' fulfillment of a purpose (although it doesn't require one) and both directions have a certain kind of inertia and require rigorous effort to achieve either end of the spectrum. Additionally, something possessing Quality can also be subject to an overall impression of awe without any readily built standards such as artwork. The Mandelbrot fractal for example, merges the scientific and the artistic together and has proven to be both universal and awe inspiring from a single glance. More importantly, it seems to address a universal philosophical need from the extending concept of the Buddhabrot (which if rotated to the RIGHT 90 degrees can be best viewed) and how it is hidden from us until we dive into the areas we casually fill in with darkness. To address your argument of a meaning crisis, it seems that what we collectively suffer from is a lack of Quality or Excellence and from the fast-paced and impatience of modern society, we have chosen not to overcome the inertial barriers I mentioned above and have settled for mediocrity because it is easier from a supply-sided perspective. Despite our demands that we have improved Quality standards, in particular with entertainment which is the everyday focus of most people, we are provided with barely acceptable examples of Excellence for our mass consumption. Perhaps we have a perpetual 'been there, done that' kind of perspective and that all the original stories, myths, and songs have already been written and composed and what is left are variations on themes. Ultimately, I would characterize the meaning crisis as the mediocrity crisis. The third, and possibly more enlightened alternative that transjectively bridges the cliched black and white choices, has been selectively targeted and eliminated over the course of the years. Thus, we are left with polarization that evolves without diminishment.

Textured salience landscaping is the core machinery of perspectival knowing: dynamic, situational awareness. Opens up an affordance landscape. Relevance Realization is the core machinery of your participatory knowing.

Glad to hear a mention of Friston’s important work, I understand he and Solms are going to build relevance realizing robots

This one was heavy. I got excited when you talked about caring. "Heidegger!" I shouted. "He was right after all!"

Book List: 52:24 - Read Montague -- Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect: How We Make Decisions

One of the best lectures in the series. Absolutely fantastic! A lot of what was plausibly demonstrated here as a natural explanation actually looks very observable and testable neurologically. Considering this video is two years old at this point, someone may have already contributed something. Thank you for sharing.

In improvisation we have this concept of failing with joy. Failure is where all the discovery is. We love it when the system collapses because it lays the foundation for what we will build on top of it.

@KalebPeters99

2 жыл бұрын

This is great! By improvisation do you mean in a theatrical context? I ask because I'm a jazz musician and I think it can certainly apply there too!

@WolfmanZach

2 жыл бұрын

@@KalebPeters99 I do mean in a theatrical context, but it absolutely applies to music as well. Reminds me of this moment from Herbie Hancock: kzread.info/dash/bejne/pmGqq9afYKqWZbA.html

Thanks John.

What a cohesive explanation of the process of insight! I would like to note, from my current understanding of neuroscience and the DMN, default mode network, (which seems to contribute greatly to personality and conscious experience), it seems that various subcortical regions of the brain play particular roles, and not all may apply this SOC logic in their functionality, it may be just that the neocortex alongside the DMN extracts and interprets the information from these other regions via this very SOC method. Evolutionary neuroscience needs to come into this at some degree as well, I believe, with a wary eye on the reptilian/triune brain model. Or maybe I have this all wrong, either way, great work!

10,000 subscribers, I don’t understand why it’s so slow to catch on.... this is so important for self discovery self realization thank you for your work I want to be able to buy the series from you when you finish... I have a question this has so much relevance to me because I’m so interested in clinical psychology and mental health. But I am auto didactically Learning why do you think this is not possible?

@gingerlivingston6692

4 жыл бұрын

I wonder how many subscribers would self-label as auto-didacts? This series is life-changing. I keep trying to share this with my family and friends, but so far have been met with a lack of interest. I can't believe how lucky I am to have access to this.

@bradrandel1408

4 жыл бұрын

Ginger Livingston, hi I don’t understand why more people aren’t taking advantage and self learning these principles that can help us have more harmonious perspectives with the way things are...

@bradrandel1408

4 жыл бұрын

Ginger Livingston And also why Jhon thinks that you can’t self learn from this type of content does it take a classroom what do I have to take a test I don’t know why he’s against auto didactic learning🦋🕊Peace be with us all

@gingerlivingston6692

4 жыл бұрын

@@bradrandel1408 it sort of sounded like he might address it in a future eposode. I hope so. Oherwise, he may have offended/confused half of his fan-base. Haha. I am personally not offended, I'm too grateful for the opportunity to learn from John. I started watching late, and am trying to catch up so I can finally watch an episode on its release date. I think next week I may be finally caught up! 2 months of chipping away at this! Also, I agree with you about wanting to own the series.

@bradrandel1408

4 жыл бұрын

Ginger Livingston Wow. well thank you for engaging in a little conversation with me about it. I would like to have it in an audio version like I do maps and meaning from Jordan Peterson I study that intensively peace be with you in whatever arises and may you develop the agency necessary to navigate troubled Water

A number of things struck me while watching this episode. Before sharing them, let me first congratulate and thank John Vervaeke for this series, which has helped crystallize more meaningfully the structure of a book that I am writing, the purpose of which is to show the Bible from a very different perspective from that of the prevailing, universal perception of what it represents. The Small Network concept seems to me to resonate with the concepts of Dunbar's Number, especially for Homo sapiens, the observed 3 - 5 member optimal work/project group and optimal nuclear family size, which from a naturalistic perspective I believe should be informing how we structure and manage our social groups. Obviously there are naturalistic factors, not the least of which is the social environment needed for optimal individual self-organizing, self-realization and self-actualization, but which patently do not reflect in civilized societies. Arising from this is the matter of distributed cognition, which I see as related to the more nebulous concept of the the collective or communal mind, even a 'species mind', which in vernacular terms may be considered as the 'shared mind of mutually beneficial cooperative groups.' The idea of universal human consciousness as an interconnected, integrated actuality which can be studied, as opposed to the airy-fairy notion of the 'the Universe is conscious.' Not that I disregard the possibility of the latter.

@gavinbartlett4475

3 жыл бұрын

I meant Small World Network. Another thing which sprang to mind in this episode is that the flow between and among formulation, figuring, foregrounding and featuring could be compared with toroidal motion, like the movement of electrons in the wiring of electric generators and alternators.

Mind blowing...💞💞💞 love it.

this theory makes so much sense with many things in life

So John i'm struggling with the following here: Clearly RR is vital to human cognition and general purpose problem solving, and is far more highly develloped in human cognition than in any non human we are ware of. Also, the point of this series is understanding the roots of the meaning crisis we all observe. and perhaps pointing to preliminary directions for experiment and enaction of techniques that might help alleviate this crisis. But, in my view, all organisms are cognitive systems, and all organisms are...to quote Varela confronted endlessly with a vast excess of meaning. Additionall, from the rigorous mathematical work of Robert Rosen and philisophical and experimental work, we know that all organisms ( and no machines) exhibit modern day equivalents of what Aristotle would have called formal and final causality. To clarify, given that all organisms are comlex in the sense discussed by Rosen, yet all complex systems are not organisms. specifically, any dissapative system that is not an organism exhibits formal causality (system level regularization of emergent constraints) according to the maximum entropy principle. Organisms also feature these morphodynamic ( Deacons definition) effects, but also feature higher order processes that most assuredly don't obey the MEP, in fact they tend to nearly maximally LENGTEN the dissaption path length in ways that allow work to be done on their global systemic behalf. It seems to me that the synchronous neuron firing processes elucidated are an example of morphodynamic process utilized by human organisms in service of a higher order purposeful process...hence RR can not be fully explained via these processes alone. I would additionally argue that all organisms as anticipatory, or cognitive systems, face similiar combinatorial explosion problems and must also have some way of realizing relevance. I expect that studying the evolution of RR from simplest bacterial forms through humans may shed some light on this.

You had me at scale invariance, which appears incredibly vital to this argument. I hear the echoes--and I believe intentionally so--of QFT; perhaps even the conformal invariance of CFT.

Hi John, first of all I just want to say I'm deeply grateful for these lectures. I'm on my second watch through of the series (As well as digging into your book recommendations). It's genuinely some of the most enriching material I've ever come across. On to my question: On the portion of the lecture dealing with resiliency and efficiency in networks, I'm having difficulty seeing the trade-off between redundancy and mean path distance as a true trade off. The reason for that is that one can construct a graph with a mean path distance of 1, and maximum redundancy - Just connect every node in the network to every other node (a complete graph). It seems to me that in order for this to be a true trade-off, there needs to be some kind of constraint, such as a maximum number of connections, or perhaps some sort of loss of the information processing capacity of the network as connections increase. So my question is: In your view, what would be preventing a self-organizing network from optimizing both resiliency and efficiency by evolving towards being a complete network?

@my_temporary_name

4 жыл бұрын

The constraint you are talking about is common to all living organisms. The ones that are less efficient are more likely to die. This is also why we are lazy - unnecessary effort has always been a waste of energy that could kill you and/or make you less likely to pass on your genes.

@KalebPeters99

2 жыл бұрын

This is a fantastic question and something that is tripping me up a little also

Essere e tempo.Il dominio teologico come estensione mondiale della coscienza teologica.

Thank you. This series is worthy of the time it takes to understand it. I am getting general themes, and some details, but would like a much better grasp before I start to speak about it, or draw conclusions.

John, I am struggling to follow what you are saying because the words you are using are mostly specified for academia/science. I am trusting my intuitive capacities and usually can get the gist of your thinking. I wondered if you could put together a short "dictionary for dummies" :o) with the most relevant (!) words/phrases.... or recommend something so that us dummies can check and recheck the meaning(!) of words for a fuller understanding until the words naturally fall into places. Thank you!

@nancyschaecher7125

4 жыл бұрын

Yes, also hoping this all comes together in way that connects with the earlier lectures. Intuitively picking up some of it...

@elel2608

4 жыл бұрын

As long as you try your best to figure out what he’s saying (looking up terms, coming back to the video, etc.) and keep showing up, you’ll get it. At least that’s what I believe.

It seems to me that if there is someone in the world who can answer this question it's you: I've been carrying with me two incompatible intuitions about the fundamental nature of consciousness. One is the more eastern "consciousness is an open sky", fundamentally careless, or equanimous, detached from all narrative. What I find in this view is peace and joy, but what seems to be lost is meaning. Buddha sitting below the tree. Then there is the Western thing, based on action, based on meaning, based on being "enmeshed in narrative", where meaning is the deepest thing and even perception is shaped by it, your most fundamental orientation. Christ taking on the cross and struggling up the hill. Is there a synthesis of these two views available?

@kbeetles

4 жыл бұрын

Nick Redmark - coming to similar conclusions and wonderings, I turned back to Christianity because I missed the "juice of passion" in Buddhism. The Buddhist way of looking at the world and oneself is very stabilising and yet....and yet....no "juice"( my vocabulary) /meaning (?) in it.....

@notmyrealpseudonym6702

4 жыл бұрын

Isn't this what he is indicating with how relevance realization stretchs both up and down? So connects the local with the universal?

@CaligoFXnet

4 жыл бұрын

I look at it as function - content distinction

@marykochan8962

4 жыл бұрын

I think the two perspectives that you are looking for can be found within Christianity in the distinction between the contemplative and the active life. The problem might be that in the west, with protestantism and with the Protestant influence upon Catholicism, these two modes of being Christian, and how they can interpenetrate one another has been lost to sight.

@evanhadkins5532

4 жыл бұрын

The integration you're looking for might be flow. Life being a flow from receptive to active and back again.

John is the Thatcher etal paper you mention between 12-14:00, RW Thatcher? And the 2014 or the subsequent 2016 paper? Just trying to add article links that you talk about (for my own reading but so others can quickly check as well) Both downloadable off scholar google Intelligence and eeg measures of information flow: efficiency and homeostatic neuroplasticity | Scientific Reports www.nature.com/articles/srep38890

@notmyrealpseudonym6702

4 жыл бұрын

Frontiers | Self-organization, free energy minimization, and optimal grip on a field of affordances | Human Neuroscience www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00599/full

@jasetheacity

4 жыл бұрын

There was a correction later to Langer et al at 23.35

I've noticed "thank you for your attention" is something the Orthodox say in Church

caring. that explains lots of thing.

A playlist of your features on other channels would be nice. This information is getting so nicely layered and melodic.

@therunawayrascal

4 жыл бұрын

he does! "Others commenting on Vervaeke"

@therunawayrascal

4 жыл бұрын

or, sorry, i guess your looking for "John Vervaeke in Conversation"

Love it @27:00 when he says “I know it’s hard to grok this”…..

what is the exponent emperica;;y determined for the process you are referring to as SOC and how robust are the findings? Do you know if other models other than power law were tested on the data?

Cool!

With loving thanks i offer my gratitude to your taking on this series and explaining it so clearly . my question: part of your argument that we can't have a theory of relevance is that relevance uses representation (ep30-31). but here in ep 32, talk about the salience landscape's dimensions of aspectuality, temporality, and centrality. aren't these just using representation to explain RR? what did i miss or misinterpret? thank you!

@ToriKo_

2 жыл бұрын

Great question. I can’t answer but maybe John might argue the solution lies in aspectuality being a dimension of RR not a complete picture. But you still have the problem of aspectuality being circular in that sense

Polymath Park NOTES! The free energy principle (FEP) states, in a nutshell, that the brain seeks to minimize surprise [1]. It is arguably the most ambitious theory of the brain available today, claiming to subsume many other important ideas, such as predictive coding, efficient coding, Bayesian inference, and optimal control theory.

Yeah but, you know if you think about the little elf in The Hourglass. Here he is furiously piling that sand up into a nice Mound, only to lose control of it and have it collapse on him. He Stomps his little feet and curses and begins all over again delighting in his ability to build it higher the next time, only to have it fall apart once again. He tears his hair out in frustration and compulsively begins again. He is like a tiny Sisyphus. Now you will never look at an hourglass the same again.😉

@brisingr12

3 жыл бұрын

Thanks. This was a transformative comment.

Now it's getting hard to follow! I wonder what Vervaeke thinks about this analogy: synchrony asynchrony in cognitive function is like bursting spiking in a single neuron. Bursting refers to when the neuron does not go back to resting potential after firing and spiking is when the neuron does go back to resting potential. I did research on this behavior in leech heart interneurons a long time ago. Using a system of 17 differential equations I was able to model the real world behavior of these neurons. The big issue is what parameters of the equations (for mostly chemical concentrations) are necessary to achieve anything at all, that is, to achieve self-organized criticality. Imagining the mathematical equations and their parameters necessary for our cognitive functioning to move from 'synchrony' to 'asynchrony' and back again is making my head spin. Discovering physical measurements that correlate with psychometric ones is the first step. The next one is to determine the source of those measureable states. This would be what Chalmers called the 'easy' problem and it's still science fiction.

Deeply fascinating! I'm doing something wrong with my life.

The Necker cube also works with one eye.

This is a huge ask but is there some resource of all the literature you recommend to better grasp these concepts? I work a factory job but listen to audiobooks and podcast all day and would love to dive deeper into this subject. You are an inspiration and your grasp of philosophy, to my understanding, is very comprehensive and sound in reason. 😊

I was waiting for Heidegger's views on care (sorge) to be mentioned in this series. For what Heidegger pointed out phenomenologically there's a lot of neuroscientific evidence.

@billmartins6555

4 жыл бұрын

@Zbigniew Modrzejewski what would it mean to have 5d space if no experience corresponded to it?

@allancoffee

4 жыл бұрын

@@billmartins6555 maybe the 4.-5. dimension couldt be the Gods who "interfered" with our actions... 😉

@polymathpark

2 жыл бұрын

can you elaborate

I think that talk about Stephen and Dixon you are referring to did not end up in the final cut.

It seems that this conception of a Relevance Realization virtual engine is an aspect of the same thing that Phenotypic Evolution is an aspect of.

Does the insight machinery (from regular to small world networks), which you mention around 39:00 work similarly with humor and the sudden laughter from getting a joke?

@johnvervaeke

2 жыл бұрын

Yes I believe so.

Weird to feel my brain avalanching as it takes in John's explanation of the possible mechanisms by which it is trying to grok this video.

So. May that be the famous middle path of the buhda?

Nooo I finally caught up with the most recent video in the series... I suppose I'll be developing an optimal grip on patience in the coming weeks.

I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated

@ToriKo_

2 жыл бұрын

-Robert Sapolsky on youtube, though I would highly recommend his book Behave. -History of Western Philosophy audiobook is free on KZread, but I’m not raving mad about that one -some Complex Systems lectures by Ackoff and Sterman -some of the “interviews” done by Harvard psychiatrist and almost-monk Alok Kanojia on the HealthyGamerGG channel

The network graphs make me think how Jordan Peterson would refer to efficiency as Chaos, as it has enormous potential (the hand), but is not resilient (like a hammer). Too much resilience (Order) is tyranny.

Where do i go for wisdom ? To John Vervaeke

John have you thought about turning this into a new recovery model for treatment centers for drug and alcohol addiction’s suicide prevention?

@billmartins6555

4 жыл бұрын

What about any of this would prevent suicide?

@bradrandel1408

4 жыл бұрын

Bill Martins Phenomenology, existential humanistic psychotherapy pragmatism self realization dialogue learning how we fit in the world as we are... building community...🦋🕊

@bradrandel1408

4 жыл бұрын

Bill Martins Finding purpose and meaning... Stoic philosophy’s Do you not think any of this could help with suicide? If not maybe companionship through the suicide so people don’t have to die alone

@billmartins6555

4 жыл бұрын

@@bradrandel1408 Vervaeke hasn't actually taught any of the things you just mentioned. Phenomenology will not prevent suicide. Stoicism might, but it won't increase quality of life -- in fact it gives up on that. Simply saying purpose and meaning does nothing to actually find those things. And what has Vervaeke told you to so to find meaning? Breathe? Take psychadelics? Focus on the now? Routinely break frame?

@bradrandel1408

4 жыл бұрын

Bill Martins OK

I’m going to start calling my adhd “attentional stack criticality disorder”

20:40...so it seems we were using different conceptions of efficiency and resilience which led to some of the confusion in one of my comments last time. I generally use efficiency and resilience in the context of suceptibility to perturbation. So in the figure you used, the first ordered network is very fragile to perturbation, and in my use would have very low resilience while the last figure has very high resilience in that respect...i guess im viewing this in terms of distribution networks. But ultimately it seems im thinking of resilience in terms of robustness, and efficiency in terms of minimizing path length. An industrial farm is extremely efficient ( depending on the metric you use to assess success of course), while a network of small organic farms (using the same metric) is far less efficient...while the industrial farm is very fragile in the sense of massive failure due to certain perturbations like a particular plant disease or a pest, while the small organic network is highly robust to the same perturbations.

@marykochan8962

4 жыл бұрын

But the industrial Farm is only efficient because it's externalities are not even considered in the equation. Within the context of the entire system, taking into account the environment, human health and nutrition, and Animal Welfare, it is very inefficient.

@waynelewis425

4 жыл бұрын

@@marykochan8962 indeed, and note that with a more sophisticated assessment that included long term soil health, interaction with indigenous peoples, and nutritional output including trace nutrients and microbiome, industrial farming would be both less efficient and less resilient.

@marykochan8962

4 жыл бұрын

@@waynelewis425 so I think what that demonstrates is that you cannot assess the efficiency of one part of a big system.

@waynelewis425

4 жыл бұрын

@@marykochan8962 yes

@waynelewis425

4 жыл бұрын

Perhaps even more profoundly, I would make the claim that organisms and other metabolism, repair systems featuring immanent purpose are not composed of parts at all...rather they are composed of functional components which, once engaged in the system are no longer what they were. The functional components are processes not identifiable things. The paper I posted above synopsizing Rosen work explains better.

So not tryna be a luddite: I love these lectures. You've had me leaning in so much im almost falling off my chair.... But the opening 135 seconds made me literally say aloud "What the fuck?" Guess I shouldnta skipped 4 episodes.

Has John’s work been translated into Russian?

Also. Please talk about your tattoos sometime.

@huitian177

3 жыл бұрын

Well, on the left arm it's "concentration" in classic (traditional) Chinese, on the right arm I haven't yet seen it close up enough.

Some call them affordances. While for others they are provisions.😉

@brisingr12

3 жыл бұрын

The leeches & latchers :/

Immenso Heidegger

great 'integrative' lecture, similar to Episode 9 (the way I feel it). I wonder why talking about entropy and near-criticality of the brain/psyche John does not mention work of Robin Carhart-Harris Psychedelic Research lab. may be it is coming later. but it is highly relevant as their seminal paper 'The Entropic Brain' from 2014 www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020/full claims that normal consciousness is exactly this 'near criticallity' state of the brain. and psychedelics and mental disorders seem to skew the brain one way or the other (too much order or too much chaos)

@SuperAlex512

4 жыл бұрын

and there is a followup in 2018: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028390818301175 - "The entropic brain - revisited"

@johnvervaeke

4 жыл бұрын

You are exactly right. Carhart-Harris’ work is directly relevant. I do discuss it in some of my online lectures on psychedelics, but I should have mentioned it here as well Thank you for pointing this out.

@andrewstallard6927

4 жыл бұрын

Your original link is broken.

@SuperAlex512

4 жыл бұрын

and a great interview with Hubert Dreyfus on one's calling, meaning, relevance and AI: www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Philosophy/Modern-Philosophy/Meaning-Relevance-and-the-Limits-of-Technology/43527

Obviation doesn't mean to make obvious.

a synopsis of the work of Rosen i referenced in the other comment www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/PPRISS3.html?fbclid=IwAR396ED86P6U6ApHjRupBXkuf2MOdPku4Ok3daZMnG8YIrZtRL8i4JyT8_g

Stoicism?

23:00 couldn’t you say that Small World Networks are only optimal if you presume an environment that is relevantly variable. i.e. if an environment was ultra stable in either direction (of anti-resilience or anti-efficient) then it would not be optimal. You can only invoke allostatic optimality by presuming a certain type of environment (one that is relevant enough to call SWN optimal). I guess this means you could argue that a certain type of variable environment is a prerequisite for intelligence of (g) etc, but that is a different claim that SWN are optimal overall. If you go back to the first sentence you see how we sneak relevance into this argument and there fore are kinda explaining relevance with relevance Edit: I think the response to my argument is that we are currently and evolutionarily living in an environment that is “relevantly” variable, but by definition, as it is the environment that we have emerged from. In simpler words, we are allowed to assume a certain type of environment to explain relevance, as RR may be constrained to type of environment that we have. So we are explaining relevance from a state where relevance has evolved, it may not make sense to explain relevance from a state where relevance cannot come from.

42:00 I see a tree of life.

I've loved the entire series and now I'm returning to eps 26 to 32 to try to get a grasp on Relevance realisation. Thank you John so much for all your hard work and inspired wrestling with ideas. Two things are playing on my mind ... From what I can tell, John is saying we realise relevance by means of finding an optimal position between the poles of opponent processing. For example, one system is encouraging efficiency and the other is encouraging resilience. My question is ... this seems to commit the sin which John has warned us against ... in which you explain relevance through relevance ... because how does the processor that is encouraging efficiency avoid combinatory explosion and zero in on the elements it needs to in order to recognise which aspects of life contribute to efficiency? And how does the processor that is encouraging resilience avoid combinatory explosion and zero in on the aspects of life that contribute to resiliency? It's like a debate in which two opposing arguments are presented and on the basis of this debate we will vote and choose an action going forward (the vote representing some sort of process in which the optimal compromise is chosen ... I'm not sure how that would be done other than averaging, which John described as the Canadian approach and made clear wouldn't work) - but my main point is ... even before the optimal point between the opposing positions is chosen, how do the two opposing sides decide what is relevant to their individual arguments? Also ...I love the idea of using evolution as a metaphor for relevance realisation ... thus creating some sort of internal process in which ideas evolve, however ... when I think of evolution of species I can comprehend the process in terms of the expansive "accomodation" aspect being created through random mutation and the varieties created through sexual reproduction ... this solves the problem of combinatorial explosion by starting with a variety that is currently surviving and producing a limited range of diverse varieties, some of which will prove useful if circumstances change, and the majority being either irrelevant to survival or causing death. ... and then the selection, "assimilation" aspect avoids combinatorial explosion being created by simply deeming those that survive as relevant and culling those deemed irrelevant by way of the death before reproduction of unfit varieties. (At no point does any aspect of a species need to be recognised -ie "realised" as relevant, but fit varieties are "realised" - ie made actual and relevant simply by surviving) This selection through death is fairly easy to understand ... the relevant qualities are chosen by way of survival. At no time does the process have to recognise the relevant strengths of a variety, they are simply chosen by not dying. So has John suggested a cognitive mechanism by which the good "relevant" aspects become salient and are chosen for attention, and the bad "irrelevant" aspects are ignored. What is the arena of competition in our minds that creates a limited range of diverse ideas (subtle mutations of the ideas we already have), and then lets the relevant ideas live, gaining our attention and propagating, and ignoring the bad ideas thus letting them die. (and also not concerning itself with the infinite number of good or bad ideas that it "could" of had.)

@polymathpark

2 жыл бұрын

I think he's saying that RR works through recursion, and the SOC+SWN are a foundation for the growth of RR. So what is relevant to us may become more so wholly by accident, just being in the right place with the right people and positive neuroplasticity will occur. Or it can happen under our own, accelerated merit.

@ToriKo_

2 жыл бұрын

Really beautiful and succinct way of articulating some of my issues with what John was saying

(c. 50:35) On relevance realization and altered states of consciousness

Disembodied source of brain intelligence 1Co_2:11 For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. The spirit is the backbone of the brain that forms the most resilient and efficient connection to all aspects of the brain. An idea that is propositional but inevitable. So the Brain + Body is an interface for the spirit to the physical real. This interface isn't perfect and is also degrading.