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The Return of Meaning

A scientific, existential, and cultural phenomenon

4th February 2022     cite

John Vervaeke | Award winning lecturer, professor of cognitive science, and creator of the widely viewed, 2,904 words
50-part lecture series on Youtube, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Read time: approx. 15 mins

Meaning in the 20th century went missing. With the decline of religion, and the rise of
science, for many in the modern world nihilism has taken hold. But this is a mistake.
We must usher in the return of meaning, for the existential health of our selves and
our culture, writes John Vervaeke.

As we move into the real possibility of what is called artificial general intelligence
(AGI), i.e., intelligence that is like or surpasses our own, we move into a problem
centrally entwined with our intelligence, viz., the problem of meaning. Two questions
immediately emerge: what is the nature of this meaning so central to our intelligent
cognitive agency, and what relation does this cognitive meaning have to the
existential meaning that has been of concern to philosophers perennially but
especially since the advent of modernity and secularism? When Pascal talks about

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the infinite spaces of the scientific worldview and how they terrify him or Nagel talks
about the problem of the absurd as we pursue objectivity, they are invoking a sense of
meaning that has something to do with psychologist and philosophers are calling
meaning in life [1]. This is the sense that one’s life makes sense in a way that has
depth or realness because it connects one to something larger than oneself that has
a value and a reality beyond one’s egocentric concerns and individual existence. This
connection makes life worth living in the face of the frustrations, failures, suffering and
sorrows that reliably assail human lives.
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I want to argue that the meaning so central to AGI has two interrelated components. Sign me up
One is that our mental states are about something, they are directed beyond
themselves to something other than themselves. My thought about a tree is not a tree
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but is directed at a tree. This is known as intentionality or original meaning, and it is
problematic how to get this into the computational states of machines. [2] The second
component is relevance. You are not like a standard computer because it does not
care about the information it is processing. Its results may matter to you, but it does
not care about the information for itself. However, it turns out that this ability to care
about some information rather than other information is central to being an intelligent The afterlife
cognitive agent. The ability to pay attention to some information and ignore other without God
information as irrelevant is crucial to being an intelligent problem solver. Notice that
already the problem of cognitive meaning seems to be overlapping with existential
meaning because cognitive meaning involves being directed/connected to something
beyond oneself, and it involves sensing the relevance or importance of information.

___
Human
We need wisdom and a capacity for transformative self- consciousness: a
tragic misstep
correction, i.e. self-transcendence, more than ever before.

___ Related Videos:

I will further argue that as we answer the

relevance problem, we begin to get an
answer to the intentionality problem, and
that as we do this, we will get a good
explanation of existential meaning. So,
as existential meaning becomes
increasingly problematic due to historical
factors, we have the potential
emergence of an account of meaning-
making within cognitive science that can
help to explain the nature and function of
existential meaning. This will help
explain how this meaning-making can go
awry, and how it can be afforded and
improved. So, meaning is returning because the demands for it in cognitive science
and in our lives are both increasing at a time when we may be able to jointly meet

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these demands.


THE RELEVANCE PROBLEM
There is way too much information in the environment to which you could pay Virtue ethics and
attention. Any of it could be relevant to you meeting your goals. You have so much the mob
information in your long-term memory, and you can combine it in a vast number of
ways. Which information should you consult, and how should it be combined? You
can combine various movements and sequences of actions in uncountably large
number of ways. Which sequence should you perform? What is so powerful is that in
practice the answer to all these interrelated questions is obvious to you. So here is 

how we can re-ask our question of relevance: how does your brain make information,
The good, the
memory, and action obvious to you in a way that reliably allows you to solve so very
bad, and the
many problems in so many ways? The ability to generate powerful obviousness is
ignored
central to being a general problem solver, i.e., to have AGI.

The problem is that obviousness is, well, obvious. However, that is precisely the
issue. Being obvious is not a property of anything in itself. Focusing on a chair may be
completely obvious one moment and completely irrelevant the next. Remembering
that your Aunt Agnes loves chocolate ice cream may not be relevant for years at a 

time. What people will often say at this point is that it all depends on context.
Surplus
However, that just pushes the question down the road. For what is a context? It is a happiness
set of things, memories, and actions that are all co-relevant to each other because
that set of things is relevant to whatever goals you are trying to achieve. It is the
sphere of obviousness that is constantly around you. This just re-asks the question of
relevance again: how can we make a machine that has the ability for context
sensitivity?

What you or any other machine cannot do is check all the facts in memory, all the
available information in the environment or consider all possible courses of action. For
very many real-world problems that would take you longer than the rest of the history
of the universe. What is amazing, and to date very difficult to replicate even in very
powerful computers and neural networks, is how rapidly and reliably you do this.

There is one more wrinkle to this. Consider these nine dots. Here is the problem:
connect all nine dots with four straight lines without taking your pencil or pen off the
paper.

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For many people when they hear “four straight lines” and see the figure it is obvious
to them that there is a square whose boundaries they must respect, but that will
prevent them from solving this otherwise easy problem. Consider the following
diagram.

To solve this problem one must “think outside the box”. So, while the ability to
generate obviousness enables our general intelligence, it also blinds us. Two points
come from this simple example. Our ability to zero in on relevance and render it
obvious is inherently self-correcting and we experience that self-correction in
moments of insight, the aha experience. The second is that telling people to think
outside the box does not actually help them to solve the problem! It is not a matter of
changing their beliefs. [3] They need to know how to go outside the box, they need to
be able to generate the perspective that foregrounds the right things, backgrounds
the right things in the right way, and ignores the right things. For example, the blank
space around the box should not be backgrounded in your awareness; instead, it
should be central. Finally, they may need to challenge roles that they have stored.
Very many of us learned how to do connect the dots and be good dot connectors.
Solving the nine-dot problem requires that you make a change of direction where
there is no dot, but that is not what a good dot connector does. One needs to believe
that one should go outside the box. One also needs the right attentional skills and
directions to do so, i.e., one needs to know how. One further needs to be able to
realize that state of awareness that casts the right perspective on the problem. One
finally needs to be able to give up a role in which one easily participates and inhabits.
Solving the problem requires changing one’s propositional knowing (beliefs), one’s
procedural knowing (skills), ones perspectival knowing (one’s perspective) and one’s
participatory knowing (what roles one assumes). One must change all of these in a
parallel and dynamically interlocking fashion.

___

That sense of caring connectedness to yourself, to others and

the world, that is so important to meaning in life, is not some
existential add on. It is the lifeblood of your cognitive agency.

___

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Yet, the aha! moment of insight when you realize (in both sense of the word) the
solution is not really something that you do. It is something that you participate in and
that occurs between you and the problem. It has a life of its own. This gives us a clue
for a plausible account as to how you are always zeroing in on relevant information. It
is a dynamically self-correcting process unfolding between you and the world that is
dynamically and constantly reconfiguring what you find relevant so that you dwell in a
field of obviousness. Notice what your attention does, even right now. Part of it wants
to drift away into mind-wandering or daydreaming while another part is bringing you
back and focusing on this article. Notice that you direct your attention, and yet it can
also be caught away by a distracting thought or sound. Attention is both something
you do and something that happens to you. You participate in it. As your attention
drifts away, it is introducing variation into your awareness and there are more things
you can think about, but the opponent process of focusing selects from all the
variations which things you are going to engage. Notice how your attention is a self-
correcting process in which opposing constraints of variation and selection are always
at work. You attention is very much like a living thing that is evolving. Just as
biological evolution uses variation (due to mutation etc.) and natural selection (due to
scarcity) to evolve how species are fitted to their environment your attention is always
evolving your cognitive fittedness to your environment. When the process is working
smoothly, and you are dynamically fitted to your environment, then you have
obviousness within context sensitivity.

Notice how much of this going on outside of your propositional knowing and within
your procedural, perspectival, and especially participatory knowing. Notice how it
connects you to your environment and that this connection is an evolving salience
landscape of what you care about and how much you care about it. Many
researchers, including this author, propose that the non-propositional connectedness
and caring is how the propositions get directed onto the world. You are connected
and caring about the situation in which the cat is on the mat, so the proposition “the
cat is on the mat” is meaningful to you. Both the relevance realization (both senses of
the word) processes and the intentionality generation process are more complex than
I have presented them, but what I have presented allows you see why meaning, i.e.,
relevance realization and directedness, are so central to your intelligent cognitive
agency. That sense of caring connectedness to yourself, to others and the world, that
is so important to meaning in life, is not some existential add on. It is the lifeblood of
your cognitive agency. You find it inherently valuable because it is in inherently
needed for your general intelligence. If you do not continually solve, re-solve and
resolve meaning you will not solve any of your other problems or achieve any of your
other goals. In a very real sense, you are this capacity to participate in such meaning
making.

___

Our intelligence flows between us and the world like music.

This is both poetic and hard-core cutting-edge cognitive
science.

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___

THE MEANING CRISIS

Most of this meaning making is taking place below your beliefs and the obviousness
of your everyday experience. However, for many historical reasons that I explored
and explained in my Awakening from the Meaning Crisis video series, our culture has
become excessively, perhaps obsessively, focused on this level of belief and
everyday obviousness. We suffer propositional-ideological tyranny. We have lost
cultural frameworks and evolving systems of practice that allow us to access, activate,
accentuate, and celebrate our meaning-making. We know in our bones that such
serious play with how we find things salient (relevance that grabs attention) is
important because of our experience of music, but we find a hard time articulating
why music can be so important even sacred to us. We fall into tired tropes about
emotion and feeling without being able to explain why they should matter so much.
However, given what I have argued we can see that all our experience is like music.
It is an on-going evolution of our salience landscape that connects us to our world
and makes us care about it in a way that fits us to a melody of situations rendering
them intelligible for action. Our intelligence flows between us and the world like music.
This is both poetic and hard-core cutting-edge cognitive science. Lyricism meets AGI.

Currently we have a dominant scientific world view that cannot explain the cognition
that produces science. The truth generation central to science depends on meaning-
making. If I ask you if it is true that gribnaws frequently eekulate. You will probably
reply that you first need to know what “gribnaw” and “eekulate” mean. Until we
explain the how and why of meaning-making, we really cannot situate ourselves as
the producers and consumers of science within that very scientific worldview. We
generate a scientific worldview in which do not properly belong. We are cosmically
homeless. This is not just sad, it is dangerous. Remember that relevance realization
is a process that can also lead to self-deception. Remember the nine-dot problem.
The very processes that make us generally intelligent also make us perennially prone
to self-deception, i.e., foolishness. We need ecologies of practices that are
appropriately culturally homed for addressing our disconnectedness and foolishness,
for enhancing our capacities for self-correction, insight, and relevance realization. In
short, we need places for the cultivation of wisdom, and wisdom is not optional for us.
Another way of seeing the meaning crisis is that we intuitively realize we need to
improve our ability to cut through all the noise and BS to what really matters, we need
to connect to what is real, and we need to seriously address our capacity for self-
deception. However, we do not know how to do this, we do not know which
perspectives are the most perspicacious, and we do not know in which processes of
identity transformation we should participate. As we drown in information and
disinformation, we starve for cultural homes for the cultivation of wisdom. Where do
you go for wisdom?

For many of us the traditional religions that homed us for wisdom and the serious play
of meaning-making are no longer viable because of the scientific worldview and
historical problems and failures that attend these religions. We tried wide-sweeping

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ideologies that drenched the world in blood in the 20th century, and we have produced
enormous affluence that is agonizingly paired with mental health and addiction crises.
We have no faith in our political institutions while we increasingly politicize everything
and grow polarized from each other. We crave intimacy in our romantic relationships
and try to make them take on the role that religion and culture used to, but they often
fracture under this strain and produce endemic suffering. We are cut off from the
world in a way that is killing it and us. Then COVID just made it all worse.

THE RETURN OF MEANING

We need to understand meaning-making to reduce self-deceptive self-
destructiveness both individually and collectively. We need wisdom and a capacity for
transformative self-correction, i.e., self-transcendence, more than ever before. For an
increasing number of people, the understanding and practice of self-transcendence is
no longer viable within traditional religion or within secular politics. Work within AGI
and cognitive science is pointing to an emerging understanding of intelligence that
connects it deeply with meaning-making in a way that also makes existential sense.
What are needed are communities that home ecologies of practices that reconnect
people with their meaning-making processes such that the cultivation of wisdom and
connectedness becomes more reliably viable for them. Culturally isolating people so
that they are forced to attempt to autodidactically cobble together the practices of
wisdom and connection by themselves or in their social media echo-chamber only
tends to make matters worse. We need dynamically self-correcting ecologies of
practices that are tutored and vetted by the best cognitive science and that, in turn,
provide on-going rich data and innovation of technique to that science. The people
within these communities must be bound together by a commitment to deep
exploratory dialogue within the communities and between the communities to give us
access to the collective intelligence that can counterbalance our ego-centric and
autodidactic tendencies. What is most demonstrative of the return of meaning is the
emergence of such ecologies of practices, communities that home such practices,
and the proliferation of dialogical practices such as circling, empathy circling, inquiry,
authentic relating, insight dialogue, etc., for deeply connecting people and
communities. The return of meaning is a scientific, existential, and cultural
phenomenon that is gaining momentum. It is in a race with the degradation of lives
and environment that is also gaining momentum. It is unknown which will win the
race.

References:

[1] Pascal (1670), Le Pensées; Nagel (1989), The View from Nowhere; Hicks &
Routledge, eds. (2013), The Experience of Meaning in Life; Wolf (2010), Meaning in
life and why it matters.

[2] Haugeland (1985), Artificial Intelligence: the very idea.

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[3] Weisberg & Alba (1981), An Examination of the alleged role of “fixation’ in the
solution of several “insight” problems.

John Vervaeke
    cite
4th February 2022

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David Jones 2 5 February 2022

There is this image that is fractal and repeated and all the level with Vervaeke of a set group of distinct but often fuzzy edged ecology of
dynamically interacting "things" (but perhaps too fuzzy and changeable to be a thing). I think this image is a step up from the fatally myopic
propositional scientific system (perhaps a rigid network) in terms of truth but actually is not really helping us except to say we need talk
about it more. What we want surely is to know what this competing relevance realisation modules in the mental dynamical system actually
are and why? Until we fins that we are still just groping in the dark and going round in circles...

David Jones 2 5 February 2022

Good overview...just a point to help clarify

"Most of this meaning making is taking place below your beliefs and the obviousness of your everyday experience. However, for many
historical reasons that I explored and explained in my Awakening from the Meaning Crisis video series, our culture has become
excessively, perhaps obsessively, focused on this level of belief and everyday obviousness. We suffer propositional-ideological tyranny. "

This needs an addition of "propositional" before "beliefs" in the first line, else the rest doesn't make sense... it is propositional rather than
perspectival beliefs (and the others) that we focus on and foreground - hence the propositional-ideological tyranny!

Cameron Wright 4 February 2022

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It strikes me that the ideas you share are like the basic research that leads to some breakthrough later down the line. It's a real joy to read
and listen to the things you and your contemporaries produce. But I wonder what you would have to say about specific things, say to take
your perspective and knowledge and embody it by analyzing or critiquing some story, character, person, or cultural practice that's a bit
more everyday rather than things, like this wonderful article, that require a reader to google the meaning of words or phrases, like
perspectival knowing, or circling. Maybe if I said it like this it would make sense: provide smaller heuristics (?) that can be potentially built
up into the large sophisticated matrix of ideas and pyschotechnologies you possess rather than deconstructing a large body of knowledge
down into smaller components and then trying to link them to something appropriate. "That's amazing, but what do I do with it?" is a
common refrain for me when I read or listen to things like this.

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