John Vervaeke - How Minds Find What Matters

For this session, we'll be reading John Vervaeke, Timothy Lillicrap, and Blake Richards’ paper “Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science.”

Up to this point, many of our discussions have focused on consciousness, experience, and the mind’s relation to the world. This paper shifts the focus to a deeper problem underlying cognition itself: how do minds figure out what matters? Vervaeke and his co-authors argue that many classic problems in cognitive science — problem solving, categorization, rationality, action, communication, and the frame problem — all depend on the same hidden capacity: relevance realization. Cognitive agents must somehow zero in on the relevant features of a situation while ignoring an indefinite background of possible alternatives.

The paper argues that we should not look for a theory of “relevance” as if relevance were a fixed property things have. Instead, we need a theory of the mechanisms by which relevance is realized dynamically, context-sensitively, and non-circularly. On their view, cognition is not best understood as rule-governed symbol manipulation alone, but as a self-organizing process that balances competing pressures: generality and specificity, exploration and exploitation, efficiency and resilience.

The reading can be found in the discord in the sf-philosophy-reading-group channel