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

In this episode of "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis," Dr. John Vervaeke reviews arguments for the centrality of relevance realization to intelligence, agency, consciousness, and meaning-making. He emphasizes the importance of a naturalistic explanation for relevance realization, which can explain human spirituality, self-transcendence, and wisdom. He discusses the need to avoid circular reasoning when theorizing relevance, criticizing representation, computation, and modularity as inadequate explanations. Vervaeke suggests that relevance realization must be understood through autopoetic systems with internal, constitutive goals, operating in a scale-invariant and self-organizing manner. He argues that a scientific theory of relevance may be impossible, but a theory of relevance realization is attainable and essential for understanding meaning-making capacities.