Thank you for another beautiful essay at real thinking! This time about the mental stance itself.
But I’ll describe a few tags I’m currently using, when I remind myself to “really think.” Suggestions/tips from readers would also be welcome.
I think there is a strong conceptual overlap with what John Vervaeke describes as Relevance Realisation and wisdom.
I’ll attempt a summary of my understanding of John Vervaeke’s Relevance Realisation.
A key capability of any agentic/living beings is to prune the exponentially exploding space of possibilities when making any decision or thought. We are computationally bounded, and how we deal with that is crucial. Vervaeke terms the process that does this Relevance Realisation.
There is a lot of detail to his model, but let’s jump to how some of this plays out in human thinking: A core aspect in how we are agentic is our use of memeplexes that form an “agent-arena-relationship”—we combine a worldview with an agent that is suited to that world and then tie our identity to that agent. We build toy versions all the time (many games are like this), but—according to Vervaeke’s theses in the “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” lectures—modern western culture has somewhat lost track of the cultural structures which allow individuals to coordinate on and (healthily) grow their mind’s agent-arena-relationship. We have institutions of truth (how to reach good factual statements rather than falsehoods), but not of wisdom (how to live with a healthy stance towards reality rather than bullshit. Historically religious institutions played that role but they now successfully do that for fewer and fewer people)
Inhabiting a functional such relationship feels alive and vibrant (“inhabit” = tying one’s identity into these memes), whereas the lack of a functional agent-arena-relationship feels dream-like (zombies are a good representation; maybe “NPC” is a more recent meme that points at this).
A related thing is people having a spiritual experience: this involves glimpsing a new agent-arena-relationship which then sometimes gets nourished into a re-structuring of one’s self-concept and priorities.
tying this back to “real thinking”
Although the process I described is not the same thing as real thinking, I do think that there are important similarities.
Regarding how to do this well, one important point of Vervaeke’s is that humans necessarily enter the world with very limited concepts of “self”, “agent” or “arena”. This perspective makes it clear that a core part of what we do while growing up is refining these concepts. A whole lot of our nature is about doing this process of transcending our previous self-concept. Verveake loves the quote “the sage is to the adult as the adult is to the child” to point at what the word wisdom means.
The process according to his recommendations, involves
a Community of Practice (a community of people who share the goal of re-orienting themselves. One such is forming with and around him at awakentomeaning.com),
an Ecology of Practices (meditation, reflecting on philosophy, embodiment practices, etc. are all contributing factors to reducing self-delusion; the term practice emphasizes that it is about a regular activity rather than about fixed beliefs). A good way to get a feel for his perspective might be the first episode(s) of his After Socrates youtube series
and from my impression, a lot of this is practicing the ability of inhabiting/changing the currently active agent-arena-perspective, exploring its boundaries, not flinching away from noticing its limitations, engaging with the perspectives which others have built and so on. Generally, a kind of fluidity in the mental motions which are involved in this.
I hope my descriptions are sufficiently right to give an impression of his perspective and whether there are some ideas that are valuable to you :)
Thanks for this comment, Mart, and for the pointer to Vervaeke—does seem plausibly quite relevant. And “functional agent-arena-relationship” seems like an interesting angle on not-being-a-Zombie.
Thank you for another beautiful essay at real thinking! This time about the mental stance itself.
I think there is a strong conceptual overlap with what John Vervaeke describes as Relevance Realisation and wisdom.
I’ll attempt a summary of my understanding of John Vervaeke’s Relevance Realisation.
A key capability of any agentic/living beings is to prune the exponentially exploding space of possibilities when making any decision or thought. We are computationally bounded, and how we deal with that is crucial. Vervaeke terms the process that does this Relevance Realisation.
There is a lot of detail to his model, but let’s jump to how some of this plays out in human thinking: A core aspect in how we are agentic is our use of memeplexes that form an “agent-arena-relationship”—we combine a worldview with an agent that is suited to that world and then tie our identity to that agent. We build toy versions all the time (many games are like this), but—according to Vervaeke’s theses in the “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” lectures—modern western culture has somewhat lost track of the cultural structures which allow individuals to coordinate on and (healthily) grow their mind’s agent-arena-relationship. We have institutions of truth (how to reach good factual statements rather than falsehoods), but not of wisdom (how to live with a healthy stance towards reality rather than bullshit. Historically religious institutions played that role but they now successfully do that for fewer and fewer people)
Inhabiting a functional such relationship feels alive and vibrant (“inhabit” = tying one’s identity into these memes), whereas the lack of a functional agent-arena-relationship feels dream-like (zombies are a good representation; maybe “NPC” is a more recent meme that points at this).
A related thing is people having a spiritual experience: this involves glimpsing a new agent-arena-relationship which then sometimes gets nourished into a re-structuring of one’s self-concept and priorities.
tying this back to “real thinking”
Although the process I described is not the same thing as real thinking, I do think that there are important similarities.
Regarding how to do this well, one important point of Vervaeke’s is that humans necessarily enter the world with very limited concepts of “self”, “agent” or “arena”. This perspective makes it clear that a core part of what we do while growing up is refining these concepts. A whole lot of our nature is about doing this process of transcending our previous self-concept. Verveake loves the quote “the sage is to the adult as the adult is to the child” to point at what the word wisdom means.
The process according to his recommendations, involves
a Community of Practice (a community of people who share the goal of re-orienting themselves. One such is forming with and around him at awakentomeaning.com),
an Ecology of Practices (meditation, reflecting on philosophy, embodiment practices, etc. are all contributing factors to reducing self-delusion; the term practice emphasizes that it is about a regular activity rather than about fixed beliefs). A good way to get a feel for his perspective might be the first episode(s) of his After Socrates youtube series
and from my impression, a lot of this is practicing the ability of inhabiting/changing the currently active agent-arena-perspective, exploring its boundaries, not flinching away from noticing its limitations, engaging with the perspectives which others have built and so on. Generally, a kind of fluidity in the mental motions which are involved in this.
I hope my descriptions are sufficiently right to give an impression of his perspective and whether there are some ideas that are valuable to you :)
Thanks for this comment, Mart, and for the pointer to Vervaeke—does seem plausibly quite relevant. And “functional agent-arena-relationship” seems like an interesting angle on not-being-a-Zombie.