So last time I went through with you a series of arguments trying to show you the centrality of the issue of relevance realization. I want to review that with you and then try to begin with an account of how we might come up with a naturalistic explanation of relevance realization and then build that into an overall plausibility argument about using that notion of relevance realization to explain many of the features that we consider central to human spirituality, meaning-making, self-transcendence, altered states of consciousness, and wisdom.
We did a series of argument that pointed towards how central relevance realization is. We did arguments around the nature of problem-solving, and remember we saw the idea there of search space as proposed by Newell and Simon and we faced a couple of important issues there. We faced issues of combinatorial explosion, and what we need is problem formulation or problem framing that allows us to avoid combinatorial explosion by zeroing in on relevant information. I also propose to you (and I’ll return to this later) that problem-solving is our best way of trying to understand what we mean by intelligence: your capacity as being a general problem-solver.
Also we noted the problem of ill-definedness, very often a problem formulation is needed in order to determine what the relevant information is and what the relevant structure of the information is so that again points us into relevance. These two together also pointed towards a phenomena we have already talked about (insight) and the fact that you often have to solve a problem by altering your problem formulation and re-determining what you consider relevant.
We then took a look at categorization (I’ll come back to this again in another way a little bit later in this lecture), how it ultimately depends on judgments of similarity and we can get into an equivocation there. We can equivocate between a purely logical notion of similarity in which case any two objects are indefinitely similar or dissimilar to each other and if we mean instead of logical similarity (which would not help us to categorize) psychological similarity then we’re talking about making a comparison of two things in terms of the relevant features of comparison, the relevant aspects. So we’re into relevance and we’re also introducing an important idea I want you to remember, this notion of an ‘aspect’, a set of relevant features that cohere together and are relevant to us, especially in projects like categorization.
Doing good cog-sci, I do a convergence argument to get a trustworthy problem or construct and then I basically do a divergence argument to show how it has the potential to explain many important phenomena and establish a relevant balance between them, and so that’s what I’m building you. Right now we’re on this side, how all things are converging on relevance realization and then we can use this to explain many of the features that seem to be central to human spirituality, meaning-making, self-transcendence, altered states of consciousness, and wisdom.
We took a look at communication, and we saw the issue here is that the fact you have to convey more than you can say and then that led us into the work of Grice and a series of maxims that make conversational implicature possible. All of the maxims collapsed to the maxim of being relevant.
We took a look at robotics, the actual interaction with the environment. Here’s the idea of being an agent. We saw the robot was trying to pull the battery that’s also on the wagon and that wagon also has the bomb on it and what we saw is the problem of the proliferation of side effects. You can’t ignore all the side effects or you’ll be grotesquely stupid, you can’t check all side effects or you’ll be grotesquely incapable, and so therefore you have to zoom in on their relevant side effects. So again and again and again everything is centering on this.
As an autistic person at parts he seemed to argue that neurotypicality would be at the core of being intelligent.
The social situations (like asking for gas) he described he presented them as not working to never happen. However the ire and tensions when it doesn’t go as planned seemed very familiar to me. As the person giving advice I would have probably leaned more on using explicit distance descriptors (such as 250 meters) rather than nearby corner.
Connecting to how he was previously saying things he might actually mean that in order to be rational to need to be both intelligent and wise but he ends up saying that you can’t be intelligent if you are a spock. So the class of persons who are intelligent but unwise and therefore fail to be rational would be interesting. But because he uses intelligence in place of rationality here it reads as emotionally saliently offensive to me that he is saying that autistic people can’t be intelligent. Having signficant differences in salience landscape could be an interesting angle to look into autism. The previous example of most people filtering out the feeling of washlabels from their clothes is a real thing but for many autistic people the situation is so that they do feel and are bothered by the tactile feels.
So it is not human universal that he is pointing to but more of the neurotypical expererience. There might be interesting upsides on weighting global context heavily in ones operation but the claims that leaning into local context would be unlivable can easily start to read as xenoneurologically hateful. I don’t think that neurotypicality is at the core of humanity, and to the extent he is saying that an intelligent autistic person is an impossibility is is just wrong. It might be that he is mixing on what constitues him strongly on what constitues people in general strongly. The example of animal communication seems to resonate with neurotypicals being very social-dependent and the example of octopuses might have an analog in autistic people in that communication doesn’t need to be that essential to intelligence. The statement is carried with reservations but I get a feeling that he is not taking his own reservations as seriously as he would be wise to do. Previously he was saying that a good cogscientist pays attention to universals and recognising when assumed universal is broken not to be universal would seem to be a part of that.
I guess with the material he is presenting I can apply it to understand that because he doesn’t have the participatory knowing required his framing will be off and therefore the mistakes understandble. The analysis is interesting but with such core tenets being off will have large fallouts.
As a person that might not intuitively on a neurological level have salience tuning working having explicit and systematical understanding how to construct relevance seems like a sensible value proposition.
The issue of considering the right side effects, of course, made me think about EDT vs. CDT vs. FDT, tho here he’s making a simpler and more practical claim.
Episode 28: Convergence to Relevance Realization
As an autistic person at parts he seemed to argue that neurotypicality would be at the core of being intelligent.
The social situations (like asking for gas) he described he presented them as not working to never happen. However the ire and tensions when it doesn’t go as planned seemed very familiar to me. As the person giving advice I would have probably leaned more on using explicit distance descriptors (such as 250 meters) rather than nearby corner.
Connecting to how he was previously saying things he might actually mean that in order to be rational to need to be both intelligent and wise but he ends up saying that you can’t be intelligent if you are a spock. So the class of persons who are intelligent but unwise and therefore fail to be rational would be interesting. But because he uses intelligence in place of rationality here it reads as emotionally saliently offensive to me that he is saying that autistic people can’t be intelligent. Having signficant differences in salience landscape could be an interesting angle to look into autism. The previous example of most people filtering out the feeling of washlabels from their clothes is a real thing but for many autistic people the situation is so that they do feel and are bothered by the tactile feels.
So it is not human universal that he is pointing to but more of the neurotypical expererience. There might be interesting upsides on weighting global context heavily in ones operation but the claims that leaning into local context would be unlivable can easily start to read as xenoneurologically hateful. I don’t think that neurotypicality is at the core of humanity, and to the extent he is saying that an intelligent autistic person is an impossibility is is just wrong. It might be that he is mixing on what constitues him strongly on what constitues people in general strongly. The example of animal communication seems to resonate with neurotypicals being very social-dependent and the example of octopuses might have an analog in autistic people in that communication doesn’t need to be that essential to intelligence. The statement is carried with reservations but I get a feeling that he is not taking his own reservations as seriously as he would be wise to do. Previously he was saying that a good cogscientist pays attention to universals and recognising when assumed universal is broken not to be universal would seem to be a part of that.
I guess with the material he is presenting I can apply it to understand that because he doesn’t have the participatory knowing required his framing will be off and therefore the mistakes understandble. The analysis is interesting but with such core tenets being off will have large fallouts.
As a person that might not intuitively on a neurological level have salience tuning working having explicit and systematical understanding how to construct relevance seems like a sensible value proposition.
The issue of considering the right side effects, of course, made me think about EDT vs. CDT vs. FDT, tho here he’s making a simpler and more practical claim.