Notes from “RELEVANCE, MEANING AND THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF WISDOM” by John Vervaeke and Leo Ferraro

• “Any definition of a product implicitly presupposes the process by which it is generated. Any theory of a process likewise relies upon an implicit concept of the resulting product.” (page 2)

• Problem formulation is more important in effective problem solving than the actual initial state, end state, and steps to get there because reality always offers too wide of a variety of options to compute. It is in effective problem formulation that we can discard a majority of less relevant options for the few that we should actually spend time computing. (avoiding wicked problems > increasing compute power) - the common formulation of the problem precludes its solution

• Relevance realization - To be able to usefully ignore information in a context-sensitive manner to enable our action.

  • There are 3 kinds of relevance realization:
    • Co-relevance - how things relate to each other
    • Importance - how things relate to us
    • Transcendence - how things relate to our social environment

• One’s expertise can be used both for good or bad, yet wisdom seems to be inherently normative. (Is can only be about making life good)

• Self-reinforced-cone-shaped pile of sand with temporary form instability due to new input = self-reinforced feedback loops in the brain with temporary periods of restructuring due to new input . Both are self-organizing (end of page 10 and page 11)

• Foolishness is parasitical processing (it is a self-destructive feedback loop that takes control of the self-organizing characteristics of the brain to spread itself. It is different from ignorance - lack of knowledge - and lack of intelligence)

• “A habitual way of learning to learn results in a cognitive style for an organism” (page 15)

  • Learning to learn = noticing patterns in how you are processing information and restructuring those patterns to improve how information is being processed.

• The wise person is very focused on the transcendence dimension of relevance realization.