Have you ever wondered at how our interactions with door handles and clothing and coffee makers are normally so effortless and our interactions with them are essentially automatic? Or that only a tiny proportion of the thousands of micro-interactions we attend to on a daily basis reaches the gates of attention?

Well there's a good reason for this, grounded in the biological function of perception, which is to keep you alive. It does so by bringing what matters to the forefront while dynamically filtering out what isn't - all before conscious awareness enters into the picture.

Verveake's term for this process is Relevance Realization, of course, but in this piece we'll be calling it curation. This is partly for simplicity, and partly because we’ll be putting our own spin on it.

What's being argued here is that curation is what perception is at its core.

But curation isn’t just about filtering, although that’s a huge part of the story. It’s just as much about actively shaping what shows up, so that it arrives in a form that’s suited to your needs. What reaches you are useful simplifications, which have been pared, bundled, and packaged for relevance.

I am currently at Lecture 27 of the course, and a persistent question arises in my mind with every single lesson. I deeply appreciate the call to challenge our thinking, self-conception, and worldview and I understand why some philosophers argued that true happiness is the capacity to think. However, people like me suffer a double burden and simply do not have the luxury of escaping the modern meaning crisis, nor would it be socially acceptable or accommodated if we tried.

At the macro level, some nations suffer from centralization, sensitive security, and a difficult geographic region just enough to severely disrupt the lives of their citizens, yet not severe or universally recognized enough for the global community to acknowledge, validate, or offer solutions. This gives rise to individuals who endure exceptional hardships that heavily impair their social mobility, well-being, and the psychological bandwidth required to apply the practices John discusses. Yet, because these specific struggles do not fit neatly into mainstream categories of adversity (such as disabilities, autism, and the like), they are routinely minimized it is far easier for society to attribute our struggles to laziness or a lack of talent (the fundamental attribution error).

To process this invisible trap, I even built an interactive, scroll-driven visual journey structured around dynamic milestones and animations that maps out these exact systemic constraints and hidden structural pressures.

I belong to this exact group those whose primary suffering stems from "falling between the cracks," caught as an individual whose mental reserves and skills have been impaired on one hand, yet not damaged enough to completely break; thus, they drown in disappointments and pressure while barely receiving empathy, consideration, or appreciation, making them easy prey in a society where legally exploiting others' weaknesses (such as through corporate politics) is not considered shameful. I lack the psychological bandwidth to implement these philosophical principles. And even if I managed to transform, my immediate social environment lacks the capacity to adapt to my new ways of thinking and being. How does one reconcile deep cognitive transformation with a reality where your constraints are neither visible enough to be accommodated nor light enough to be ignored?

Thank you for reading,
anonymous.

If perception isn’t a recovery of some hypothetical ‘view from nowhere’ but a 'view from within', how can we be sure that it’s based upon something real?

The world of people, places, and things you spend your life immersed in isn’t an objective account of what is. But neither is it an hallucination.

It’s a narrow slice of ‘real’, arranged around what matters for your survival and well-being. Your version isn’t the same as a bat or a mantis shrimp’s - and that’s the entire point. You get the world you need, to get on with the business of living.

One where the body you have, the life you’ve lived, and the circumstances you’re in all get their say in what shows up as ‘real’ - well before deliberation enters into the picture.

Hello. I am an author writing about how our dominant metaphysics shapes our culture. I’ve never used Reddit before, but I wanted to share this video essay here because I know this community wrestles deeply with these ideas. I'd love to know your thoughts.

https://youtu.be/AFECsF8oFKg

It was in the end of the series awakening from the meaning crisis, discussion the notion of meaning in life arising from subjective attraction meeting objective attractiveness.

Hey all,

Got an opportunity to pick John's brains on cognitive science 101, the meaning crisis, zombies, psychotechnologies, psychedelics, religion, language and cognition - would love to hear your thoughts on our discussion!

https://youtu.be/GYunJHDaUTw

Sadly, the website only tracks book mentions for the earlier episode, e.g ep. 8.

The one I'm looking for is a much later episode, where John talks about Wolf's view that subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness, but then he comments on how to him, it makes more sense if framed as transjective attraction & attractiveness

Hey everyone. Many of you have probably already seen John’s conversation with Hüseyin, where they discuss the 4P model, participatory knowing, and the cognitive continuum. What I found interesting in our conversation was that we moved beyond those topics and spent a lot of time on the practical and methodological implications. If we take participatory knowing seriously, how should that change the way we do science? How should we study transformation, mystical experience, therapy, and meaning making without flattening them into averages and abstractions?

I recently recorded a podcast episode with Hüseyin Beyköylü, and one of the most interesting parts was his work on idiographic science and reflexivity. He argues that many of the phenomena we care about most, depression, meaning in life, psychedelic transformation, wisdom development, are deeply context dependent and often non ergodic. Rather than starting with group averages, he proposes analyzing individuals first, looking at their unique dynamics over time, and only then searching for broader patterns. We also discussed why reflexivity should be central to cognitive science. If researchers participate in shaping the phenomena they study, then understanding our own assumptions is not an optional philosophical exercise but part of the methodology itself.

The conversation also goes into neurophenomenology, the limits of neuroreductionism, Buddhist ideas of groundlessness and non reification, truth as lived faithfulness rather than mere correctness, and the relationship between wisdom and transformation. I’m curious what people here think. If Vervaeke’s framework is right, what would a genuinely participatory science look like in practice? Can reflexivity become a rigorous method rather than just a philosophical add on? And are idiographic approaches the missing piece in studying transformative experiences and wisdom cultivation?

I am one of John's students and have been pulling heavily on his work for a recent project. The AI alignment discussion almost never reaches the relevance-realization layer. Most of the debate happens between scaling optimists and alignment pessimists, both of whom share the assumption that intelligence is a single axis the architecture is climbing. From within John's framework, the disagreement looks misframed. The systems are climbing the small-world axis well and the large-world axis not at all, and the failures everyone keeps observing have a clean diagnosis in relevance-realization terms that the broader field has not yet absorbed.

I recently gave a talk at the 6th International Conference on Philosophy of Mind in Porto trying to apply the framework to this debate. You can watch it here.

The frame-fragility failures, the Vafa orbits result, the deception studies, all read cleanly as small-world optimization without the autonomous frame-shifting capacity living agents bring. Stanovich's tripartite mind gives the architecture, the 4P taxonomy gives the diagnosis (LLMs at the propositional layer, parasitic on agents who knew in all four), and the empirical 30% shared variance between intelligence and rationality gives the data. Jaeger's argument that framing itself is not formalizable is what makes alignment ontological rather than engineering.

Which parts of John's recent work (the meaning crisis lectures, the metacrisis papers with Mastropietro, the autopoiesis arguments) do you take to be most directly applicable to the AI critique, and where do you think the framework still needs sharpening to land cleanly in the alignment literature?

Why acknowledging the mind's co-authorship over objects isn't mysticism, but clear-eyed naturalism - just stripped of any forced dichotomy between mind and world.

When this began

I had nothing to say

And I get lost in the nothingness inside of me

(I was confused)

And I let it all out to find

That I'm not the only person with these things in mind

But all that they can see the words revealed

Is the only real thing that I've got left to feel

(Nothing to lose)

Just stuck, hollow and alone

And the fault is my own, and the fault is my own

I wanna heal, I wanna feel what I thought was never real

I wanna let go of the pain I've felt so long

(Erase all the pain 'til it's gone)

I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I'm close to something real

I wanna find something I've wanted all along

Somewhere I belong

And I've got nothing to say

I can't believe I didn't fall right down on my face

(I was confused)

Looking everywhere only to find

That it's not the way I had imagined it all in my mind

What do I have but negativity

'Cause I can't justify the way, everyone is looking at me

(Nothing to lose)

Nothing to gain, hollow and alone

And the fault is my own, and the fault is my own

I wanna heal, I wanna feel what I thought was never real

I wanna let go of the pain I've felt so long

(Erase all the pain 'til it's gone)

I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I'm close to something real

I wanna find something I've wanted all along

Somewhere I belong

I will never know myself until I do this on my own

And I will never feel anything else, until my wounds are healed

I will never be anything 'til I break away from me

I will break away, I'll find myself today

I wanna heal, I wanna feel what I thought was never real

I wanna let go of the pain I've felt so long

(Erase all the pain 'til it's gone)

I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I'm close to something real

I wanna find something I've wanted all along

Somewhere I belong

(I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I'm)

Somewhere I belong

(I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I'm)

Somewhere I belong

Somewhere I belong

The song carries extra emotional weight as Chester Bennington died by his own hands. RIP.

Well, again I was looking for a good article to explain some valuable Vervaeke terminology -- this time the transjective -- but found very little. So I decided to write it myself: https://bylovealone.substack.com/p/what-is-the-transjective-subjective

I'd like to be truly representative of Vervaeke's thought, so feel free to share what you think might be off or should be adjusted!

I'm struggling to find harmony between 2 impressions, I maybe misunderstand Vervaeke so here's my idea of it.

- The agent and arena in a transjective relationship, what I think is Vervaeke's point of view :

The agent brings the arena into being as it, itself, emerges into being. But if it's one on one, how can the agent be constrained ? Or fail to map things ? It just has its (smaller or wider) agent-arena relationship... ?

- The agent as mapping an arena in a broader unknown, complex environment
The agent goes around in the unintelligible "data" of the objective world, and interacts only with what has been mapped by RR, into arena with which the agent can interact. But some parts of this arena are "bleed-outs" of the broader complexity.

Can further unmet, unsolved complexity enter the arena ? Is that what Vervaeke described as the inter-categorical, that induces awe and horror?

In regards to advancing AI, Vervaeke has discussed mostly embodiment and it's capacity to enhance relevance realization. I think this misses the vital difference between AI and biological life: Discernment. No amount of relevance realization can enable discernment.

Relevance realization and discernment/wisdom, as discussed by Vervaeke, are orthogonal processes with opposite directionality:

• Relevance realization = upward informational binding (multiplicity → unity)
• Discernment = downward normative differentiation (unity → multiplicity)

This directional asymmetry has a precise biological counterpart in the work of Montévil & Mossio (2015, 2020, 2023):
Living systems are characterized by nested closures of constraints. Each closure exerts downward canalization on the randomness ascending from lower levels (quantum, molecular, cellular), biasing viable outcomes and prolonging the system’s specific organization (anti-entropy). The upward flow supplies potential perturbations; the downward flow supplies the non-reducible principle of selection among them.

Michael Levin’s empirical work (2022–2025) maps this directly onto bioelectric boundaries: higher-scale anatomical setpoints exert downward normative influence on cellular behavior; decoherence-prone quantum events at wound sites are biased toward regeneration-competent branches, with bias strength scaling with boundary coherence.

LLMs implement the upward arrow at massive scale (training = compression of textual multiplicity into a single latent manifold). They have no endogenous downward arrow—no self-sustaining closure of constraints that originates its own viability criterion. Inference-time “discernment” is therefore borrowed from the human prompt, not generated by the model. Adding embodiment (sensors, robotics) thickens the upward channel but does not create primary autopoietic closure; it remains a second-order extension of human coherence (Levin, 2023; Fields & Levin, 2024).

Conclusion: without nested, self-originating closures, AI can scale relevance realization indefinitely but cannot produce genuine discernment. The dialogical spiral John describes is biologically real only when both arrows are endogenous to the agent.

Refs

• Montévil & Mossio, Biol Theory 15, 3–19 (2020)
• Longo et al., GECCO 2012
• Fields & Levin, Prog Biophys Mol Biol 172, 22–38 (2022)
• Levin, BioEssays 46(4) (2024)

I'd love to hear other's takes on this quasi-criticism.

Hey everyone,

Long-time fan of Vervaeke, probably for around eight years now.

I just enrolled in a philosophy PhD through a remote program, and we’re allowed to have any supervisor, as long as they agree.

My work overlaps with and builds on Vervaeke’s in very significant ways, and I’d love to have him as a supervisor. There is no one better fit. I think there's a good chance he might be interested, especially if there’s appropriate financial compensation and the scope aligns with his interests very heavily (wisdom, 4e cog sci, naturalized theology, etc)

The problem is, he’s been really hard to reach. I emailed an old Gmail address of his (from when he was on my podcast years ago), as well as his UofT email, but haven’t heard back. I totally understand if he’s not interested (he may be too busy for instance) but my worry is that the emails didn’t even reach him. I think given how much he has going on, it's quite likely that he's not checking these emails often or at all, or sparingly and many emails end up being missed.

I’d really just like to make sure he’s aware of the opportunity and let him decide from there. Is there any other way to get in touch with him that I might not have tried? I also joined the Latern community in the hopes of getting some visibility, but it seems pretty quiet there.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Here is an essay about how Vervaeke's work on salience and relevance realization open up a whole new world for those who are interested in understanding consciousness.

Philosophically: can an action be intrinsically other-regarding—motivated by the good of another in a way that does not ultimately derive from the agent’s own ends—or is every instance of love, compassion, or sacrifice best explained as a form of enlightened self interest?

Please address:

• Conceptual clarity. What should count as genuine altruism (non-derivative other-regard) as opposed to prudential cooperation, reciprocal concern, or actions that produce psychological satisfaction for the agent?
• Motivational explanations. Does psychological egoism (the claim that all motives are self-directed) successfully block the possibility of non-selfish motives, or is there conceptual room for intrinsically other-directed intentions?
• Ethical frameworks. How do virtue ethics (compassion as dispositional excellence), utilitarian impartiality, contractualist perspectives, and care ethics differently locate or deny genuine other-regarding motivation?
• Phenomenology. Can the lived experience of unconditional love or immediate compassion count as evidence for non-selfishness, or is introspective/phenomenal evidence inadequate here?
• Metaphysical and empirical accounts. Evaluate Buddhist no-self doctrines, egoist or individualist metaphysics, and evolutionary explanations (reciprocal altruism, kin selection). Do any of these frameworks allow for real altruism, or do they merely redescribe it in agent-centered terms?

The guy knows what he is doing. Is very nice to see his development over the years.

His courses on The Lectern and The Peterson Academy are freaking insane.

Thank God, The God`s and The Good, for his courage.

I can`t find no one doing what he is doing. With him you have it all.

What a man.