REBEL

WISDOM
SENSEMAKING
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WE EK 3
WISDOM WITH
JOHN VERVAEKE
 WEEK 3

WISDOM WITH
JOHN VERVAEKE

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 WISDOM

Welcome to the Week 3 workbook!

This week, we are still in the interior-oriented part of the course, focusing on how we
develop wisdom. Wisdom isn't the same as knowledge; it is our capacity to perceive clearly
and gain insight. Wisdom frees us from cognitive traps, and helps us to act in a way that
benefits ourselves and others. As psychiatrist and author Roger Walsh has pointed out in his
cross-cultural studies of wisdom, it is almost always tied to compassion. Cultivating wisdom
is essential to our sensemaking, and in taking right action in the world.

In the work book we’ll look at how we can apply some of John Vervaeke’s work in cognitive
science in service of our goal of developing more wisdom. Specifically, we’ll be looking at
what causes some of our foolishness and self-deception by understanding some cognitive
dynamics that we can become aware of and change.

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 TO DO IN WEEK 3

● Read theory leading up to John’s session

● Written Exercises
● Pod Inquiry

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This work book prepares you for John’s lecture session. He asked us to ask you to watch 12
hours of his videos for a good theoretical grounding. We did most of that for you so you don’t
have to! Below you find a distillation and a glossary of his key ideas mentioned in the video
lectures. Note that the theory presented below are not always from Vervaeke's research,
but from many other researchers and thinkers too.

If you do have time available, watch episodes 3, 28, 42, 44, 45 of his Awakening from the
Meaning Crisis lecture series.

Below are four additional links to dialogos practices in the order in which they should
be watched according to John. These explain more of why of doing intersubjective
psychotechnologies like Pod Inquiry and breakout groups are highly relevant for
developing wisdom:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYX2JnODL3Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_N5WhH_W-o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g6rwOa-pGs&t=35s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UovLJTLbFhU&t=185s

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 PREFACE TO THE THEORY
The theory is meant to introduce new concepts and language that, with presence, can help you
see your cognition, meaning making and the habitual way you pay attention to things in action.
We learned about how our historical conditioning may not serve us in every context last week.
A deeper understanding of your cognitive apparatus can help free your perception and give
more options for wiser action.

We do not claim to be exhaustive in this presentation of John’s work on wisdom. We have tried
to select the most useful concepts, to be applied in the context of our course. So what follows
is not complete. If you want to get the bigger picture we highly recommend the entire online
lecture series ‘Awakening from the Meaning Crisis’.
The core idea to grasp in this course and workbook is the notion of ‘Relevance Realisation’, briefly
defined as:
‘[...] the ability to ignore vast numbers of options (hopefully poor ones) and focus on a small
set of potentially fruitful ones.’

The theory below explores some of the core dynamics which constitute this process. We’ve
woven in written reflection exercises to get you to become conscious of the subprocesses that
make up your own ‘salience landscaping’ and relevance realization. These reflections bring the
theory down to earth and connect it to your own practices and personal challenge.

There will be plenty of new concepts to learn. New language is helpful in the way that it allows us
to make new distinctions. Let us know if you have questions about the terms. Some terms are
explained more by John in the intro video. You’ll also find a brief glossary included of some terms
used in the text.

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 THEORETICAL GROUNDING
RELEVANCE REALISATION
Relevance Realisation (RR) sits at the core of your intelligence. This process is necessary
because the same processes that make us intelligent and able to act effectively in the world
are also the ones that help us navigate, or ignore, much of the large amount of information
that our nervous system picks up.

All that incoming information must be processed and managed to avoid what is called in
computer science a ‘combinatorial explosion’: even a relatively small set of parameters can
result in a vast number of paths through a problem space, a number that exceeds human
computational capability. That means that we’re confronted with too many possibilities and
hence uncertainty and overwhelm.

A human being’s ability to avoid combinatorial explosions stems from the way they can
convert ill-defined problems into well-defined problems. To do that, certain actions have to
be immediately ruled out by not including them in a problem space during problem
formulation, thereby making the search space far more tractable (no one even considers
including the ambient temperature of the room while taking notes in a lecture). The key is
our ability to zero in on the relevant information and the relevant structure of the information
to perform the actions needed for good problem formulation.

So we have to limit the overwhelm of our consciousness by limiting the many interpretations
and options we’re confronted with. Our ability to solve problems, to navigate combinatorially
dense problem spaces, is contingent upon our ability to constrain that space.

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But here’s the catch - what these selective processes take in and leave out, fortified by years
of conditioning, which for most of us has turned into an unconscious cognitive style, can also
prejudice and bias us, possibly leading to self-deception.

There is an important distinction to be made here, between an ill and well-defined problem.
Know that most real-world problems are ill-defined problems, simply because we do not have
all the information available to us.

The difference between these two is the presence of relevance realization, or its absence.
That’s why it matters for our sensemaking, how we formulate a question or problem matters.
Problem formulation helps us avoid the same combinatorial explosion and can so help us deal
with ill-defined problems.

Second, logic and the ‘psychotechnologies’ that enhance our insight, like meditation, also are
crucial. Insight can change ill—definedness. However, our relevance realization can also lead
us astray if the wrong things become salient in our consciousness.

Insight can rearrange the way our RR apparatus functions and how we frame problems. In
short: insight is crucial for the cultivation of wisdom. (Even this paragraph might bring you
insight and have the rearranging effect).

Another helpful capacity to become a better problem solver and predicter is to be able to
categorize things, developing ‘categorizing perception’. This can be simply remembering a
similar situation from the past and map it onto a present situation. But again, helpful as it is,
the old may not map onto the present perfectly.

Truth and relevance are also not the same thing. We can say many true things about two
different objects, but they are not necessarily relevant. What is relevant and salient differ
depending on the context.
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Salience here means what motivates you, what arouses your energy and what attracts your
attention. This is why we make the course personal by introducing a challenge, so your own
purpose can surface. What was salient before, like a pack of cookies in the supermarket, is
less salient in the consciousness of someone who decides to improve their diet for health
reasons. We see that the right things become salient through the lens of purpose, and thus
lessens irrelevance in your life and increases your problem-solving capacity.

This process is called ‘hyperbolic discounting’ - how much you are reducing the salience of a
stimulus.

“A definition of relevance is impossible. Relevance realization isn’t the application of a

definition, it’s intelligently ignoring irrelevance and making relevance salient.”
John Vervaeke

In conclusion: relevance realization is about establishing relations of relevance between

things we perceive. This ability sits at the core of meaning making. This capacity is essential
for generating insight and insight is essential for wisdom and sensemaking. The threat to us
is the inability to make those connections. Also, salience can lead us astray if it takes us away
from what is relevant.

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 EXERCISE 3.1

● How would you rate your capacity to zero in on relevant information in the context of the
challenge you chose?

● When making decisions, what is most salient to you? Your emotions, intuition or
rationality? Do you know why?

● Does this salience point you in the right direction when problem solving in the context of
your developmental challenge?

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 INTELLIGENCE, RATIONALITY AND WISDOM

First, intelligence does not equal rationality and does not equal logicality. Rationality,
as John uses it, is more about the systematic ability to overcome self-deception and the
affordance of the development of meaning in life.

We need other competencies, again insight and good problem formulation.

● What are other possible missing pieces?

● What psychotechnologies can we employ?

A cognitive style is needed that cultivates a sensitivity to our biases and actively counteracts
them - active open-mindedness (AOM). Mindfulness and active open-mindedness (AOM)
can facilitate insight and cognitive flexibility and optimize the relevance realization that’s at
the core of our intelligence. Active openmindedness is a psychotechnology that makes us
more rational; it’s learning to see how heuristic processes, central to our adoptive intelligence
are present in our day to day behavior. This overcomes the ways in which our intelligence
deceives us.

But the key skill is finding a balance - don’t override the cognitive biases too much. They have a
heuristic sensemaking function in mitigating the combinatorial explosion we’ve described before.

So we are seeking an optimal form of open-mindedness, not a maximal one. Connected to

that is what Vervaeke calls an ‘attitude-ecology’ of sensitivity and sensibility that can help us
in a domain-general manner to aptly spot and respond to the presence of cognitive bias.

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We are learning this active open mindedness with the practice of presence and meditation.
We can generate our own instances of learning and problem solving in a directed manner,
that’s called a ‘need for cognition’ which is the desire to think and reflect and the degree
to which you are motivated to go out and look for problems, generating your own instances
of learning and problem-solving. The need for cognition is also a predictor of active open-
mindedness. We can cultivate our attitude ecology through curiousity and wonder.

Being a good problem finder is also an aspect of wisdom, it’s partly a creative capacity.
We can find new problems that if solved, have a significant impact on known and existing
problems. That’s called creating a ‘problem nexus’.

“Wisdom begins in wonder.”

Socrates

Plato is also convinced philosophy begins in wonder, but expands it towards awe. That can set
you on a quest to Anagoge (see Glossary). Aristotle veers more to developing wonder towards
curiosity. Wonder then gets you to formulate questions, which you then can answer.

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 RATIONALITY
Researcher Stannovitch says we can distinguish between two systems, they’re not entirely
separate, but each foregrounding and backgrounding at times. They are systems of how we
process information

● System 1 works more intuitively, associational, implicit processing. And it’s very fast.
This is a coping system, for being involved with things in an everyday manner. It’s operating
mostly in the background.

● System 2 operates more deliberately, rationally. It works inferentially, through

argumentation. Its, slower, good for planning, is more explicit and foreground.

We can’t rely on system 2 too much. We would be entering the realm of combinatorial
explosion and easily get slowed down and overwhelmed. But this system has to be able to
override the more fluid and intuitive System 1 to a degree. The systems are in an opponent
relationship, both work to make us adaptive. S2 has a corrective function for S1 so you don’t
easily leap to (foolish) conclusions.

Let’s go back to the notion and practice of active open-mindedness (AOM). In S1 is where
the heuristics and biases are operating which can make us leap to conclusions, but S2 can
override that leap from happening. Active open-mindedness teaches us to protect the S2
processing from being overrun by S1. We need to be able to intervene.

You are foolish, if you’re highly intelligent but have not trained and developed AOM, as to have
S2 properly protected from interference from S1.

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We can zero in further and look at that leaping. (Here we call it ‘cognitive leaping’). The
better you are at leaping, having a few clues and coming to a correct conclusion about truth,
the better you are at insight. The point is to spot the tension - if you shut off the machinery
(S1) that makes us leap, we also shut off the machinery for insight. So, we have to give up
simplistic notions of rationality. Simply put, we can be both too rational and too intuitive.
I am sure we all know people who fall on one end of the spectrum.

The main point is again a skill we can learn: these systems need to either be backgrounded or
foregrounded depending on the situation we find ourselves in, or a fit for the type of problem
to be solved. The more rational S2 needs to be foregrounded when theorizing, the intuitive
S1 when we’re doing therapy for example. This capacity to do that dynamically demands the
cognitive styles of both mindfulness and AOM. The task is to optimize for that ‘opponent
processing’ of both systems and our cognitive styles.

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 EXERCISE 3.2
Now that you understand System 1 and 2 and how they relate, reflect on:

● Do you have a dominance and/or preference in/for one system?

● How well do you currently shift between S1 & S2 modes, and in which contexts? Are you
bringing the right mode to the right problem?

● How does this theory apply to your personal challenge? Can you spot where you need
to make adjustments, become more deliberately rational or do you need to rely on S2 a bit
more?

● Do you need more mindfulness and insight, or practice AOM to regulate the S1 / S2 modal
fluidity better depending on context?

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 INTELLIGENCE AND ERROR
We can relate to our intelligence in two modes:

● It’s a fixed trait

● It’s malleable

The first mode has us relate to making errors in a specific way – any errors you make discloses
to you that you’re not smart. This first view also focuses us on the product – the error.

In the malleable mode, an error points to the skills you’re using or the effort you made. We
can apply our agency and change our skill level. This second view also focuses on the process,
the skills, rather than the product, the error.

So what does this mean? It means that the way you identify with your processing has a huge
impact on your problem solving ability and your proclivity for self-deception and your need for
cognition. Rationality is an existential thing, it’s how you’re identifying with your own cognitive
processing.

But it’s not just an informational processing thing. Where intelligence is fixed, rationality is not.
It’s highly malleable. It might be more interesting to ask yourself not how intelligent you are,
but how rational you are. The more rational you become, the more wise you are.

Seen through this lens, adopting the identity of being a ‘learner’ instead of being fixed can
make all the difference.

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 EXERCISE 3.3

● Which mindset do you have regarding your intelligence?

● How did this attitude develop in life?

● How is it part of your self image and does it enable or hold you back?

● What could you do differently in that mindset?

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 WISDOM AND VIRTUE
Remember the values and virtues we presented in the introductory workbook?

● Truth

● Courage

● Curiousity

● Presence

● Authenticity

“Life situations do not come labeled with the needed virtues or strengths attached. There is
thus the problem of relevance.”

Virtue and wisdom are related, so we should not maximise them individually according to John
– like be brutally honest all the time - but optimize moving dynamically between them depending
on the context. Are virtues, like courage and generosity, logically independent from each other?
Or are they related and if so, when are they in conflict? What are the relevant virtues in which
situation? Virtues often come with rules, but applying these rules depend on our relevance
realisation. Sometimes it’s best to not apply a virtue through prescription, but develop ones
we don’t have – an aspirational response.

So we need wisdom in order to be virtuous. And each virtue is a more granular way of being
wise in a particular situation. There is a connection therefor to the cultivation of wisdom and
the pursuit of a virtuous way of life. The application in life is sometimes called practical wisdom,

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or as the Greeks called it - ‘phronesis’. This is the kind of wisdom needed to be virtuous, to be
contextually sensitive and have good judgement, knowing what is the most appropriate thing
to do in a situation.

This dynamic, processual way can be contrasted with the way many people think about being
virtuous – having a set of rules, often moral commandments, they can apply in any given
situation. This approach can become problematic if we confuse ‘having laws’ with people being
wise.

When relying on rules or law, we must ask ourselves if the imposition of them causes people
to pursue wisdom and virtue less.

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 EXERCISE 3.4 (optional)

● Do you rely on rules or more on dynamic ways of problem solving when confronted with
challenging life situations in which virtues play a role?

● What virtuous rules are your sacred cows?

● How do you know they are true for any situation?

● What happens when others do not play by your rules? Is your sovereignty at stake in
those moments?

The processual, phronetic way of knowing demands more flexibility – a perspectival-situational

awareness (see glossary) that activates the right procedures that fit the right contextual
situation.

It requires seeing what is specific about a situation, in many different domains. It should not be
confused with expertise though, that is domain specific and a narrowly contextualised form of
sensemaking.

Some things are specific, but much can be generalized and solved through application of the
rules. The skill to have is to integrate the rules with the processes, put principles into practice
and practice in a principled manner.

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 SOME WISDOM FEATURES
What are some of the features of someone wise? Five criteria have been identified by some
researchers Vervaeke lists. He has critiques of these, but are useful talking points.

● Rich, factual knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of life. The principles.

● Rich procedural knowledge about the pragmatics of life. Wisdom is not about what you
know but more how you know. How to put the principles into practice.

● Lifespan contextualism - a kind of perspectival knowing, taking the big picture, but also
able to also zoom in.

● Relativism in values and virtues. (Vervaeke sees this as a capacity for tolerance.
Fallibility or epistemic humility is a better term he thinks.)

● Recognition and management of uncertainty.

Again, seeing wisdom as expertise is misleading. We can come to overfocus on procedural

knowledge (see glossary) at the expense of perspectival and participatory knowledge. It also
confuses context sensitivity with being domain specific. The thing to develop is cognitive
flexibility. So you can adapt to different situations in an efficacious manner.

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 WISDOM IN RELATIONSHIP
A few notes on the relational aspects of development of wisdom, how it can be generated in
dialogue is important for us as we practice together.

Discussing, or even imagining a discussion with another person, enhances your capacity for
wisdom. This challenges the individualist notion of rationality, think of methods like Platonic
dialogue and the stoic idea of ‘internalising the sage’.

This is effective because the move to take the perspective of another, a 3rd person perspective,
enhances the ability to overcome the transparency and biases of our own perspective. This can
be facilitated by internalizing the other. One can learn to converse with oneself.

We often speak of collective intelligence and distributed cognition. That’s problem solving that
is done with a network of embodied brains and their accompanying psycho-technologies like
dialogue, inquiry or circling. Our individual cognition is always situated within and dependent on
distributed cognition. 

Distributed cognition is important because it affords us collective intelligence, which makes use
of collective systems of meaning (culture) in order to collect, curate, and coordinate distributed
cognition in ways that enhance our collective problem solving.  

In Vervaeke’s session we’ll be looking to the interpersonal aspects of wisdom practice.

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GLOSSARY

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Salience landscape:  It is the dynamic unfolding pattern of salience with multiple texture
gradients of salience. It is the result of sizing up which is the process by which information
is featured, foregrounded, figured and framed for problem solving. As well as sizing up, it
incorporates optimal gripping (see below). Out of all the affordances given by participatory
knowing (see below) it selects those to make present within perspectival knowing. 

Propositional knowing is knowing that something is the case by asserting a belief that has its
content a proposition that can be evaluated for whether or not it is true. It is guided by a sense
of conviction and when done well results in theory (in the scientific and not everyday sense of
that term.)  This is a cognitive-linguistic form of knowing.

Procedural knowing is knowing how to do something by interacting with it skillfully. It is

guided by a sense of power and when done well results in expertise. This is a cognitive-
sensorimotor form of knowing. 

Perspectival knowing is knowing what it is like to be here and now. It is done through
attentional modification of salience landscaping (see above.) It is guided by a sense of presence
and when done well results in the situational awareness that selects affordances for skill
acquisition and application. It is a consciousness-state of mind form of knowing.

Participatory knowing is knowing by participating in a process of co-identification with

something or someone. Biological evolution, cultural evolution, and relevance realization (RR)
evolution of what is relevant create a mutual shaping of agency and arena so that they belong
and fit together.  This generates transjective (see below) affordances for action and cognition.
It is guided by a primordial background sense of belonging, and when done well results in
reciprocal opening/anagoge (see below).

It is a form of knowing that works by modifying the machinery of the self and the way it both
externalizes/projects itself onto the world and the way in internalizes/introjects the world into
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itself ( all within the three levels, biological, cultural, and logistical (RR.))  It is a form of knowing-
being-loving.

Optimal grip comes from Merleau-Ponty but has been developed by Dreyfus and Taylor and
others. It is the idea that when interacting with an object there are tradeoffs between seeing the
whole and getting all the details and organisms dynamically manage those tradeoffs by find the
sweet spot that gets the best of both for the particular task at hand.  I argue that in additional
to an optimal grip on the object there is an optimal grip on the subject: we are always (for
evolutionary reasons) trying to get an optimal balance between seeing as much as we can and
being seen as little as we can (prospect and refuge theory).  I would argue that there is a higher-
order optimal grip between object optimal grip and subject optimal grip.  Finally, there is meta-
optimal grip in which one is trying to balance between higher order optimal grip in this situation
and transfer to other situations, i.e., trying to optimally grip here and now in a way that may also
be useful there and then. 

A phase-function fit is the idea developed with Leo Ferraro about insight problem solving.  It is
the idea that attentional functions need to be matched to a phase of problem solving in order
to afford insight problem solving, and when mistimed in their application they can actually
undermine problem solving.  When needed to break an inappropriate frame one needs to scale
down attention, and when one needs to make a new frame one needs to scale up attention. 

Inappropriate framing is one which frames a problem in a way which still leaves it
combinatorially explosive, too ill-defined, or in which ones framing has trapped one within a well
defined problem formulation with a tractable search space, but that space will not actually lead
to the goal. 

Transjectivity is the real relation between the mind and the world. It is neither found with the
inner mental world of the subjective nor the external physical world of the objective. It is the
primordial meta-affordance (source of affordances)  that make possible both our subjective and
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objective worlds. This is where RR is found, it is where culture and biological niche construction
are found. 

Anagoge: This is Plato's version of reciprocal opening in which the world and the self reciprocally
complexify. The self complexifies as an agent and the world (in disclosure) self-complexifies as
an arena. For Plato one improves one's discernment into and understanding of the processes
and patterns of the psyche. This affords the reduction of internal conflict. This reduces self-
deception by decreasing the gap between what we find urgently salient and what we rationally
discern as more relevant. This reduction in self-deception enhances our internal sense of
fullness of being because of the reduced conflict, and it enhances our perception of reality
because of the reduction in the biasing effects of self-deception.

So we see more deeply into the world, i.e., we discern the difference between real causal
patterns and illusory correlational patterns. We thereby understand the world by being better
at tracking the real patterns. This expanded arena in which we are more in contact with the
world satisfies our need for contact with reality. This expanded arena also trains our skills of
discernment and understanding which we can then internalize into awareness of our psyche.

So now we are even better are discerning its patterns and understanding its principles, and
so the whole process now feeds back on itself. Both of our deepest needs for inner peace and
contact with reality are being meet, and the self and the world are reciprocally opening up in a
way which engenders an experience of love. This love conjoined to the sense of peace and the
sense of con-formity to what is real is the best human life possible according to Plato. It is the
wisest life. 

Self-organizing criticality (SOC). is a form of self-organization in which a system organizes into

some stable structure, but the very process of self-organization eventually also pushes it into a
critical phase where that structure breaks down. That break down actually then affords a new
structure emerging, and the cycle repeats. Vervaeke and Ferraro argue that it is one of the ways
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RR is implemented in brains, and Stephen and Dixon (and others) have argued it is what happens
within insight. 

Psychotechnology A socially generalized way of formatting, manipulating and enhancing

information processing, that’s readily internalisable into human cognition, and applicable in
a domain-general manner. It must extend and empower cognition in a reliable and extensive
manner and be highly generalizable among people.

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