John Vervaeke

John Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto whose work centres on meaning in life, cognitive ecology, and what he calls relevance realization — the question of how a finite agent decides what is worth attending to at all.

Relevance realization is the part I keep returning to, because it is the same problem that shows up in any system that has to select from more input than it can process. His framing is psychological rather than computational, but the structure is recognisable from a direction I work in more often: a knowledge graph is an attempt to solve a version of it mechanically, deciding in advance which relations are worth making traversable. Metadata schemas make the same bet, and the Open Research Knowledge Graph is that bet applied to the literature. All of them work by fixing relevance ahead of time; Vervaeke’s argument is that a cognitive agent cannot, and that the continuous re-solving of the problem is most of what cognition is.

Whether that argument transfers to machine systems is not obvious to me, and he does not claim it does. But it is a useful corrective when designing a schema, because it names what a fixed schema gives up.

His long-form series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is the main entry point, running from ancient cognitive practices through to contemporary cognitive science.

See also: reading and thinkers for where this sits in the garden, and knowledge graphs for the machine-side version of the relevance problem.