Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Glossary
Definitions of Key Words/ Phrases Used in the Series
This glossary is largely taken from great work by Sergio Hunt who put together a wiki for AftMC content: https://www.reddit.com/r/DrJohnVervaeke/comments/ms9tl3/our_awakening_from_the_meaning_crisis_notes_so/.
I’ve made some minor amendments and will add to it over time.
Active Open-mindedness: a set of skills, psycho-technologies, sensibilities, and sensitivity that helps you note and respond to the presence of bias in a domain-general manner. Active open-mindedness teaches you to use S2 processing to protect you from S1 processing and its danger of leaping to the wrong conclusion.
Affordance: (Gibson) a relationship of coordination between constraints, a way of co-identifying. Things present themselves to me, and I conform to it. You don’t see colors and shapes, you see affordances — this is walkable, this is where I can place things, this is moveable.
Agape: the love of creation, the way a parent loves a child, that God is demonstrating toward humanity as he creates an ongoing future, making non-persons into persons. It is our deepest appreciation for the caring that is intrinsic and constituative to the Relevance Realization that makes both the agent and the arena possible. Agape is inherently transjective and has a value independent of my valuing of it because I emerge from it and participate in it rather than being the source of it.
Agent: to be capable of organizing your cognition and your behavior so that your actions fit the situation and environment.
Akrasia: (knowing what the right thing to do is, but not doing the right thing) comes from a lack of wisdom, i.e. foolishness.
Alethea: used by Heidegger to refer to “unclosedness”, “unconcealedness”, “disclosure” or “truth”. The literal meaning of the word ἀ–λήθεια is “the state of not being hidden; the state of being evident.”
Algorithm: a technique that pursues certainty, guaranteed to find a solution or prove that a solution cannot be found.
Aporia: the kind of confrontation offered by Socrates, an irresolvable internal contradiction that forces the realization that you do not know what you claim to know.
Arena: a place that is organized such that you know how you can act in it, it makes sense to you, you know where things belong, what acts are appropriate, how to measure and calibrate your physical and intellectual performance. (ex. football arena)
Aspect Identity Shift: coming to see the no-thingness of God as the inexhaustible fount of meaning cultivation. For Tillich → the ground of meaning, intelligibility, and the relationship between them. For Nishitani → when we deeply participate in the no-thingness of Śūnyatā, we gain the ability to aspect shift the nothingness of meaninglessness, seeing it as pointing instead to its ground, an inexhaustible source of meaning cultivation that cannot be drained dry by despair.
Anagoge (ἀναγωγή): The process of wisdom as ascent or climbing, developed in Plato’s myth of the cave and Paul’s agape (the Greek and Christian forms of participatory knowing).
Autopoetic: (see self-organizing)
Availability Heuristic: judging how probable an event is by how easily you can remember a similar event or imagine a similar event.
Being Mode: needs are met by becoming something (mature, virtuous) … developmental needs. These needs relate to a particular kind of meaning…relating to things expressively.
Bioeconomy: a biological self-organizing system that is constantly dealing with the allocation and use of resources in order to develop itself (logistical norms: efficiency, resilience).
Cartesian Graphing: Rene Descarts uses algebra to invent analytic geometry, introducing the idea that equations can capture reality.
Category: a set of things that you sense belong together, not that necessarily share an essence.
Character: that aspect of yourself that you can cultivate. (Not your personality, which you were born with, given to you by biology and your environment)
Chunk Decomposition: the process of breaking up a gestalt
Cognitive Commitment: a proposition’s computational identity is all of its implications, which is combinatorily explosive. Out of all of the implications, you select which ones will be used in an inference (by using Relevance Realization). You must recognize how to apply a rule in any given context (see Situational Awareness).
Cognitive Science: the discipline that attempts to produce profound synoptic integration among the fields of neuroscience, machine learning, psychology, linguistics, and anthropology that addresses equivocation, fragmentation, and ignorance of the causal relationship between them.
Confirmation Bias: an adaptive strategy that looks for information that supports your current belief.
Contemplation: to look up towards the divine (greek: THEORIA — trying to see more deeply into reality.)
Constraint Relaxation: de-automatize my cogniztion
Courage: (Tillich) The brave person faces danger. The person with fortitude endures difficulty. But the courageous person sees through the illusion and distortion of fear or distress to what is truly good, and acting accordingly.
Credal Dominance: Propositional Knowing (having mode, willful assertion) I believe, a paradigmatic set of propositions that state what the essence of religion is in terms of truth content.
Critical Detatchment: your ability to remove your fixation on the product of your cognition (e.g., locked on the 9-dot problem) and to be able to redirect your attention and care about the process for its own sake.
Da’at: see “Participatory knowing”
Dasein: being there, thrown into the world, and my being is in question. Heidegger is trying to get you into aporia, into the being mode, stepping back and engaging in a process of development (becoming) confronting mystery and going through transformative experience. We are the beings whose being is in question.
Deautomization: you automatically and unconsciously frame the world in a certain way. Disruptive stratgies allow us to break these frames. Increasing variation (noise, entropy) in what you are paying attention to, thereby increasing awareness of what is invariant.
Demiurge: a figure that Plato introduces, who becomes aware of the forms (eidos) and shapes things in space and time. With attention to temporal events, we can become aware of the eternal. For the gnostics, it is an evil overlord.
Depth Landscape: causal patterns (as opposed to correlational) that are tracked and established as I interact with the world.
Depth of Reason: (Tillich) Platonic notion of that which makes reasoning possible. Relevance Realization, recursive machinery of rationality and aspirational rationality. We have an ekstatic relationship with the grounding depths of the psyche. The grounding and formative depths of reality (interaffording miracle-the shining/mystery-the withdrawal into moreness) are coupled with the grounding and formative depths of the psyche by self-organizing symbols that grow out of the unconscious within and outside of us.
Dialectic: the increasing differentiation and integration of patterns of intelligibility, which are according to Hegel also the patterns of reality.
Disrationalia: Stanovich’s theory of foolishness. S1 processing makes you leap to conclusions. I need to do this because it is essential to my coping with the environment. S2 processing has to override those conclusions. Active Openmindedness teaches you to use S2 to protect you from S1 processing and its danger of leaping to the wrong conclusion.
Dissolutionment: often referred to as a negative state of moving toward despair, but in the Axial Age context, it points to losing the having mode. There is something irreversible about experiencing the “more real” of the being mode.
Divine Double: prevalent in ancient Mediteranean spirituality. I have a self right now, but it is bound to a double of me that is archetypically more important than me. My true self is actually my divine double. My spiritual self is to bring my current self and the divine double together. The realization of their interdependence culminates in a mystical union.
Domocide: the destruction of home. Physical (your house) or cultural (your house is not your home). The loss of deep connection to yourself, others, nature.
Eidos: from Plato. Often translated as form or idea… but means something more like paradigm. The real patterns we discover in reality. From the psychology of concepts: structural functional organization. The way things hang together so that the thing functions as a whole. A gestalt*.*
Encoding Specificity: your memory stores facts as well as perspectival, participatory knowing (the state you were in when you learned or did something else). Your brain stores what was happening and how you were fitted to the environment.
Eros: the love of being one with something, consumption, erotic love
Embodied-Embedded: the connection between mind and body is one of constituative need/dependence. (see Transjective)
Enactive Analogy: a form of play in which I try out new forms of perspectival knowing. (jeepform, martial arts, therapy) An apt metephor similar enough to the world you want to move into to explore it, but similar enough to this world that you can escape it.
Enactive Demonstrative Reference: The salience tagging of “here-ness” and “now-ness”, this is mental grouping, a prerequisite for category building. All of your concepts are categorical, which depends on something that is pre-conceptual, sub-semantic (by using Relevance Realization). This resonates with language that attempts to describe higher states of consciousness.
Enlightenment: a systematic and reliable set of practices that ameliorate the perennial problems and alleivate the stress and suffering that they inflict upon us.
Epektasis: (Gregory of Nyssa) non-soteriological narrative. You are not trying to rest in God. Instead you are engaging in infinite self-transcendence in the infinity of God — the constant disclosure of the inexhaustibleness of the ground of being. The transjectivity and transframing never stop.
Essentialism: a heuristic that implies when I create a set of things, they must share some “essence” or natural kind. But not all categories have this overlap. Wittgenstein’s example was the word “game”
Exaptation: a structural/functional organization for a particular task has a set of side-effects that are can become capacities for completing a different task.
Existential Inertia: (see Unthinkable)
Faith: In ancient Israel, not believing ridiculous things for which there is no evidence. Faith was your sense that you are in a reciprocal realization, on course, evolving with things, knowing what to do at the turning point, knowing who I need to change into. (Tillich) not the assertion of propositions to be believed, but rather ultimate concern.
Figuration: the process of creating a foreground/background understanding
Finst-ing: (see Enactive Demonstrative Reference)
Foolishness: although you have the right beliefs, you don’t have sufficient character (wisdom). You haven’t trained skills and sensitivities that would create a virtual engine that regulates your development and growth such that you will actualize yourself.
Framing: understanding the nature of a problem.
Geist: mind/spirit, a living system of patterns of intelligibility by which we ultimately make sense. According to absolute idealism (Hegel), this is identical to reality. This can be studied by studying history … the process by which reality and our understanding of it are co-unfolding together, grammars of human thinking, being, worlding, by which we make sense of ourselves and the world.
General Intelligence: (relevance realization) a dynamic, developmental evolution of your sensory-motor fittedness, that is regulated by virtual engines that are ultimately regulated by the logistical normativity of the opponent processing between efficiency and resilience.
Gestalt: see Eidos.
Global Workspace Theory (GWT): (Baars) your consciousness functions like the desktop of your computer, desktop, files, activate file, information can interact, and you can broadcast changes back to all files.
God: (Tillich) an imaginal symbol for the ground of Being, therefore no kind of being or thing. Any attempt to reify God as a thing is a form of idolotry. God is the simultaneous grounding of meaning, reality, and the relationship between them.
Having Mode: needs are met by categorizing things efficiently, controlling them effectively. My understanding of a thing is categorical … I can control things by knowing what I need to have and being able to manipulate them to meet my having needs. That means I relate to things in an I-it relationship (Buber).
Heuristic: a technique that is reliable for increasing your chances of acheiving your goal by pre-specifying a subset of the search space.
Higher State of Consciousness: A temporary experience that does not cohere with our everyday experience, and challenges our everyday experience without providing any new informational content (is ineffable and transrational).
Humility: a deep appreciation of one’s inescapable limitations. Maximal accomidation while reminding you that you can never become anything beyond a finite being.
Hyperbolic (Temporal) Discounting: universal across many species. The more you discount, the less something grabs your attention. The further away in time a stimulus is, the more it is discounted.
Idolatry: Tillich’s claim that fundamentalism and literalism are attempts to have divinity rather than to become divine. Idolatry is replacing ultimate concern with an object that can be manipulated, using the machinery that is appropriate for ultimate concern for something that is not ultimate.
Imaginary: the purely subjective experience of generating non-real mental imagery.
Imaginal: bound up with gnosis. The use of images that bridges and integrates the abstract and concrete world in an ongoing transjectivity. The imaginal mediates between the abstract intelligble world (i.e., reality as a mathmatical formula) vs. the concrete sensible world that is deeply divided in the Cartesian cultural grammar. It also mediates between the subjective and objective worlds through transjectivity.
Individuation: Jung’s notion of a self-organizing psychological process, one that you neither make or receive, but participate in. Jung gives a psychological account of Plato’s Eidos, in the archetypes, the formative, founding patterns. The structural functional organizations that form the basis of the psyche. You can set up an internalized interaction with the archetypes and that will be internalized into the way the ego self-organizes. Ultimately that can become part of the dialogue between the ego and the self (Axis Mundi). This is the process by which the ego’s perspectival knowing and participatory being is being fundamentally altered.
Insight: the process by which bad problem formulation is converted into good problem formulation, while also helping us to realize which subset of the problem space is relevant, noticing when the salience landscape is misleading us.
Integrated Information Theory (IIT): (Tonino) consciousness is how powerfully integrated pieces of information are, the more tight the integration, the more powerful the processing, the more likely that complex affords consciousness. How able is a system to adapt anomylous information.
Intelligence: the capacity that makes you an agent whose cognition is working with meaning, as opposed to just responding to an environment like a plant, characterized by being a general problem solver.
Kairos: the crucial turning point in a narrative, in terms of the mythos of time as a cosmic narrative, it is personified in the figure of Jesus when Christianity develops
Lectio Divina: a way of reading a text in which you let the text speak to you in a meditative, mindful fashion, opening yourself up to the possibility of it transforming you. Much more like listening to a piece of music in an open way. Remembering the being mode in your reading, rather than having beliefs and propositions.
Logos: see “Participatory knowing”
Love: see “Eros”, “Philas”, and “Agape”
Meaning Crisis: historical factors undermine a worldview/tradition, delegitimatize a language/cognitive grammar, make obsolete or dismiss practices and sets of psycho-technologies that people have created to respond to the perennial problems.
Mean Path Distance: (a measure of efficiency) the number of nodes that information must travel through to reach the whole network.
Meditation: moving toward the center, scaling down. Doing reps to build the ability to step back and look at your mind.
Meta-drives: reducing inner conflict and being in touch with reality
Meta-meaning: The existential mode that makes possible an entire system of meaning. Without the agent-arena relationship, none of my actions have meaning.
Metastability: normally your brain is integrating and differentiating. With psilocybin, the brain is massively complexifying: simultaneously highly differentiating and highly integrating.
Mindfulness: a cognitive style that coordinates the psychothechnologies of meditation, contemplation, and flow interaction with the environment.
Modal Confusion: in the having mode and trying to meet our being mode needs (being mature=having a car, being in love=having lots of sex). We end up thinking about what we need to have instead of who we need to become.
Myth: not the standard modern use (false stories about the ancient past), but rather C.G. Jung, Paul Tillich and Victor Turner’s use: symbolic stories about perrinial patterns that are always with us. Ways we share intuitive truths with each other.
Nominalism: whatever order or pattern you find in the world is made by how you are speaking about it. All that is “real” is raw individuals and causal relations.
Nomological Order (Cosmos): a worldview that is demonstrating worldview attunement in an ongoing, reliable fashion so that it is constantly affording existential modes in which agent/arena relationships are unfolding and blossoming naturally, so that the person is not experiencing absurdity but rather experiencing a deep connectedness between their intellectual projects of making sense of the world and their existential projects of fitting in and making sense of it.
Non-logical Identity: logical identity is sameness, i.e. A=A, sharing all of the same properties. But I understand myself to be the same baby that was born many years ago, even though I share very few of the same properties with that self. Self 1 (point in time) → Self 2 (point in time).
Non-Theism: the rejection of the presuppositions (terms of debate) that are shared by theism and atheism. 1) God is the supreme being. 2) God is accessed primarily or solely through belief. 3) Theology or anti-theology do not require transformative anagoge. 4) Sacredness is personal or impersonal. The non-theist rejects this Catesian grammar, and argues that sacredness is transjective, participatory, and aspirational.
Narrative Order: purpose, a story of how things will play out over time. How can we move forward through both collective and individual history?
Nationalism: the nation-State can take the role that God has taken in the past. Your patriotic devotion and willingness to sacrifice for it and participation in its historical development that preceeds you and will follow on after your death.
Naturalistic Imperative: in order to provide a scientific explanation of mind, you need to be able to explain a phenomenon in terms that are not inherent to the phenomenon.
Normative Order: we can move up the levels of reality, consciousness, and the self in a coordinated fashion… from what is less real to what is more real (Plotinus → Augustine) driven by a gnosis agape of Christianity — of knowing what is real and becoming what is real.
Notice Invariance Heuristic: two kinds of things don’t change: good invariants, complex patterns that are in the world; bad invariants, blocks that i need to change to solve problems. Ask yourself, what am I not changing in all of my failures?
One (the): that by which reality is realized and our mind realizes reality (Plotinus), like light itself is invisible and makes everything visable. You cannot have it; you can only be it.
Ontonormativity: the states to which a person attributes the description “more real”, i.e., dreaming → normal experience → (sometimes) higher states of consciousness.
Opponent Processing: two systems that are opposed in their goals and interdependent in their function, constantly evolving to fit the environment, resulting in autopoetic optimization.
Optimal Grip: Marleau-Ponty, optimal grip — optimizing between gestalt and feature, looking through and looking at. I take my salience landscape to get an “optimal grip”, contact with the world. Affordances open up (Gibson) when I get the right salience landscape.
Parasitic Processing: a perversion of the adaption function of your consciousness that causes you to suffer (dukkha). Something bad happens, it stands out in my mind, I can remember and remember it well, I remember other such events, I become anxious and lose cognitive flexibility, I become less able to solve problems, I start to make mistakes and fail, my anxiety increases, that re-enforces encoding specificity — I’M DOOMED! — even neutral events get interpreted as bad.
Participatory Knowing: Hebrew Da’at: There is a historical course that unfolds in linear time, and you are participating by identifying with it, changing it while it changes you… Greek Anagoge / Logos: scientific (Pythagorean inspired) I have to chang myself in order to see the world, and then the world changes and that puts a demand on me to change myself… and so on and so forth.
Perennial Problems: the machinery of meaning making is going awry when people are experiencing a sense of meaninglessness. The very machinery that makes you adaptive makes you suceptible to self-deception and self-destruction. This can undermine religio and drive people into despair.
Philia: the love born of cooperation, working together
Plausibility: makes good sense, stands to reason, should be taken seriously. It must be “convergent” (produced by independent and converging lines of evidence), “elegant” (multi-apt, and powerful), “fluent” (readily accessible and usable), and a balance between the convergence and elegance.
Pneuma: the objective world (the wind). Barfield argues that this originally interpenetrated and inter-afforded Spiritus before the Cartesian disjunction. (see Spiritus)
Poesis: is to find sacredness in the flow of self-transcendence in creativity. Ekstesis (standing beyond ourselves) in creativity. There is a change in consciousness, a felt different in the self. There is a connectedness to the inexhaustibleness of reality.
Procheiron: Stoic concept of remembering in the existential sense (see Sati). A way of seeing through a psychotechnology.
Proleptic Rationality: Proleptic is the foreshadowing, or anticipation, of future events. The process of trying to acquire a valuing of something for its own sake is proleptic rationality, what Callard refers to as aspiration. (relies on non-logical identity).
Projectability: should I stay here and get as much as I can (exploit, consciencious, depends on things staying the same) or should I move and try to find something somewhere else (explore, curious, depends on things changing)?
Prosoche: Stoic concept of paying attention to how you are judging. Learning to see that there is a difference between the being and having modes.
Psychotechnology: a socially generated and standardized way of formatting, manipulating and enhancing information processing that is readily internalizable into human congnition, and that can be applied in a domain-general manner. It must extend and empower cognition in some reliable and extensive manner and be highly generalizable among people. Prototypical instances are literacy, numeracy, and graphing.
Pure Consciousness Event (PCE): not even being conscious of anything, just being conscious — not even aware of the self or the machinery.
Qualitative Development a fundamental difference of competence, what I can know, what I can be. This is a non-logical identity, one that does not share all of the same properties.
Quantitative Development: getting more beliefs and experiences
Quantum Change Theory: an Axial experience, that “higher” state of consciousness (think Shamanism) gave me access to the real world. I’ve come back like someone in Plato’s cave. This is only echoes and shadows, less real. I’m going to change myself and my world to recapture, (Sati) remember what that is like. I will transform and restructure the agent/arena relationship.
Rationality: the set of psycho-technologies that affords self-transcendence by training you to skillfully overcome self-deception. It is the capacity to overcome self-deception in a reliable and systematic manner, and affording flourishing through a process of optimization of cognitive processing. Reliably means a high probability of functioning successfully (not completely). Systematic means it is not only functional in one domain (expertise).
Relevance Realization: central to intelligence, moving from the entire search space to the subset of possibilities that would give you a solution. (see General Intelligence) RR is embedded in your procedural, perspectival, participatory knowing, your transjective dynamic coupling to the environment and the affordance of the agent/arena relationship, connects the mind/body and the mind/world. RR is central to intelligence and the functionality of your consciousness.
Representativeness Heuristic: judging how probable an event is by how salient it is, how much it stands out in your mind.
S1 Processing: is intuitive, associational, makes use of implicit processing, and is very fast. This is the kind of processing you use when coping with an environment. This is how we are caring for things, being involved with them, finding them salient. Is automatic.
S2 Processing: is deliberative, inferential/works by argument, explicit processing, and is very slow. Relies on working memory.
Sacredness: a higher-order form of Relevance Realization. Worldview attunement homes us against horror in a meta-assimiliation of the agent/arena relationship, while the opponent process of the nouminous fascinates (and potentially horrifies) through meta-accommodation. Sacredness is remembering the being mode (alethea) in a trajectory of transframing that is always closing upon the relevant while simutaneously always opening to the moreness. Mythos → symbols enmeshed in story, enacted in ritual. When we have a mythos about religio, such that we can seriously play with it in order to enhance its capacities for meta-assimilation and meta-accomodation, that’s sacredness.
Sacred Second Self: Vervaeke’s term for a secular “divine double”. (see Divine Double)
Salience Landscape: some features of consciousness that are being picked out of the overwhelmingly vast amount of possible information and foregrounded. This goes back and forth between figure and ground, foreground and feature set
Sapiential Obsolescence: knowledge becomes the willful assertion of things that we must simply accept because of an arbitrary will that weilds power. Wisdom as self-transcendence is negated, and knowledge is inextricably bound to politics and the machinery of the State.
Sati: to remember, to remind, to bring to mind. Remembering a lost mode of being, what it is like to be in the being mode. A deep restructuring of your being. Like going back and recovering an identity that you used to have there. A modal memory from participatory knowing.
Search Space: a sequence of operations that transforms the initial state into the goal state while obeying the path constraints.
Self-Organizing: the structure of a living thing shapes the possibility/probability of events that feedback into the structure. Events cause an eidos, the eidos constrains events. (see virtual engine).
Sensibility Transcendence: (see Transframing)
Situational Awareness: how is my salience landscaping foregrounding what is most relevant to the task, how is it adjusting as the situation changes so that the way that I am applying my skill is more adapted to events.
Sin: missing the mark (not doing something immoral) . In archery, you can’t shoot where your eye looks, you have to have a kind of sense to hit the bullseye. People make decisions that trespass, take them off the path.
Soft Vigilance: constantly renew interest (inter-esse, to be within something), constantly exploring and opening up with attention to new aspects and details of an object or situation.
Solomon Effect: find an interpersonal problem that’s messy and problematic. They are mesmerised by the mirage of their own egocentric perspective. They remain stuck. Re-describe the same problem from the third-person perspective. They will break frame (systematically locked) and have a central insight into how to resolve their problem.
Sophrosyne: salience landscape self-organizes to naturally tempt me toward the good (Greek: σωφροσύνη) is an ancient Greek concept of an ideal of excellence of character and soundness of mind, which when combined in one well-balanced individual leads to other qualities, such as temperance, moderation, prudence, purity, decorum, and self-control. An adjectival form is “sophron.”
Spirituality: a functional sense of connectedness that affords wisdom and self-transcendence. A pre-egoic binding that ultimatley grounds the self in its world. The result of Relevance Realization.
Spiritus: the self moving aspects of the psyche. Barfield argues that this originally interpenetrated and inter-afforded Pneuma before the Cartesian disjunction. (see Pneuma)
Standard of Effectiveness: a definition of understanding — someone trying to grasp the truth, using rationality to grasp the significance of connections (not necessarily accurate representations of the truth, but attempts to get you to zero in on the relevant implications). Someone who understands something can apply their knowledge, find new domains, and open up new areas of research, transfer, transform, and specify it in many ways. They can motivate and facilitate a need for cognition by formulating good problems, zeroing in on a problem nexus. Understanding is contextually sensitive, relative to the situation and person at hand.
Symbol: to put two things together, exemplifying by getting you to participate in that to which you refer (not signs, which only refer). Love→ Sign: heart shape, Symbol: kissing. The core of a symbol is a metaphor, looking through to look at, shifting the salience landscape in order to attain insight. (Tillich) Symbols have a surplus of meaning, they have a moreness, a numinous character grounded in the depth of mind and reality.
Symbolic Resonance: as I see more deeply into the object, it draws me in to more powerful integration. The more powerful integration coordinates my cognition so that I can see more deeply into reality. This process affords anagoge and transframing.
Synoptic Integration: we need to build a bridging vocabulary across the disciplines (neuroscience, machine learning, psychology, linguistics, and anthropology) that addresses the equivication, deals with the fragmentation, and fills in the ignorance, telling us about how all of the levels are actually interacting and constraining each other.
Systematic Import: (J.S. Mill) science has to form categories that support powerful inductive generalizations predictions and claims for all of a “type of thing”.
Tonos: a creative polar tension between foreclousure, a homing conformation (assimilation, coherence) and nouminous moreness (accommodation, opening and wonder).
Transframing: the whole way of participating in an agent-arena relationship is transformed, a new self and object emerge.
Transjective: relevance is not a property of objectivity (objective realization — to make real) or subjectivity (subjective realization — bring into awareness). Relevance is a real relationshiop between the organism and its environment. It is co-created by how the world and the embodied brain are fitted together.
Ultimate Concern: concern is caring about something, coping with it, committed to it, involved in it, it encompasses you even though you are being involved in and through it. It is perspectival/participatory and open ended… pointing toward the inexhaustibleness of the ground of being. This is directed at dasein.
Understanding: see Standard of Effectiveness
Unthinkable (the): although you can create thoughts and beliefs and draw all of the inferences that would be true from a certain perspective, you can’t make it a viable way to proceed.
Virtual Engine: the coupling of a virtual generator and a virtual governor in a systematic way (regulating a feedback cycle), resulting in a dynamic system.
Virtual Generator: a set of conditions that generates options in a dynamic system
Virtual Governor: that which constrains possibility in a dynamic system
Virtue: a set of good character conditions that have systematically been cultivated in a person.
Weltanschauung: see Worldview.
Wisdom: an ecology of psycho-technologies (cognitive styles) that dynamically enhance relevance realization in inference, insight, internalization, understanding, gnosis, transformation and aspirations. // Phronesis/Sophia. Gaining the ability to cultivate character, virtues that regulate your growth and development so that you actualize your potential as a rational human being. Wisdom is a systematic seeing through the forms of cognitive and existential illusion caused by self-deception and into what is more real (McKee and Barber). Wisdom is the systematic seeing through illusion and into reality, creating insight not only into a particular problem but a family of problems. It is a qualitative change, insight into a kind of error… at the level of transframing. As the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. Wisdom is not about what you know, but rather how you know it.
Wonder: the state in which we become aware in a perspectival and participatory way (not in a focal way) of the significance of the atmosphere of Relevance Realization.
Worldview: agent/arena coupling — co-identification — account of the world and an account of how I know the world that mutually support each other in bonds of deep plausibility.
Worldview Attunement: Geertz description of the process of agent/arena coupling, if you can’t get this going, you will experience your existence as absurd — it won’t make sense to you.
