Research Call Friday 27th June: Anna Riedl

Hi all,

This Friday in the Research Tent (at 5pm CET), I hope you’ll join me in welcoming Anna Riedl, who will talk to us about her work with John Vervaeke on rationality and relevance realization, as well as how this connects with her more recent work on a complexity-science inspired approach to ethics that she calls Autopoiethics.

I’m especially excited to have Anna join us, as her work with John Vervaeke was central to my recent piece on Wise Altruism.

In addition to her work with Vervaeke, Anna is quite well known in the rationalist community, having given the keynote at last year’s LessWrong community weekend, and has also had some recorded discussions with Brendan Graham Dempsey about Autopoiethics.

As usual the talk will be approximately half an hour with another half hour for discussion. Everyone welcome!

Meeting link copied below for convenience:

Zoom: Join here
Meeting ID: 891 1441 1437
Passcode: 649056

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Thanks for setting this up. I agree with Anna’s local, personal approach as a contrast to the calculated, large-scale methods of Effect Altruism. However, I’m left with the feeling that this ethical approach is difficult. At least EA is simplifies ethics into formulas. Now we must embrace uncertainty and question our personal motivations. I guess this is where wisdom and relevance realization come in. We need to cultivate an awareness of our intentions and capacities while incorporating a calculation of our impact. There may also be an element of bravery - acting with uncertainty and fear but faith that you are pursing the good.

How do we to practically incorporate Anna’s ideas?

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I very much enjoyed Anna’s presentation and would certainly welcome more of the same!

One question that came up was the relationship of Vervaeke’s 3R’s model to McGilchrist’s brain lateralization model. To me, they work together quite nicely. Right-brained holism is “combinatorially explosive” (i.e. not actionable) from a left-brained POV. For the left-brain to perform its manipulative functions, it needs a “small world” representation of the larger world. The 3Rs model details how that sampling and representation process works. As McGilchrist points out, however, the left-brain tends to overestimate the comprehensiveness of its own approach, and thus will imagine it’s small world model maps the wider world better than it truly does. Uncomfortable contractions will thus creep in. This motivates the need to periodically realign and reformulate the small world model - the “recursive” element of the 3Rs model.

To extend the relationship between Vervaeke and McGilchrist further, to me Vervaeke’s 4Ps model of different types of knowing can be ranked on a left-brain to right-brain scale:

  • propositional knowing - heavily left-brain.
  • procedural knowing - left-brain for step-by-step instructions, but more embodied and holistic in the form of muscle memory and practical mastery.
  • perspectival knowing - the left brain harvesting and modeling information mostly received from the right brain.
  • participatory knowing - very right-brained.

On the later point, when Vervaeke gets into exploring participatory knowing, he cites practices such as Zen, shamanism, and Gnosticism, and discusses philosophers such as Heidegger. McGlichrist likewise favors Heidegger and related thinkers for unpacking the perspective of the right brain. EA and analytic philosophy in general will not be able to process or parse this line of investigation.

To sum up, I’m sure the left-brained among us will peruse the assembled works of Vervaeke and McGlichrist to find small variances to refute what I have posted above. Meanwhile, my rather right-brain favoring view will luxuriate in the larger Gestalt which Vervaeke’s and McGilchrist’s models both instantiate in complementary ways.

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Applied Ikigai is my personal response to that. I’d studied perspective’s similar to Anna’s for quite awhile (including plenty of Vervaeke) and cooked up the Ikigai-derived process as a simple point of entry to the wider world of Vervaeke’s 3Rs and beyond.

The formulaic part of EA is exactly its prime weakness. It’s a “small world” pretending to speak for the whole world. It’s exactly everything McGilchrist as well finds problematic about the left-brain. EA grossly overestimates its level of insight, imagining that mathematical precision on tightly circumscribed variable sets obviates the need for a wide angled view. Many are those, however, who feel as well as think, and for such people who process ethical matters more holistically, EA-related fantasies about technical accelertationism appear distinctly dystopian.

In the Ikigai practice - the preferred first move is “what do you love?” Not, “what do your calculations tell you about what the world needs?” The point about opening with “love” is to get emotions, intuition, passion, energy, the right brain, and participatory knowing into the discussion before the left brain gets a chance to turn everyting into matrix algebra. Math and reason will get their proper turns. But let’s make sure first that Love is the master, and everything else is the emissary.

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Yea I’m starting to get why you keep talking about Ikigai here, I can see how it ties up neatly with Anna’s approach in that way, and really resonates with how I approach things as well.

For me there’s still an open question in this area, similar to what I raised at the research call, about the connection between ‘what you love’ and questions of scale, systems and expanded moral circles.

It seems possible and indeed desirable to love all living things, as one learns to do in some kinds of Metta meditation, and therefore to care in an intuitive and emotional way about changes at the level of global systems and structures.

It also seems possible and desirabe to love ideas (philo-sophia) and to be passionate about truly understanding those global systems and structures and their leverage points.

So i would suggest that we take a nuanced view of the way the autopoiethic approach relates to ‘local’ action - it is true that from an information-theoretic and epistemological point of view the local will tend to take precedence, but to the extent that we can identify information flows and scientific models of systems that transcend local moral circles, it seems consistent with an autopoiethic approach to direct significant energies towards developing and acting on such models.

The key would be that the approach to such models would need be grounded in the first-person -through love, as you say - and be highly mindful of trade-offs between smaller and larger moral circles, and of the massive uncertainties and information degradation that comes with expanding those circles.

It seems useful to also add a historical perspective: in an increasingly globalised world informational flows are increasingly not restricted to local interactions, and the survival and flourishing of individual systems are increasingly interconnected with the survival and flourishing of the global system as a whole. There may therefore be a historical movement toward integration of global and local from the perspective of autopoietic systems.

This historic viewpoint also fits well with a Heideggerian perspective. In Being and Time you have the notion of finding your ‘ownmost possibility’ in authenticity, which fits well with the Ikigai approach, but this gets developed by Heidegger into a notion of being aware of your place in a world-historical context and acting out of such awareness.

As a graduate student at the University of Essex I was very much in a milieu of people familiar with analytic, left-brained thinking trying to clarify and distil what Heidegger was saying, and this approach now seems very relevant here - isn’t that also what Vervaeke and McGilchrist, coming from a very non-Heideggerian, scientific background, are doing?

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I’m wondering if anyone else got an uneasy feeling about prioritising first-person perspectives? I can see and appreciate that if one is enlightened, then enlightened self-interest works just fine. Equally, the principle of “love your neighbour as yourself” points clearly (as I see it) to the importance of not prioritising others over oneself.

But, and it seems to me a big but, looked at practically, most people’s first-person perspectives are anything but enlightened. I see it as all to easy to dress up what is actually just self-interest in clothes that appear to be enlightened — so many false gurus/prophets come to mind. And, if you were to clothe yourself in MAGA merch (which I’m sure no one here would dream of, but it’s still an interesting exercise in perspective-taking) isn’t it all too easy to see what Trump is doing as prioritising his first-person perspective, while presumably honestly believing (if he isn’t honest he’s a good actor) that it is actually benefitting all citizens of the USA? And that’s only the most prominent of the world’s oligarchs. (Not to mention Ayn Rand and other non-oligarchs.)

I really don’t see how a first-person first approach would avoid these kind of pitfalls, without a healthy dose of collectivity, and that’s what I would like to add to this field. I find this in a well-functioning Quaker community, but again, that’s only my experience. Any Deliberately Developmental Space would ideally be providing this kind of collective sense-making, thus mitigating the dangers of what I think Peter Limberg called “egoic capture” back in 2020.

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Not uneasy at all. The reason was, my first hack at metatheory in the public classroom (about a year ago) started with this from Lene Rachel Andersen: https://eaea.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/What-is-Bildung-pdf-English.pdf

There are two relevant diagrams in this short article. The first - Circles of Belonging - is part of my “What is Ethics” presentation for the first day of a CS course. Yes, of course, if one’s “circle of belonging” is so tight it fits only around personal ego, that would be Ayn Rand territory. Love in its many forms tends to lead a person wider, however. The current civilizational challenge is to articulate global, species-level, or Gaian circles of belonging that are tangible and actionable. But it’s not like practicing at the family and community levels on the way to that is a bad thing. The leap directly from self-alone to cosmic consciousness generally comes off mostly as spiritual by-passing.

Lene visited my area a couple years ago and I spent many hours with her discussing the nuances of how ego psychology fits into her more community-driven educational models. (Lene is allergic to Wilberian personal development and the IDG). Being US-based, if I can’t address the “captain of my soul” egoistic type, I would have very few to converse with! That’s one reason I also dove deeply into UTOK - to map the mechanics of the self, precisely not to get stuck there. Long story short, I’m now inserting the UTOK Map of Mind model where the Circles of Belonging model just features “ego”, and that gives us more to work with. Now UTOKing: Mind. In this blog and video series, we… | by Gregg Henriques | Unified Theory of Knowledge | Medium

Specifically, UTOK Mind 3 is the interface to language and culture. So it allows for remapping quite a bit of what @rufuspollock has been saying about culture and inner work onto Gregg Henriques’s synthetic view of all the leading psychotherapies and psychological research programs.

To sum up - if anyone feels uneasy about Anna’s presentation, it’s important to own whatever those feelings are. People are going to feel what they feel. To me, that’s a feature, not a bug. But my feeling about Anna’s work was more like exhilaration. For me, she essentially validated a multi-year research and practice program and suggested the potential to grow my own metatheoretical “circle of belonging” just that much wider.

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Mostly, I’m +1 on all your various points. So I’ll run parallel a bit, but not contradictory at all.

My personal views are as approximately complex and nuanced as yours are - and informed from similar sources. My “Ikigai” thing is not meant to substitute for any of that. It’s more like a portal into it. To operate effectively in my local cultural and institutional milieu, I’ve had to master that classic literary form, the Elevator Pitch. If a name like “Heidegger” gets dropped into the conversation, it needs to do its work in less time than a TikTok video. Ikigai from that POV is my answer to clickbait. Attention must be captured. Once students get a taste of the bait, we can pull them all the way into theory, history, philosophy, and beyond.

Are there evil MAGA versions of recursive relevance realization? Without doubt. Using an idiom my students all understand, I ask them if they wish to train for the Jedi or for the Sith. Same Force, same technique either way. Nevertheless, I offer the training to all comers, understanding that some will take a dark turn at some point. (Speaking of Heidegger, BTW …) My basic trust is in a cosmic grand narrative I scarcely understand and can certainly not articulate. But like the archetypal Arjuna, the Lord of Being keeps telling me to accept my role and get back into battle regardless of results. We’re all players in an epic, fated to never see the final act.

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Thanks to Anna Riedl for her rich and complex inquiry. She covered so much in such a short time — and a few reflections and queries of my own came forward.

Reflection 1: Relevance Realisation,

in Vervaekean terms, he tells us that cognition is always filtering — attuning to what matters. What is salient.

But we must also ask:

Relevant to whom?

From which worldview?

If relevance rests on colonial logics, extractive attention, and epistemic supremacy, our “realisation” may simply reaffirm what we already believe — a map that never leaves the castle.

That seems close to Anna’s small-world/big-world split — but the implications of that didn’t seem to be fully taken into account with her later comments.

If we are sovereign in our small-world, building smarter tools will only reinforce our blindness…

  • sovereignty without humility is delusion
  • intelligence without relationship is danger
  • generativity without listening is still extraction

This isn’t a rejection of relevance realisation — but a call to root it deeper: in planetary awareness, in more-than-human listening, in perspectives we haven’t yet learned to honour.

We need to be mindful that when complex and nuanced work enters the public sphere, there’s a tension between depth and drift.

Without care, nuance is hijacked, or plain misunderstood — becoming pop psychology, slogans, dogma, or weapons for the powerful.

Ideas don’t just inform — we need to project how they will travel.

What will they do in stressed, under-resourced, or wounded fields of reception? This really matters. It affects how the majority will form their relevance realisation. Without attention to how messages are received, interpreted, and used, even the most luminous insights can become complicit in systems they aimed to heal.

That’s why contextual sensitivity matters so much: we must guard the relational integrity of our work — watching not just what is said, but what it does in the field, among human beings whose agency is mentally curtailed.

Reflection 2: Anna spoke of centering the first person.

That can be grounding — but also risks becoming a hiding place. Again without a relational compass, and context sensitivity it can slide into exceptionalism or bypass.

We need a language that holds the I, the We, and the It — all at once.

Perhaps:

  • sovereignty as responsible self-authorship
  • vs. selfism as unconscious centrality

I see a familiar polarity emerge:

  • Effective Altruism — risks self-erasure, burnout, spiritual desaturation
  • Radical First-Person Sovereignty — can drift into narcissism and disconnection

But instead of a tug-of-war, could there be a third way?

Integral Resonance — a form of care that honours both the self and the field.

Not altruism…not individualism…

Coherence. A felt alignment across I–We–World.

Reflection 3: I offer resonance as the highest form of love

— not sentimental or altruistic, nor even anthropomorphic, but the structural felt-sense of mutual affordance. ( not Wilber’s intentional force either)

A love that includes trees, time, silence, predator and prey. The universe that loves itself. The true universal love.

Reflection 4: When engaging thinkers like Jordan Peterson, we must do so with full awareness of the fields we enter.

Dialogue has huge value — but platforming has consequences.

Vervaeke’s hope — to build bridges across divides — is honourable, but I believe he has made a gross error in partnering with Jordan Peterson.

When we engage with those who hold great influence through harmful framing, grievance, hierarchy, or culture-war rhetoric, we aren’t just dialoguing. We’re helping to normalize and validate a field of thought that has done real harm.

Dialogue too easily becomes appeasement.

Tone is not truth. Charm and civility is not coherence.

We must discern when thinkers serve systems of repression — knowingly or not. Even luminous insight can be absorbed, diverted and weaponized by control systems.

Abstracted theory, without embodied and relational discernment, can feed domination. Since I studied with Hilary Bradbury some years ago, I have applied her ART framework of Action Research, which ensures we keep in contact with the ecology and felt sense of the world, as we research. I’m now less inclined create a citation patchwork of other’s ideas, and more to personally think and feel, listen to non-academic stakeholders, read and write poetry and try to “big world” into a research question.

Without inner resonance, I think our work is at risk of just being stitched from borrowed cloth.

Ideas should be held open and we should do what we can to protect the emergent field from collapsing backwards. That is why I’m not so fond of the name Second Renaissance, despite the pleasant buzz of hope for a new age of humanity. I feel the our civilization is in an over-saturated recycling dump. Building sites full of mock, mock tudor cardboard houses, New Age that is not new, but appropriated, hollowed and flattened folk-lore, new “druids”, new “shamans”, Facebook philosophy shorts, trite psychology hacks, everything a rehash. Verveake is absolutely right that we are up the creek without a paddle. I suspect it’s time to get out and walk. Barefoot.

:red_question_mark: Would you like to try this resonance experiment:


Watch a video of Jordan Peterson. Mute the sound.

Set aside opinions. Breathe slowly. Hand to heart. Watch.

Attend to his micro-expressions. Let his being wash over you. How does your body respond?

When I do this, I sense pain, brittleness, internal conflict. I sense a man exercising extraordinary levels of intellectual self-domination.

Try the same experiment with Robert Sapolsky, Bernardo Kastrup, and Rupert Sheldrake. I’m not suggesting you judge their theories on this alone, but it gives you additional informationabout them, and their research, that you cannot get otherwise, something you may not even be able to put into words.

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I’m with you here with the first person issue. It seems harmless, useful even if we look at what happens when it goes right. However if we don the black hat, all sorts of monsters appear. I cover a bit in my post.

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Interesting. There some fine subtlety available here with love motivation. I sensed Anna has had personal experience of burnout in altruism. Altruistic love has shadow, it lacks universality.

EA leaves me ice cold, personally. All head, no heart, no reason for me to care much about any of it … I can see how Anna, a budding cognitive theorist, might have been tempted to prove something to world of hyper-rationalism. But I’m glad she decided to be a real human person instead.

One thing I lifted from Vervaeke was his excellent lecture on Thomas Hobbes vs Rene Descartes vs Blaise Pascal on AI. I used that in the AI chapter of a beginners text on information technology. (I’m team Pascal all the way!). The EA world is mostly Hobbesian. Like Hobbes, they think lots and lots of calculation results in consciousness and insight, to the point that the right machine might do it better. Pascal sees all that as palpable nonsense. "The heart has its reasons … "

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@RobertBunge … I’m noticing the difference in tone between your replies above. Your reply to me

starts by contradicting. Your reply to @JonahW

starts with the positive. Later, you write:

So, I’m curious what you are trying to say here. Have I not owned my own feelings to your satisfaction, perhaps? If this is the case, I would be interested to know your feelings are around this, as well as what you believe is important. If not, what was the stimulus for your summing up there?

In addition, if anyone feels uneasy about anyone else’s contributions here, what do you suggest is the best course of action? To stay silent? To express and own those feelings? Or what?

Just to clarify, I was, I hope clearly enough, expressing my own unease with one issue that came up in Anna’s presentation; and at the same time, implicitly offering supportive dialogue with anyone who also felt that unease. And then I mentioned some points where I was following and agreeing. And then explaining my unease. I’m wondering, what in my reply prompted your contradiction?

I’m not asking anyone to agree with me. It appears that many people found the talk wholly positive. But I am left with an uneasy feeling – fully owned, if you like – that critique is not acceptable here — and not only from you. I want to be very clear that to me, critique is not only acceptable, but necessary. How it is given is important, to be sure. I know very well the dangers of prioritising “being right” over relationship. I value critique of ideas and actions, not of people. And I value critique when it is constructive, well-meaning, friendly, and aimed at the greater good. I value critique given with a humble spirit, prepared to revise ideas.

Any problems with this?

No problems. You read my “not uneasy” as a contradiction to your reaction to the presentation. I meant my expression as a contrast, not a contradiction. You reacted the way you reacted. Fine with me.

There is a larger issue around all this about “first person perspective”. All of the thinkers @Martin likes to cite basically require that and deconstruct anything else as false consciousness. I’ve learned those lessons well and try not to aspire to God’s eye views of anything. Suspicion of the first person in the west goes back at least as far as Augustine of Hippo. So if we can’t trust ourselves, who exactly can we trust? It’s not like Anna’s approach (by way of Vervaeke) is insensitive to these matters.

Anyway, if you are feeling uneasy about Anna, that’s a data point worth keeping. I just feel differently, that’s all.

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Thanks, @RobertBunge … and at the risk of being repetitive, I’m not feeling uneasy about Anna, I’m sure she’s doing what she can with a good heart — I’m uneasy about that one aspect of what she was presenting.

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Understood. Like I suggested in my previous, the whole first person vs some other perspective question is fraught. It’s not like obvious, immutable truths have gained any wide consensus lately. So we need to rely on situated views, problematic as those often can be.

That makes good sense. We can’t deny being situated, or escape by pretending that we have an “objective” view of the world. What that means in practice though, is up for vast, wide-ranging further enquiry! Let’s see if we are ready to go there…

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This is truly an invitation to vastness! It’s amusing to see us all dancing with meaning, trying not to ( and failing) step on each others toes, discovering, to our surprise and consternation, we might have rather more than two feet and ten toes.

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First person perspective is all you’ve got.
Collective perspectives are something you subscribe to.
First person perspective is “zero trust perspective”.
Collective perspectives - You need to buy into them on the basis of idealism, trust and coherence.

Idealism emerges from a realisation that a collective perspective is good (best option?) and that others will not take advantage of your trust in order to pursue their personal interests (goal alignment / mission alignment) - at this point relevance realisation moves from individual to collectsive.

Autopoiethics (how I understood it from Riedl’s presentation) is all about systems thinking and the need for a system to “care about itself” and to define itself within a narrow scope of a small world (bounded context). There’s an element of focusing on the “self” and disregard of the “outer”. This gives it relevance realisation. But this prelude really goes back to interests of individuals first in order to create well defined “small world” systems that will be the basis of a large world.

Following the disintegration of grand narratives into smaller localised narratives then individual narratives - rebuildling them takes building smaller narratives first and then joining them into larger ones.

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The only thing I would add to this (as has been coming out in the “resonance” threads, among others) is this inward movement can be viewed as one beat in a larger dialectical or cyclical system involving self-other communications. The reason I mention this is because a singular focus on inwardness tends to miss a lot of points about culture, community, and social change. The inward movement is absolutely needed for anything innovative in social and cultural systems. But unless the inward movement finds a corresponding outward expression, it remains a purely private matter.

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