Johnny V is an award-winning cognitive scientist studying meaning and wisdom. Topics include: why going meta is bad for intimacy, why you should hug your gf and how to get Gen Zs less addicted to Instagram.
Hi Daniel. I don't think we've ever conversed, but we've been in BASB and/or WoP courses together. This is a beautiful interview, as was the one with Layman Pascal. When Pascal spoke of falling in with a group of people who shared his biggest obsessions, I thought "Can that possibly happen to me? I kind of need for it to".
Some time I want to ask you about Stoicism, but not now. I tried to get some idea of it up from Massimo Pigliucci, having been part of intimate size forum he ran in between being a New York Rationalist, and his current devotion to Stoicism, and just had to say "Maybe I'll get back to this some day".
When this interview turned to the idea of relevance, it made me wonder if you, or for that matter Vervaeke, are aware of a body of thought that was recently (actually in 2015 but it seems like yesterday) put in an interesting form by Thom Scott-Phillips in Speaking Our Minds: Why human communication is different, and how language evolved to make it special. I suspect if you read as much as is in the Kindle free sample, you'd want to read the rest, and you'd be well into the treatment of the relevance of relevance. I think it dovetails with your and Vervaeke's discussion of relevance, but you might be surprised at the direction it goes in. The idea, which is extremely well grounded in the work of mentors of Scott-Phillips, Michael Tomasello and Dan Sperber (who builds on Paul Grice), is that the necessary adaptation prior to human language was a deep ability and *drive* to intuitively know what is relevant for a person one is socially very close to, which reduces the complexity of the signal to something that is tractable even when humans were only beginning to turn towards language.
The discussion that led to your comment on your ex-girlfriends clapping may be have some bearing on my 35-year marriage, and maybe even to a lack of ability to make myself relatable to others.
Hey Hal thanks for this comment. I really appreciate the encouragement and the shares. I haven't heard of the Scott-Phillips book but it seems very relevant. Just added the free sample to my kindle
Hi Daniel. I don't think we've ever conversed, but we've been in BASB and/or WoP courses together. This is a beautiful interview, as was the one with Layman Pascal. When Pascal spoke of falling in with a group of people who shared his biggest obsessions, I thought "Can that possibly happen to me? I kind of need for it to".
Some time I want to ask you about Stoicism, but not now. I tried to get some idea of it up from Massimo Pigliucci, having been part of intimate size forum he ran in between being a New York Rationalist, and his current devotion to Stoicism, and just had to say "Maybe I'll get back to this some day".
When this interview turned to the idea of relevance, it made me wonder if you, or for that matter Vervaeke, are aware of a body of thought that was recently (actually in 2015 but it seems like yesterday) put in an interesting form by Thom Scott-Phillips in Speaking Our Minds: Why human communication is different, and how language evolved to make it special. I suspect if you read as much as is in the Kindle free sample, you'd want to read the rest, and you'd be well into the treatment of the relevance of relevance. I think it dovetails with your and Vervaeke's discussion of relevance, but you might be surprised at the direction it goes in. The idea, which is extremely well grounded in the work of mentors of Scott-Phillips, Michael Tomasello and Dan Sperber (who builds on Paul Grice), is that the necessary adaptation prior to human language was a deep ability and *drive* to intuitively know what is relevant for a person one is socially very close to, which reduces the complexity of the signal to something that is tractable even when humans were only beginning to turn towards language.
The discussion that led to your comment on your ex-girlfriends clapping may be have some bearing on my 35-year marriage, and maybe even to a lack of ability to make myself relatable to others.
Hey Hal thanks for this comment. I really appreciate the encouragement and the shares. I haven't heard of the Scott-Phillips book but it seems very relevant. Just added the free sample to my kindle
I tried replying to your last email, but it didn't go through. Maybe we can exchange actual email addresses. Mine is hal@panix.com