Meaning and Bias

Welcome back. This journey continues as we explore the intersections of intelligence, relevance realization, predictive processing, generative modeling, and religio—the sense of connectedness that forms the foundation of meaningful experiences. In our last discussion, we integrated relevance realization with predictive processing, a concept detailed in a 2022 paper I co-authored with Brett Anderson, Mark Miller, and John Vervaeke.

Today, we delve deeper into meaning in life and the dual dimensions of religio—horizontal and vertical alignment—while addressing how religio can also predispose us to self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviors.

Horizontal and Vertical Religio

Religio embodies two interconnected dimensions:

Horizontal Religio: The connection between agent and arena, such as our interaction with affordances in the environment.
Vertical Religio: The alignment of propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing, interwoven into a cohesive framework.

When horizontal and vertical religio mutually afford and reinforce each other, they create a profound sense of connectedness—a grounded and meaningful existence.

Dimensions of Meaning in Life

Cognitive science identifies three primary dimensions contributing to a sense of meaning:

Coherence: The environment’s ability to make sense and hang together meaningfully.
Purpose: The organization of goals into a structured hierarchy that supports overarching objectives.
Significance: The depth of connection and the sense of realness, grounded in an inexhaustible, intelligible reality.

Interestingly, coherence and purpose are often emphasized, but recent studies, including those by Costin and Vignolis (2019), show that mattering—being connected to something real and valuable beyond oneself—plays the most critical role in creating meaning in life.

The Shift from Self to Other

The idea of mattering involves reversing the relevance arrow: rather than asking how the world is relevant to us, we explore how we are relevant to the world. This shift is vital in cultivating connections that transcend egocentric preferences.

The Threat of Bias

Despite religio’s potential to create profound meaning, it also opens the door to biases and distortions. These cognitive shortcuts, or heuristics, are essential for avoiding combinatorial explosion but can lead to:

Confirmation Bias: Seeking evidence that supports existing beliefs while ignoring disconfirming data.
Framing Effects: How information presentation impacts decision-making, even when the data remains logically identical.
Belief Perseverance: Persisting in beliefs even after the evidence supporting them has been debunked.

These biases often operate within a self-organizing, recursive framework, reinforcing themselves in patterns known as parasitic processing—a process where distortions take on a life of their own, narrowing cognitive flexibility and problem-solving abilities.

Addressing Bias with Meta-Perspectival Practices

Addressing biases and foolishness requires interventions that go beyond one-shot solutions. A complex ecology of practices—dynamic, recursive, and multi-leveled—can effectively disrupt these self-reinforcing loops.

Dialogical reasoning, where perspectives are shared and integrated, has proven effective. For example, in the Wason Selection Task, reasoning accuracy improved dramatically when participants engaged in collaborative dialogue rather than individual problem-solving.

Love, Mattering, and Meaning

Philosophers like Iris Murdoch and Susan Wolf provide insights into the connection between love and meaning:

Murdoch describes love as the acknowledgment of something real beyond oneself, fostering reciprocal opening and self-transcendence.
Wolf emphasizes that meaning involves being connected to something larger than oneself, something real and valuable beyond ego-centric concerns.

This agapic love, a creative force, turns the relevance arrow outward, cultivating connections that enrich life’s depth and significance.

Conclusion

Religio holds the dual potential to ground us in profound meaning and to lead us into biases and distortions. By fostering an ecology of practices and embracing dialogical reasoning, we can transcend these limitations and deepen our connections to reality. Love, mattering, and an openness to reciprocal transformation become the bedrock of a life well-lived.

In our next discussion, we will explore how rituals and collective practices enhance rationality and meaning, challenging the notion of reasoning as a solitary, monologic endeavor.

Stay tuned as we continue this exploration of meaning, bias, and the pursuit of wisdom.