Human Action, Metaphor, and Money with John Vervaeke (WiM473)
May 31, 2024
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John Vervaeke discusses human action, metaphor, and money, exploring the role of abstraction, relevance realization, and love. They delve into the relationship between action and reality, the significance of metaphor in cognition, and how money serves as a metaphor influencing human behavior. The podcast delves into deep philosophical discussions about truth, goodness, and beauty, highlighting the interconnectedness of human cognition and reality.
Action embodies relation between self and world, fundamental for existence and manifestation.
Metaphors aid in compressing complex ideas for enhanced communication and understanding.
Money serves as a compressive metaphor for human actions, symbolizing value beyond exchange.
Deep dives
The Interconnection of Action, Love, and Metaphysics
Action is considered fundamental as it embodies the relation between oneself and the world, enabling one's existence and the world's manifestation. The discussion explores the relationship between love and action, highlighting the intrinsic connection between them. Delving into metaphysical aspects, the conversation touches on the notion of the one as a metaphysical basis in Christianity and the foundation of all being. It emphasizes the role of action in cognition and meaning-making, underscoring the significance of embodiment in understanding reality.
Epistemology, Action, and Relationality
The conversation navigates through epistemological concepts, contrasting analytic and synthetic truths and delving into Kant's perspective on synthetic a priori propositions. It bridges action and epistemology by highlighting how mental categories are ultimately grounded in categories of action, shaping the interaction between the mind and reality. This interplay between action and cognition is further explored within a transcendental argument framework, emphasizing the role of action in making contact between the mind and reality.
Relevance Realization, Affordance, and Cognitive Dynamics
The discourse progresses into a discussion on relevance realization, where action and potentiality dance in a dynamic feedback system. Concepts like affordance, coined by Gibson, are examined for their metaphorical construction, linking actions like crossing a river to economic interactions. The intricate relationship between action, affordances, and potentiality is explored, emphasizing how action opens up potential pathways and shapes our cognitive software in navigating reality.
How Metaphor Enhances Cognition
Metaphors play a crucial role in cognition by allowing the compression of complex ideas into simpler, more communicable forms. The podcast discusses how metaphorical thinking emerged in human evolution, particularly during the Upper Paleolithic transition. Metaphors help emphasize specific aspects of an entity by foregrounding certain features while backgrounding others, similar to focusing on salient aspects in our experiences to convey meaning.
Money as a Compressive Metaphor for Human Interactions
Money is described as a compressive metaphor for human actions and interactions. In the context of economic activities, money symbolizes more than just a medium of exchange; it encompasses the symbolic value of human actions and their consequences. By metaphorizing goods and services into numerical representations, money serves as a tool for compressing complex real-world interactions into concise and actionable formats, similar to the compression of perspectives in metaphorical language usage.