John Vervaeke

Knowing comes in four kinds — propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory — and only the first fits in sentences.

The stake isn't a skill machines might match — it's whether we keep the practices that put us in contact with what's real. The meaning crisis is losing that grip; the machines didn't cause it, but they can deepen it or help us recover it.

Any fixed benchmark fixes the frame in advance — it tells the system what counts as a task. But general intelligence is precisely the power to reframe: to decide, unprompted, what the task even is.

Relevance realization: a mind doesn't compute what matters, it continuously self-organizes toward it — trading generality against precision, staying poised between too much focus and too little. It's a standing act, not a rule you could write down.

Intelligence is relevance realization — the standing capacity to zero in on what matters here and now without checking everything. Not information, not skill: the art of ignoring almost all of it.

Understanding is participatory, not just propositional. You grasp something by being gripped by it — caring, coping, having a stake in a world — not by predicting the next token about it. A system can hold all the propositions and still not be in contact.

The self isn't a thing you have but a relationship you're in — an agent fitted to its arena. The grasping ego that fears its own dissolution is not the whole of it; wisdom is loosening that identification without losing the person.

Realness is not just existence but the depth of your contact with it — graded by how fully you participate. Losing that contact is the meaning crisis.

A world explained purely from below can say how things came to be, but not why some are more real, more worth becoming. Meaning needs the vertical that emanation guarded — a 'more real than real' to climb toward — recovered, not deleted, by the naturalist.