Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Johannes Jaeger, Anna Riedl, Alex Djedovic et al.
35 citations
Organisms solve problems in a way that fundamentally differs from algorithmic computation. Before an organism can apply logical rules, it must first determine what is relevant—turning ill-defined problems into well-defined ones. This ability to realize relevance is present in all living beings, from bacteria to humans, and arises from their autopoietic, anticipatory, and adaptive organization. The process of relevance realization cannot be fully captured by formal algorithms, implying that organismic agency, cognition, and consciousness are not computational in nature. Instead, relevance is realized through an adaptive, emergent triadic dialectic—a metabolic and ecological-evolutionary co-constructive dynamic—that allows an agent to continuously maintain a grip on its reality. Being alive means making sense of one's world through embodied ecological rationality, a key characteristic distinguishing life from non-living matter.
Interdisciplinary Research in Counseling Ethics and Philosophy - IRCEP
December 24, 2025
John Vervaeke, Rick Repetti, Christopher Mastropietro et al.
Two group philosophical practices—Dialectic into Dialogos (DiD) and the Socratic Search Space (SSS)—are described and contrasted with Nelsonian Socratic Dialogue (NSD). NSD aims for consensus by extracting a virtue concept from personal experiences, then testing it through Socratic questioning, making it a 'cataphatic' or positive practice. DiD instead leads participants into aporetic engagement with a virtue concept, making it 'apophatic' or negative. SSS integrates elements of both, balancing cataphatic and apophatic approaches. DiD and SSS are designed to induce dialogical flow states (Dialogos) that afford transformative experiences of distributed cognition, described by practitioners as a 'secular séance' that ignites Heraclitus's metaphorical fire associated with Logos, the intelligibility of ultimate reality. The paper presents cognitive science, philosophical, and practical supports, ethical considerations, and relevance amid the AI revolution and meaning crisis.
Philosophical Psychology
December 16, 2025
Hüseyin Beyköylü, John Vervaeke, D. Meling
Self-transcendent experiences (STEs), such as flow states and mystical experiences, are profound shifts in cognition and consciousness with transformative potential. A proposed cognitive continuum framework, grounded in enactive cognitive science and complex dynamic systems, treats the embodied person embedded in their world as the unit of analysis. STEs reflect an enhancement of relevance realization—the organism's active engagement with its environment to adaptively frame its world—across increasingly global levels of cognitive organization. Destabilization and complexification are central processes, with entropy as their metric. The Entropy-Fluency hypothesis posits that increased entropy signals destabilization followed by increased fluency, bridging first-person subjective experiences with third-person scientific observations. STEs are dynamic, person-specific, and context-dependent phenomena requiring idiographic and transdisciplinary methods.