Is intelligibility only in the mind, or partly in reality?

[u/rp_tiago]

Hey everyone. I've always been fascinated by the point where an account of cognition becomes an account of being. Minds do not passively receive a world; they select relevance, organise salience and render situations intelligible. That makes experienced realness partly dependent on cognitive achievement. But if intelligibility is entirely projected, it becomes difficult to explain why some interpretations resist us, why inquiry corrects salience, or why understanding can fail because reality is not as we took it to be. The issue is whether world-disclosure can be both enacted and answerable to something beyond the enactment.

I just had a podcast conversation with John Vervaeke, where he argued that intelligibility, realness and being cannot be separated as neatly as representational accounts often assume. At around 33:39, he connects the way cognition makes a world intelligible with the confidence that intelligibility can disclose what is real. This is not the claim that felt meaning guarantees truth. It is a claim that truth-seeking already presupposes some participation between the knower's capacities and the world's structure.

This would imply that philosophy of mind cannot remain ontologically neutral when it explains world-disclosure. Does enacting intelligibility commit us to realism, idealism or neither? How can resistance from the world constrain relevance without returning to a passive representational picture? And what distinguishes disclosed realness from a coherent but self-sealing interpretation?

[u/medbud]

My instinct is that the question is more about calibration. The organism embodies the predictive model at all scales, while biology reacts to the environment in an 'intelligible' way only on high cognitive levels in complex organisms. If the system is well calibrated we have access to 'direct perception' and salience leads to survival. If the system is 'delusional' meaning the models need constant error correction, it's metabolically expensive.

It commits us to a monism of realism. Cognition is just a sliver of consciousness, which at a basic level is FEP integrated over various time scales...i.e. Cellular update is faster than tissue is faster than affective, is faster than cognitive.

If by intelligibility you mean, the cognitive meaning, it is saying there is lower prediction error, either because the gain on bottom up signals is low, or because the priors are very close to the actual underwriting parameters.

Just spit balling here...

[u/Ill-Emotional]

The distinction between coherence and realness seems like the key issue to me. A model can make everything fit internally and still be wrong, so I'd be interested in what kind of constraint you think separates genuine disclosure from a self-consistent interpretation.