In our first lecture, we are introduced to the core components of cognitive agency - intelligence, rationality, wisdom, and spirituality. Dr. Vervaeke explores the challenges of adaptive intelligence, focusing on the frame problem and the difficulty of efficiently searching vast problem spaces to find relevant information. Dr. Vervaeke emphasizes the central role of relevance realization in human cognition, arguing that it is more fundamental than representations, rules, and reasoning.

In lecture two, we delve into the deep continuity between mind and life, exploring how the principles governing biology are continuous with those governing cognition. The lecture introduces the concept of "religio" to capture the multidimensional, dynamically self-organizing process of evolving our optimal grip on the world, which is central to cognitive agency and general intelligence. The discussion highlights the convergence of relevance realization theory and predictive processing frameworks, proposing that general intelligence is anticipatory religio for an autopoietic agent.

In lecture three, we explore the connections between meaning in life, religio (a sense of connectedness), and the human tendency towards self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior. Dr. Vervaeke argues that love and mattering, which involve turning the arrow of relevance towards others and the world, are crucial for a meaningful life. However, the very cognitive processes that make us intelligently adaptive also make us prone to biases and irrationality, as demonstrated through various psychological experiments on probability judgments, framing effects, belief perseverance, and motivated reasoning.