03 • Mind vs. matter

Our capacity to make sense of the world impacts our understanding, our beliefs, our actions, our creations, and our culture. What are the consequences, if we get it wrong?

Last time I suggested that it should be possible to keep a scientific and rational belief system and make sense of Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order. I’m still convinced that this is true. However, I’m not convinced that we all fully understand what that actually means.

Have you ever reflected on your own personal view of the world, how you make sense of it all?

It is possible, and I would say even probable, that you are making a lot of unchallenged assumptions, based on historical and cultural defaults that you have adopted automatically and without much reflection. That's perfectly normal.

Trying to understand deeply how we look at the world quickly gets extremely complex and difficult, and it involves some pretty hairy philosophical questions. We usually don't entertain such questions in our daily lives, because it doesn't seem necessary — thanks to a sufficiently well operating model of how the world works.

Well, as you are reading (or are at least interested in) Alexander's works, guess what — he raises a lot of these philosophical questions, partly because he thinks there are deep problems with how most of us today view the world.

The Scientific Revolution and Descartes' "trick"

In the 17th century, at the heart of the Scientific Revolution, Rene Descartes provides us with a clever method: If you want to understand how something works, pretend that it is a machine, isolate it from its environment, and invent a mechanical model, a mental toy, which obeys certain rules and replicates the behavior of the original thing.

This method was supposed to just be a useful mental trick. It worked so well for us that it brought us The Enlightenment and The Scientific Revolution and with it over 300 years (and counting) of scientific progress. Its success in explaining phenomena speaks for itself. Over time, Descartes' model has grown into the representation of how reality works. Now we fundamentally turn to this model to try to understand anything. It has become our scientific worldview.

Christopher Alexander in The Nature of Order, book IV (highlights mine):

It is well known that a cosmology may be linked to a particular method of observation. Indeed, the recently-held mechanistic view of the universe itself arises from a particular method of observation, the famous method described by Descartes. In the Discourse on Method, written three hundred years ago, Descartes set out his charming and innocent idea about the method of observation which we ought to follow in order to find out how the world works. He said, quite simply: We must pay careful attention to what happens in the natural world, and keep checking it in detail, and keep making our own model or picture of it also more detailed, constantly checking backward and forward, until the two come into closer and closer correspondence. This is the essence of his famous method.

It is wonderful, reading Descartes, to see how he predicts that the use of this method, when consistently and patiently applied, will lead to the gradual creation of a world picture which is true and detailed. Three hundred years after he described this method, what he predicted has come true. The constant application of his method made it possible for us to know the mechanics of the universe in extraordinary detail. The whole of modern science, the wonderful picture of the world which we have attained today, has come about simply because of repeated application of this method, day after day after day, by hundreds of thousands of people, for three hundred years.

Undeniably, Descartes' "trick" has brought us far. Yet, we are beginning to see certain limitations.

Or perhaps not?

I guess, not seeing them is part of the problem…

In touch with reality

Curiously, Rene Descartes also turns out to be an important character in John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. He dedicates almost two full episodes to him.

He [Descartes] invents analytic geometry. Any geometrical shape can be converted into an algebraic equation. Equations capture reality, because — remember what Galileo has done — math doesn't have to look like, it doesn't have to share the same gestalt as what it is representing. That has now been taken to its fulfillment in Descartes. The equations are not in any way like what they represent, but nevertheless — following up on Copernicus and Galileo — they are what cut through illusion into reality.

Now this is a radical idea! Because of graphing and analytic geometry we get this idea that we can grasp the world with equations.

So you think E = mc² captures something deep about the world. And you should. Because when you really understand this, you can take a paper clip worth of matter and you can smash a city to the ground. Men and women like gods. That's intoxicating, the power that it puts at our fingertips.

It seems to provide overwhelming evidence that this way of thinking puts us deeply in touch with the fiber and fabric of reality. We are fundamentally in contact. But it's not a contact of experience, it's not the Aristotelian conformity, it's not participatory. It is purely propositional, it is purely abstract, it is purely symbolic.

Vervaeke hints at an issue there: If we are in touch with reality in a purely propositional, abstract, symbolic way, could there be anything problematic about that?

Minds as machines

Of course, Descartes is embedded in his historic and cultural context, a challenging time where making sense of the world has become more and more difficult as humanity unravels more and more mysteries of the universe. Copernicus and Galileo, among others, confronted people of the time with challenging observations and even more challenging conclusions. Religion, up until now playing an integral role in most peoples' lives as a source of meaning, begins to come in conflict with scientific observations and gradually loses power to secular efforts and institutions.

Where science excels at explaining previously mysterious phenomena, how can it provide us with meaning?

[In Descartes time] there's all this anxiety. There's all this sense of disconnection. Descartes understands the meaning crisis as a lack of, a search for certainty.

Conformity, in the Aristotelian, the neoplatonic sense, participatory, perspectival conformity, has been replaced by propositional certainty. And of course, the thing about math for Descartes is, it gives you certainty. That's why math cuts through all the illusions. That's why it allows us access to such power.

Descartes thinks the answer to the crisis is to transform our minds not in any kind of spiritual transformation, but to transform our minds into machines of certainty — minds that will only work mathematically and logically in terms of equations. The way to get certainty is to turn myself into a machine that represents the world through abstract symbolic propositions and then manipulate those propositions in a purely logical, mathematical function. Descartes is proposing that the way to address the anxiety of the age is for each one of us to adopt a method that will turn us into computers. […]

Reasoning is being reduced to computation. The idea is: If we can make our minds into purely computational machines then we will achieve certainty. Certainty in our beliefs will give us what Descartes thinks we need in order to alleviate the anxiety that we are suffering.

Machines as minds

Paying close attention to Descartes' thinking is one of his contemporaries, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. He takes Descartes' ideas a step further and basically proposes artificial intelligence:

But Hobbes says, cognition is computation. And here is the radical idea he proposes: He takes a new idea, current at the time, that matter is a substance. Remember the old Aristotelian idea that matter is pure potential? But with Galileo matter is a reality in the sense of a substance. It resists, and it's good that it resists, because I need something that resists my will in order to help me with my biases. Matter is inert, it's resistant, it's really there, I push on it. Notice that all that's left of conformity is resistance of will.

Hobbes says, matter is real. What if I built a material machine that did computation? If cognition is just computation and I can build a machine that does computation — and some of the first automatic machines are being built at this time, calculating machines — if I can make a material machine that does computation, I will have made cognition, I will have made a mind.

Right there, at the heart of the Scientific Revolution, Hobbes is proposing artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is a child of the advent of the meaning crisis and the Scientific Revolution. It's not a modern idea. Artificial intelligence goes back to this time.

What is Hobbes doing with this? Galileo kills the universe. Copernicus kills the reality of our sense experience. But Hobbes is doing something way more personal. Up till now you've been isolated inside your own mind, but at least still there. I still have something special, unique, something spiritual. Hobbes kills the soul.

Because if artificial intelligence is right, if I can build a purely material machine that is capable of computation, then I will have made a mind, and I didn't have to involve any soul stuff, any spirit stuff, in making it. And that's radical.

If you are a software person, this might be a great angle to directly relate to this: Do you believe that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is possible? Do you agree to the basic premise that inert matter can ultimately be arranged in such a way that we can create a mind? Clearly, we haven't yet fully figured out how to do that exactly, but do you believe it will happen eventually? Perhaps soon?

What does your answer reveal about your worldview?

Reasoning as computation

Descartes thought that Hobbes is an idiot for proposing this:

There is often a claim made that Descartes rejects Hobbes' materialism because Descartes is Catholic and that his motivation is religious. And then there is the innuendo that Descartes is actually operating (sorry for this pun) in bad faith, he's merely trying to preserve his religious beliefs. I think this completely misrepresents and is a disservice to Descartes' intellectual integrity. Descartes does not respond to Hobbes out of his religious faith. Descartes responds to Hobbes out of the fundamental machinery and central claims of the Scientific Revolution.

I want to show you how problematic our worldview is becoming and has become: Hobbes basically proposes this idea of artificial intelligence. Descartes says that that is wrong. And he has a series of arguments against Hobbes that are very telling.

What Descartes basically does is argue about the central claims that are being made by the Scientific Revolution. The central claims that are being made are claims that matter is real, and reality is mathematically measured, and that the meaning and value of things is not in the things themselves.

Let's go through this very carefully:

Descartes says, "Hobbes, if you are making an argument, if you are engaging in reasoning (as opposed to just computation), you actually care, you have a goal, you are held to a standard of truth." Because whatever I'm doing when I'm reasoning, I'm working towards the goal of truth, which means I am acting on purpose.

And secondly, truth depends on meaning. If I ask you, is the following claim true? [unintelligible] Is that true? You presumably can't tell me if it's true or false because you first need to know what I just meant. Truth depends on meaning. Reasoning acts on purpose. It acts in terms of meaning, and it cares about standards or goals. It works according to a normative standard of how we ought to behave.

This is at the heart of reasoning. This goes centrally to a lot of useless time in the current culture wars of discussions of rationality. I actually am a scientist who scientifically studies rationality in human reasoning, and it is often surprising to me how little of the science of rationality advocates of rationality make use of, how difficult it is to integrate notions of rationality with a scientific materialism.

I'm not anti-materialistic. That's not what I'm doing here. I'm trying to show you that people who advocate a model of rationality that is ultimately Cartesian, that rationality is about behaving purely logically in an attempt to get certainty in our truths, Sam Harris for example comes to mind, are not paying attention to the criticisms of that model made by the very self same Descartes. Do not advocate one side of a phenomena without paying attention to central criticisms made about it by its progenitor.

Because what is Descartes saying to Hobbes? He's saying, look what's central to reasoning: normativity. How things ought to be. Meaning and purpose. And Hobbes… I'm going to act on Descartes' behalf here, I can do this in all integrity and legitimacy because we have Hobbes' letters to Descartes and Descartes' response. And Descartes' responses are often contemptuous.

So you can almost hear Descartes saying, "Hobbes, you idiot! You can't have a material reasoner." Because what is the Scientific Revolution saying about matter? It's saying that matter is inert. It has no purpose. There is no meaning in matter. We've been doubting that since Occam. Occam's Razor, remember what it actually cuts? It acts in terms of ought to be, not how things are. No, science doesn't act in terms of how things ought to be. It acts only in describing and explaining how things actually are. It has no values.

Science is teaching us that the world is purposeless, matter is meaningless, there's no normative standard or structure in matter. It's just actually how it is. And how it actually is is valueless.

"So, Hobbes, matter lacks meaning, purpose, normativity, it’s inert. How could you possibly get all of those things out of matter?" How could you? If you are a reasoner, you care about the truth. And yet truth depends on meaning, purpose, at least the pursuit of truth, and normative standards of how things ought to be. And none of those are in matter.

At this point it should become clear that what Hobbes and Descartes discuss there in the 17th century are questions and problems that are still relevant here today.

Mind vs. matter

A scientific worldview, based on Descartes' revolutionary method at the heart of science, and all the scientific progress we have made until today, has brought with it a deep sense of disconnection between our own everyday experience and a mechanical universe that lacks meaning and purpose — the dualism between mind and matter. Up to today, we have not managed to convincingly reconcile this division.

300 years later, Alexander picks up on exactly the same issue:

Christopher Alexander in The Nature of Order, book IV (highlights mine):

We see, then, that a method of observation can have enormous power to teach us things. However, as we now know, the world-picture we have inherited from these three hundred years of observation and model-making is too mechanical. That came about as a direct result of the method itself. Indeed, it was the genius of Descartes' method to focus attention only on how things work as machines, and to pay no attention to anything else.

But, of course, we had to pay a price for doing it. The mental trick that was needed to achieve these wonderful results required that we separate ourselves from the process of observation — and this had the consequence that our view of the world became mechanical. That is no surprise, because it is precisely the strength of the method that we choose to pretend that everything is a little machine. It is this mental trick that lets us find things out. But, at the same time, it has the consequence that the world which is created in our minds then seems to be value-free, and seems to be impersonal.

If you are reading The Nature of Order, you are not reading a practical guide on how to build beautiful buildings with lots of tips and tricks from an expert builder and architect — although, yes, there is some of that. What you are reading is Alexander's attempt at a scientific argument for how to reconcile mind and matter. He is trying to present a compelling answer to one of the biggest unsolved philosophical problems out there. He is literally going to try to explain how the universe works (in book IV).

I find it enormously helpful to be aware of this historical philosophical context, and that you are headed into a deep and thoughtful discussion of metaphysics and philosophy. Even if you are here primarily for practical advice — which you can find plenty of in the books — all of his observations and all of his advice is predisposed on a different, post-Cartesian understanding of how the world works.

He realizes that a lot of his observations — accurate, precise observations of his inner experience — cannot be explained with the Cartesian model.

Christopher Alexander in The Nature of Order, book IV (highlights mine):

In order to create this effective scientific world-picture we had to use a device: the intellectual device of treating entities in nature as if they were inert, as if they were lumps of geometric substance, without feeling, without life — in effect, merely mechanical elements in a larger machine.

[…] The elements are defined, and the rules of interaction are defined, and everything then follows when this mechanism is let loose.

Yet we human beings also have, in our daily experience of the world, something different, an immediate awareness of self. We are conscious. We are aware of our own selves. We have feelings, We experience love. Sometimes we experience unity. […]

Within the era of the mechanical world-picture, we have been taught to think that the experience of self is somehow an artifact of the interaction of matter, a consequence of the play of machines.

Yet thinking so does not contribute any understanding of the self that we experience each day. The self — in each one of us — continues to exist. It is more palpable, more present, in our daily experience than is the world of mental and mathematical mechanisms.

Yet our present world-picture has no place in it for this self. The self does not figure in the present world-picture as a real thing. Nor does consciousness. Nor does love. Nor does the experience of unity.

Or, more succinctly, as he states in The Nature of Order Book I, The Phenomenon of Life:

The picture of the world as a machine doesn’t have an “I” in it. The “I”, what it means to be a person, the inner experience of being a person, just isn’t part of this picture.

Alexander goes through great lengths to propose a new model, which integrates human experience and — in his view — is compatible with our current understanding of science. For his observations to make sense, to him, and eventually to us, he needed a plausible explanation for how mind and matter work and interact.

What you will ultimately be able to get out of The Nature of Order will significantly rely on how far you are willing to subscribe to his new model, how much you are willing to introspect and turn towards your own personal inner experience, how much you consider your intuition about your self a real phenomenon.

A collapse of meaning

Alexander grasps the importance of this problem, the divide between mind and matter, our mechanical way to view the world, and the harm it has been causing — in architecture and beyond. Architecture is of course his primary domain and therefore the source for many of his observations and examples. But The Nature of Order — the hint is in the title — goes far beyond architecture. Just like Descartes was back in his time, Alexander is worried about our capacity to make sense of our world and what we do to it with our limited understanding.

Christopher Alexander, back in book IV:

It is this ongoing rift between the mechanical-material picture of the world (which we accept as true) and our intuitions about self and spirit (which are intuitively clear but scientifically vague) that has destroyed our architecture. It is destroying us, too. It has destroyed our sense of self-worth. It has destroyed our belief in ourselves. It has destroyed us and our architecture, ultimately, by forcing a collapse of meaning.

A collapse of meaning.

A meaning crisis.

Alexander's The Nature of Order and Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis are both substantially connected and hone in on the same fundamental problem.

Recontextualizing Alexander’s work as a proposal to address the meaning crisis unlocks new paths to make sense of his work. And potentially, because Alexander proposes specific solutions, we may even be able to identify new ways to address the meaning crisis.

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If you are new to this series, start here: A secular definition of sacredness