04 • Mind over matter

A surprising connection between »The Nature of Order« and cognitive linguistics offers a path to rectify Alexander's fantastical metaphysical explanation of mind in matter.

In last week’s article I was presenting the historical philosophical context that Alexander’s The Nature of Order is deeply entangled in. I hope painting this bigger picture, based on scientific analysis and expert opinion, has the rigor and gravitas to make you comfortable reflecting the bigger questions raised by Alexander. At least better than having to trust a random guy on the internet (that’d be me 👋), because what do they know?

But of course, you could also ask me, “Hey, so what do you believe? You’ve read it. Did it change your worldview? Do you think it’s worth it? What did you get out of it?” Today I ‘d like to address that.

Diagnosis: scientific skepticism

A lot of people come to Alexander’s works from a mostly pragmatic perspective. If you — just as Alexander started out himself — “just want to learn how to build beautiful things”, you can end up in a serious conflict as soon as you realize how Alexander tries to reformulate foundational principles of how the world works in a way that may be in conflict with your own worldview.

But maybe you don’t. This might not be an issue for you. There are many people — and sometimes I admire them for that — who can just skip over this. They can somehow deal with the cognitive dissonance I’m experiencing, and can ignore underlying questions that fill me with doubt that the material is worth reading. They can “just go with it”. If you’re one of them, good for you.

I am not one of them. And I am writing this series for those of you who are more like me: analytical and skeptical, always trying to gain deeper understanding.

When a model of thinking doesn’t appear to make sense to me, I just cannot ignore that. Especially if I am hoping to base future actions on that model. Of course, in many cases I don’t care enough, ignore it, and move on to something else. But naturally, if it seems worth it, I investigate further, sometimes — certainly in this case — obsessively, and more often than not this ultimately reveals how my own understanding was inadequate and incomplete. I was wrong. I learned something. That’s great. I like learning things. Perhaps too much.

Diagnosis: missing capacity for faith

In Challenging your belief system I described my own experience of reading the first book of The Nature of Order, as I was transitioning from part 1 into part 2:

Where everything until now was satisfying high standards of objectivity, suddenly he begins talking about personal experience, something we would consider highly subjective. Ultimately, he brings up personal "feeling as the inward aspect of life".

Something there didn’t sit well with me and didn’t satisfy my standards of objectivity. Relying on personal subjective experience seemed eerily spiritual to me, as if I was supposed to just believe, have faith in something I don’t (and perhaps can’t) understand.

Nope, not having that! I’m a software engineer. My job is to pick complex systems apart until I figure out what’s going on, and then reassemble them (with slight modifications) to improve them. Understanding is crucial for this. I need to figure this out! And what Alexander claims can be achieved when applying his method was certainly attractive enough to spend more time trying to make sense of it.

So I picked apart the most complex system there is — our mind.

Experiential( real)ism

Actually, I had already started doing that, for different reasons. Long before I started reading The Nature of Order, I was investigating a software project to build a personal knowledge management system — picture a fancy new modern way of using our phones and tablets to take notes. [What you’re reading right now is, in a strange way, still part of that project; perhaps I’ll get to tell you more about that another time.]

I was driven to bring something substantially better to the table, or in this case to the App Store: an app that would truly and properly augment human intellect. These days, almost everybody in tech seems obsessed with just starting to build and then adapt as you go and as feedback trickles in. Which can work, but more often than not the design of these systems drifts towards metrics that can be easily measured and the business model becomes more important than the original problem. I wanted to try a different approach and first understand the problem I want to solve. So I set out to get a better grasp on how we think.

That’s when I encountered the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson about categorization - how we put things into categories, mentally, as concepts in our mind. Turns out, linguists ask a lot of the same questions that software people ask when they design systems. Also turns out, linguists have done a lot of research for many decades and have come up with a lot of good answers to such questions.

Long story short: Lakoff’s books Metaphors We Live By and Women, Fire and Dangerous Things changed my worldview, before Alexander even had a chance to.

This may be a criticism I have of Alexander: I honestly don’t know if he were able to achieve that on his own. Had I not read Lakoff and Johnson before, had I not already accepted that objectivism (which corresponds to Alexander’s mechanistic Cartesian worldview) is a severely limited way of understanding the world, because it completely ignores us as experiencing individuals, and had I not already bought into Lakoff’s proposal of experiential realism or Experientialism, I am not sure Alexander would’ve been able to convince me of his ideas.

Although I’d love to go into details, I’ll have to cut this short here, otherwise this easily turns into a whole other series “Alexander and Lakoff”.

The gist is, both Lakoff and Alexander, each of them independently and without reference to (and perhaps without knowledge of) each other, argue for the same thing: We need to change the way we view the world and allow personal experience to become part of the new model.

Let’s take a step back and consider how random this is: On one side we have an architect, who has deep thoughts about the design process and the philosophy of architecture, design, and building. On the other side we have a cognitive linguist, who is also interested in philosophy, literature, mathematics, and politics. Both, deeply immersed in their respective fields, come to the same conclusion: we need a better way to make sense of this world.

Personally, after reading them both, I find Lakoff’s argument much more compelling than Alexander’s. Where Alexander ultimately stays full materialist and seeks a physical explanation of the self in matter (book 4), Lakoff offers a pragmatic cognitive account of personal experience within a shared reality.

Being able to make that connection between the two primed me to open up to Alexander’s claims about personal experience. Even if he fails to fully explain his theory in the end (which I think he does), he makes accurate observations and comes to interesting and useful conclusions that align pretty well with the model Lakoff is proposing. So where I would have felt irritated and skeptical about his claims, I could now plug in an alternative explanation backed by Lakoff’s work.

It also helped that I see another strong connection to the software world: We have just recently begun to consider the people who end up using software a little more in the process of designing it. From my perspective, however, still not enough. What it feels like to use software is often not considered at all, or through very limited lenses of usability, user experience, and accessibility.

So, has Alexander successfully changed my view of the world? Well, he certainly contributed to a changed worldview, but he had significant help.

Now, Lakoff doesn’t explain Alexander. Experientialism doesn’t explain The Nature of Order. The theories just connect in powerful ways and the authors agree on the necessity of a modified worldview. I found the connection incredibly helpful, though I hope it is not necessary — studying Lakoff took me at least half the time it took me to study Alexander.

It’s impossible for me to un-know Lakoff and approach Alexander with a beginner’s mind, so I can’t really tell how convincing Alexander would be without that help. However, I can point out what I consider the weakest part in Alexander’s argument.

Alexander’s mistake

One mistake I think Alexander makes in book 4 is: although he accepts a possible “psychological explanation” as plausible, he ultimately rejects it, or at least declares it inferior to his (meta-)physical one.

Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, book 4:

Should we take the description literally? Or should we take it as a truth of psychology? Of course, I fully realize that if this physical/meta-physical hypothesis of the I-plenum turned out to be true, it would force a radical reappraisal of the nature of matter and would, in effect, provide a starting point for thinking about an altogether new view of the physical universe. That is a very tall order. A reasonable person may reject the wisdom of even thinking about such a thing.

Even if this picture is too much for you, and you consider it to be just a model — at best partially correct — still, the I in one form or another, does remain as a necessary part of the world-picture.

The humane view of the ground as a psychological and structural phenomenon is undoubtedly more easy to accept. In this view we keep a view of the I as something in our experience, as a psychological ground, which exists in every human being: and we recognize that we cannot make a living building unless each one of its centers is connected to the structure of this self or psychological ground. Then the blazing one, the blazing furnace, which is seeable, reachable, reached by the artist trying to find union with the I, or reached by the observer who, through the existence of a living work, sees and makes contact with the I, makes sense as psychology. Even in that case, the blazing one remains as experienced reality.

The plenum model of the Ground — the idea that the I is actually real in the universe, not only in the mind — is harder to accept. But in the rare moments when I dare to consider it, it helps me, because it enlarges my understanding. It also nourishes my mind and stimulates my inspiration. In this view we see the same ground — but we now think of it as a great thing in the universe, far beyond ourselves, haunting, otherworldly, ultimate in its beauty and light. It is reached only when a great work breaks through to it.

Would it be fantastic if this was all in the physical nature of the universe? Sure. And to be fair, we don’t know if he’s wrong, because we have no idea. He could be spot on. Or surprisingly close. It’s a massive open question.

However, after all his rigorous scientific build-up, he ends with a weak justification for a fantastical explanation. I think, even with his conviction, his work would’ve been more defensible, and more accessible to rationalist minds, the kind of minds he seems to be trying to convince, had he considered both paths as equally plausible at least.

That, of course, is an assessment made from my extremely rational perspective. If you come at this from a more spiritual side, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

So, what’s my verdict?

Is The Nature of Order worth reading?

4 massive books. More than 2500 pages total. Deep, dense, scientific and spiritual thinking. It took me almost a year to process it. Should you really spend all that time and effort?

Well, again, consider who you’re asking here. I’m writing this series. You just got a feeling for how much time I spent with Alexander and related theories. So I’m obviously deeply biased, when I give my answer: Absolutely!

Where Alexander’s attempt at explaining the universe ultimately fails, the explanation is just part of his work. Even if he gets the explanation wrong, his observations, his conclusions, and his practical advice on what to do are still enormously valuable and useful.

That’s essentially what he says himself in book 4:

Whether the humane, psychological and positivistic view, or the more dream-like plenum view is more accurate, I do not know. But the overall picture I am trying to present in either case remains. One way or the other, the ground of I is real. Either the ground is a psychological description of the way we experience living structure. Or it is a factually supportable, previously unknown aspect of matter. There can be no doubt, I think, that at least one of these two versions is true. The I, in some form, exists.

Alexander identifies important problems and makes us aware of their far-reaching and perhaps unintended consequences. He constructs useful mental models for describing and manipulating structure and process. And he provides specific and actionable advice for how to change the way we design and build to create a better world. All of these things are useful in their own right. Screw his metaphysics.

Even if he can’t quite explain convincingly why this all works, we can still try this out and see what happens for ourselves.

Wait a second…

Hold on! What did I say in the beginning? Aren’t we back at believing then? Having faith in something we don’t quite understand?

Again, if you’re like me, you’ll be left at least a little unsatisfied.

Alexander himself seems painfully aware, and at least a little bit unsatisfied as well (from Book 4):

Although you and I probably cannot help being skeptical about the more difficult meta-physical view, because it is so far beyond what we currently allow ourselves to think, there is one cogent reason for believing it that I have not mentioned. It is very, very hard to make a beautiful building. Even the methods and processes I have described in Books 2 and 3, with all their structure, are still very hard. As a practical matter, the metaphysical view of the Ground put forward in this chapter makes this hard task more attainable. As we shall see in chapter 12, the artist or builder is then making the building as a gift for “God” — an instrument through which one seeks union with God, reality beyond reality. The buildings themselves, and all the centers of the buildings, are made as windows through which one can reach contact with that blazing One, through which I touch eternity.

When I do my work in this conscious spirit, then all that living structure which is so hard to reach does become slightly more attainable, slightly easier. It then seems to be within reach, and as a practical matter, it can then sometimes be reached.

Well, I just said Alexander couldn’t explain all this convincingly.

What if somebody else can explain this, scientifically?

What if Alexander’s secondary option of a “psychological explanation” is a more promising path to understanding what he really meant?

Which brings us back to cognitive science and John Vervaeke…

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