2023 in review
This year I finished the original Mirror of the Self series, realized its relevance for AI, and tried to make its lessons applicable to software design and development.
This is newsletter #33 this year. Also, it’s almost 2024.
Let’s do the obvious thing and look back on 2023.
Intelligence, relevance, and why there won’t be AGI anytime soon
At the beginning of 2023, I was — without knowing it at the time — pretty much exactly halfway through my original series. I kicked off the year with What is Intelligence? and The Relevance Problem, which describe the nature of our human intelligence, how it is often misunderstood as something that can be fully captured by computation, and what we as humans still have over any machine invented so far: a capacity for relevance realization.
Opponent processing and the dynamic nature of design processes
In February I focused on Dynamical systems, and why The essence of design must be dynamically adaptive to an ever-changing environment. Here things really start to come together and it becomes clear how Christopher Alexander’s fundamental process of unfolding aligns with John Vervaeke’s relevance realization framework: both are dynamic processes of differentiation with integration. Opponent processing explains the eternal conflict between opposing goals at the heart of these processes. There is no progress, no continuous adaptation, no life without such conflict; and resolving the conflict, by letting one side win, results in stopping the dynamical system, a state also known as death.
Exploring consciousness and why we are not anything like computers
After looking at dynamic processes from the outside, we can now ask: What does it feel like to be one? Here- and Now-ness explores the function of consciousness as continuous cognitive adaptation to our environment, and explains why all Four ways of knowing are important for us to make sense of our world. Flow and Intuition closes the loop to earlier explorations of bias and insight. Finally, Metaphor tries to capture how we fundamentally structure our analytical thinking with symbols embodying physical interactions — our thinking primitives are not based on propositions and calculation, but on intuitions and interaction, guided by relevance realization.
Remembering our humility
In March we begin with a deep dive into how our cognition is grounded in a Fundamental framing and human spirituality. The limits of our conscious processing give rise to The mystery of wonder and awe, and lead us to cope with our mortality and insignificance when Opening the Eye to the Storm. Our greatest creations and artworks remind us of our humility by pushing us towards Sacredness and the sacred at the edge of our cognitive capabilities, confronting us with the numinous and revealing The Mirror of the Self. This completely secular explanation of what we experience as spiritual concludes the series in April.
Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order
After a quick recap of the second half of the original series, I was grateful for the opportunity to present a fraction of my learnings in a presentation at the Building Beauty program: Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order is not an attempt to summarize, but to approach a synthesis of our constant search for meaning as we try to make sense of the world around us with the process of making, where we capture our insights into the world in creations that are meaning-ful.
From artificial intelligence to care-ful design
In May I can no longer ignore the rise of interest in and (un)popularity of artificial intelligence, and share some obvious connections I see between AI/AGI, and key concepts from the series.
Modally confused AI raises the question if AI as we know it today is really poised to enslave us, or if we already achieved that ourselves through a limited world view that promotes propositional tyranny and having mode thinking, which are especially prevalent in the tech industry.
Mind or machine? Who Cares? elaborates on that question and argues that what makes us remarkably different from machines is that we care — in a cognitive sense.
This happens to align with Christopher Alexander’s thoughts on the design process and — prompted by the announcement of Apple’s Vision Pro augmented reality / spatial computing headset — leads me to suggest Design as higher-order problem solving. Distinguishing problem solving from designing experiences, I follow up with tying it all back to our cognitive processing in Fighting insight with inference — the eternal conflict between our intellect and our intuition, which is of course the kind of opponent processing that makes us human, and that machines (currently) do not have.
Improving software design and development
In summer I shifted towards exploring the question: What have I learned that could practically benefit software design and development?
From tools to environments was my conclusion from seeing modal confusion deeply ingrained in the tech industry and current software practices, which tends to over-generalize solutions for under-contextualized problems. I suggest moving from minimum viable products towards minimum livable environments, so that we have an opportunity to augment our analytical problem solving skills with implicit learning to build up the intuition we need to design great experiences. In Switching contexts I report from my very own experience of trying to put that into practice myself.
In my Building Beauty presentation I brought up the question: Are we software people actually making things, or merely describing them? But I did not address that question then. To build or not to build? explores that question further.
Between science and art
As summer ends, and as I keep struggling with context switching between writing and programming, I switch gears and grasp for last straws, causing some of my favorite essays of this year to emerge:
A friend prompted me to share a bit more on What I got out of watching Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
After a particular long pause, I write about the art and science of Making coffee, which may be my personal favorite essay this year.
Then I finish up one of the leftover drafts for the original series: Symbols attempts to explain the connection between our analytic and symbolic processing with our deeper, subconscious processing.
Finally, in Rediscovering handwriting I share a specific experience that for me encapsulates much of what comes from not just trying to solve problems but designing for experiences instead.
Simplicity
At the end of October it occurred to me that one concept that hides at the center of the question of how to apply all that abstract cognitive science and philosophy to software is simplicity. As a form of beauty, or wholeness, it is an elusive property present in most things we deem well-designed. Can it be understood in terms of our search for meaning?
And so I begin On simplicity… — what I hope to become the next series that leads me closer to practical and applicable suggestions for better design in software development and beyond. The initial essay frames what’s coming with how my thinking about simplicity has changed.
In Meaning-ful design I expand the main conclusion from my presentation Finding Meaning in the Nature of Order: If wholeness is ultimately about meaning, what if simplicity is ultimately about coherence?
In Familiarity I revisit context-(in)dependence in light of simplicity. It turns out that amazingly complex things can appear surprisingly simple to us, suggesting.
And that’s where we catch up with today.
2024
I’m thrilled to share more of my thinking about simplicity in the upcoming year through my writing in the ongoing series, but hopefully also in another way…
It has always been my goal to turn at least some of these hard-won insights into something practical and applicable. My journey over the last years took me farther away into abstract and philosophical realms that even I at times almost lost hope that I will ever be able to make that happen.
However, the last few months have rekindled my enthusiasm for being able to demonstrate benefits and consequences of a different design approach driven by the ideas discussed here in actual working software.
In 2024 I look forward to spending a significant part of my time on software experiments that try to materialize these benefits in software you will be able to run and source code you will be able to inspect.
Happy holidays and until 2024!
—Stefan
Mirror of the Self is a fortnightly newsletter series investigating the connection between creators and their creations, trying to understand the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art.
Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.
If you are new to this series, start here: 01 • A secular definition of sacredness.
Overview and synopsis of articles 01-13: Previously… — A Recap.
Overview and synopsis of articles 14-26: Previously… — recap #2.
Another great way to start is my recent presentation Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order.