26 • The Mirror of the Self
In this episode we are concluding the Mirror of the Self series with a look back at where we started — Can we now make sense of Vervaeke’s The Sacred and Alexander’s Mirror of the Self?
Before we get to today’s post, a quick announcement: I’ll be presenting my recent thinking on the cognitive science in Christopher Alexander’s work in the Nature of Order webinar of the Building Beauty program next Thursday, April 27th. Here’s my synopsis of the presentation:
Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order
A cognitive-scientific perspective on Christopher Alexander
"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."
— Christopher Alexander in book 4, The Luminous Ground
Scratching the surface of various ideas from ancient philosophers Plato and Aristotle to more recent and contemporary scientists Erich Fromm, Alicia Juarrero, George Lakoff, and John Vervaeke, we will explore several perspectives on "the psychological phenomenon".
Can 4E Cognitive Science help us make sense of and find deeper meaning in The Nature of Order?
The webinar is free and open to the public and you can join this presentation via Zoom by registering here to receive instructions on how to attend. (We haven’t finalized the details yet, which is also why today’s newsletter is a little late… :)
The session will be recorded and you will be able to find the video recording a few days after on this page.
Now, on to today’s content…
It is time to close the loop and look at where we started.
Does this make sense now?
Let’s dissect this piece by piece and see if what we learned during the series helps us make sense of what he is talking about:
I'm trying to suggest to you that the idea I proposed to you about what sacredness is can be connected to an alternative proposal of what the sacredis.
As we learned last week, Vervaeke defines sacredness as the psycho-existential experience, and the sacred as a meta-physical explanation that grounds its experience. He later on proposes that instead of the usual connection to something supernatural, the sacred can ultimately be explained through the ongoing process of relevance realization.
Building on his exemplary description of developmental wonder, he redefines the sacred as the relationship between reality and our self:
The sacred is the transjective relationship…
A transjective relationship is neither objective nor subjective (or both at the same time, if you will). It is neither intrinsic to the object nor to the subject. It co-emerges out of the relationship between both. It only exists, it only makes sense, with both.
To be able to attribute properties to an object, or to us ourselves (our self), we need concepts for these things, but transjectivity is pre-conceptual and deeply rooted in the participatory knowing of our existential modes and our agent-arena relationships.
…between the combinatorially explosive nature of reality.
The “object” in that transjective relationship is reality, which happens to be combinatorially explosive.
The reality is ultimately a no-thing-ness that ultimately it is not a thing that you can frame.
That reality is combinatorially explosive means that it is unfathomably complex such that we will never be able to fully comprehend it with our cognitive system, which avoids combinatorial explosion to protect our limited cognitive resources and filters what is relevant to us in a particular situation. Reality is not a thing. We cannot turn it into a concept, because any concept we can form, will not be able to capture reality to the full extent.
We can endlessly reframe reality, change what is salient to us in a given moment, and highlight different aspects and affordances available to us, but we are fundamentally limited in our capacity to make sense of reality itself.
We are always presented with a filtered and aspectualized salience landscape, which only exposes a fraction of all the information there really is. We are substantially limited in our capacity to make sense of it because of our fundamental framing.
Reality will always transcend your framing. That's what combinatorial explosion says.
The aspectualized, filtered salience landscape is our framing, and there will always be such a framing for us, because to make sense of the world around us we need that framing which provides us with identities for objects in our environment (concepts) and an identity for our self. That framing can and does dynamically change all the time, and other things can become more or less salient to us, and we use different skills to act as agents in this arena.
But what reality ultimately is, is not available to our conscious mind as a concept, as an idea, because reality will always be much richer than any framing of it. However many limited frames we will be able to look at, break, and step out of, we cannot step out of our ultimate framing, which provides us with concepts themselves and an idea of our self. We can re-frame reality in ways that may give us deeper insights into it, but we can never have the full picture, a god’s eye view. We are, ultimately, not gods, but finite human beings in awe of this mystery of the inexhaustible nature of reality.
And this is linked to the no-thing-ness of your self — the I that can never be captured, the framing that can never be captured in the frame, …
On the other end of that relationship is our self, the “subject”. We can also never fully capture the fundamental grounding our self is based on, because to make sense of something requires the concept of a self in the first place. We are again caught in a frame that we cannot escape from. The observer can never fully observe themselves.
…the ongoing, never-ending… not in you particularly but as a process; it doesn't come to a completion is what I meant by never-ending… process of relevance realization.
In that sense we are similarly complex as reality itself: a complex dynamical system, inexhaustible, constantly changing and adapting its sensory-motor loop to get an optimal grip on the world around it, changing its salience, presence, and depth landscapes to be able to act effectively as an agent in an arena. That process never stops until death. We are, ultimately, finite.
There's a deep non-logical identity, a deep symbolic resonance, between these two.
This is the mirror: object and subject, reality and self are in a way the same, not in a logical, but in a symbolic way. Both no-things, inexhaustible in their complexity. Anything that makes sense to us, anything that has meaning, emerges out of their relationship to each other.
Reality and self interwoven and deeply coupled in a never-ending dance of relevance realization. It does not make sense to consider one of them without the other. We are both every-thing and no-thing at the same time.
I think it's what a lot of the mystics were talking about.
Perhaps a lot of religious and mystical texts — should you ever come across one — begin to have a very different meaning to you now. At the end of the day, we are still trying to describe something that isn’t a thing and therefore is by definition ineffable. That is not so much different to what those mystics probably tried to do, when they had even less knowledge about the world available to them at their time. If these narratives seem foreign and weird to us now, perhaps we are trying to take them too literally?
This is a deep participatory identification.
We are destined to be participants in this ongoing co-identification of self and reality, because everything that we are, as far as we can make sense of it, comes out of the relationship between them. Our experience of a self, and our experience of the world, are reflections of their shred inexhaustible complexity that gets filtered, aspectualized, featurized, into affordances that then enable us to make sense of part of it and act in this part of reality as we perceive and understand it.
The inexhaustibleness of reality and the inexhaustibleness of relevance realization are deeply, deeply coupled at the primordial levels of religio.
The still mostly mysterious process that presents us with our hallucinations of a self and a world grounded in reality happen on the lowest levels of our subconscious cognition and are pre-conceptual, pre-egoic, and pre-experiential and therefore by definition inaccessible to our conscious mind.
Only when we experience that mystical sense in the form of awe and wonder (or fear and horror) do we become non-focally but subsidiary aware of these lower levels of our cognition, participating in something that is greater than us, beyond our limitations, which define us and our humanity.
This is the sacred as this: the inexhaustible that powers the experience of sacredness in a deeply, profoundly, participatory fashion.
This confrontation with our deepest levels of cognition must happen way below our propositional knowing, ineffably in the subconscious depths of our participatory knowing, which gives rise to all the higher levels that ultimately construct our experience and give us the ability to make sense.
That is a possible secular, naturalistic explanation for The Sacred.
And, I suggest, for Christopher Alexander’s Mirror of the Self.
Does it make sense?
Ok, so what…?
It’s very unlikely that at this very moment you experience anything special. And you shouldn’t. If I did a good job with the previous 25 episodes, today’s “revelation” should have been obvious and nothing more than a recap of everything we learned so far.
I do hope that along the way of reading the series you had a few smaller revelations and “Aha!” moments that helped you reframe how you understand your own cognition. I certainly had a few of those as I was putting all this together.
Being able to explain Alexander’s Mirror of the Self with Vervaeke’s naturalistic notion of The Sacred seems to me an incredibly useful feat that has the potential to reconnect scientifically-minded people with Alexander’s later work. There is certainly more work that needs to be done to further develop this first attempt of making a connection between them, making it even more accessible to a broader audience.
And there is more work to be done to explain what all this means practically. At the end of the day, Christopher Alexander was mainly interested in creating beautiful buildings, and all this talk about a deep connection between the things we make and our own selves was just what he understood as an important precondition to be able to create something beautiful that we and other people can “like from the heart”.
Liking something from the heart
Christopher Alexander in The Nature of Order, book 1, chapter 8 (emphasis mine):
Liking something from the heart means that it makes us more whole in ourselves. It has a healing effect on us. It makes us more human. It even increases the life in us. Further, I believe that this liking from the heart is connected to perception of real structures in the world, that it goes to the very root of the way things are, and that it is the only way in which we can see structures as they really are.
As we begin to appreciate this liking from the heart, we shall find out a number of important things about it:
The things we like (from the heart) make us feel wholesome when we are near them.
We also feel wholesome when we are making these things. As we make them, and after making them, we feel whole in ourselves, healed, and right with the world.
The more accurate we are about what we really like, in this sense of liking from the heart, the more we find out that we agree with other people about which these things are.
What we like from the heart coincides with the objective structure of wholeness or life in a thing. As we get to know the “it” which we like from the heart, we begin to see that this is the deepest thing there is. It applies to all judgements — not just about buildings and works of art, but also about actions, people, everything.
There is an empirical way in which we can help ourselves to find out what we really like from the heart. Nevertheless, it is not easy to find what we really like, and it is by no means automatic to be in touch with it. It takes effort, hard work, and personal enlightenment to understand it and to feel it. It requires liberation from opinions and concepts and ego to experience deep liking.
The reasons for the existence of this deep liking are mysterious, not obvious. To plumb them we shall have to examine the nature of things — even, ultimately, the nature of matter itself — very carefully. Nevertheless the reasons are empirical. We may determine, empirically, to what extent a thing has the ability to rouse this deep liking in us. It is not a private matter.
Somehow, the experience of real liking has to do with self. As we find out which things awaken real liking in ourselves, we find ourselves more in touch than before with our own selves.
When we find out the things we really like, we are also more in touch with all that is.
Where to go from here…
I’d like to keep this newsletter going, but now turn to more practical applications of the insights we gained (hopefully) over the last few months. I have a few ideas on where to take it from here, which I’m happy to share in a future edition of this newsletter, but first I’d like to hear from you what you are interested in reading next. If you have thoughts about this, please share them in the comment section below.
I’d also appreciate your questions about anything you think has not yet been covered or explained well enough, or just any question you have about this that is somewhat related. If there will be enough questions, maybe there will be a Q&A post in the near future?
For now I’d like to thank you for sticking around and reading this far. Don’t forget to sign up for my presentation next Thursday, if you’re interested. Looking forward to seeing you there, or to hear from you via comments or email reply. Until next time!
—Stefan
Mirror of the Self is a weekly newsletter series trying to explain the connection between creators and their creations, and analyze 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: A secular definition of sacredness.
For an overview and synopsis of the first 13 articles, see: Previously… — A Recap.