13 • Agent and arena
It is not enough to understand how the world works. We also need to understand how and why we participate in it, to be able to function and thrive as autonomous agents in a complex environment.
The way we experience the world every day puts us at the center of everything.
The way you experience the world every day puts you at the center of everything.
At the core of your everyday experience is your self.
Making sense of the world
"Ok, how is the world organized? What is the structure of reality?”
Well, how does it look to us? What can we all agree on?Ok, so we're all stone cold sober. Clear day. We can all talk. We can agree. And this is — try to get back to Aristotle's time — this is how things seem to all of us: We are at the center. And this is something we're going to come back to, because that's how your perceptual cognitive system seems to operate — you are at the center. Things are moving around us. [Aristotle] has a geo-centric worldview. The Earth is at the center.
Why do things move? Why are things moving? He has the idea that things move for the same reason you do. Remember, Thales talked about that: the magnet is moving, you're moving. When I lift on this [table] and it's pushing against me, that feels no different to me than when a person is pushing on me. It feels like the table is moving itself against me. Again, don't concentrate on whether or not this is true, concentrate on how much sense it makes.
When I move the pen away from the earth, it looks like it moves itself to get back there. Which looks exactly like: I want to be over there, and I move myself there, because I'm separated from where I want to be.
Aristotle's idea is that every thing is made up of elements. Basic elements like earth, water, air, and fire. Things that have a lot of earth in them, like this marker, want to be where Earth naturally is. Earth is at the center. As you move things away from the earth, things fall back towards it. Water is going to be on the surface. Fire moves up. And air is above.
Notice when I burn some wood how much sense this makes of it: Because when I burn the wood, the fire comes up, the water that's evaporated spreads out as condensation, and then the ash, the earthen part, falls down.
For Aristotle the Earth is at the center. And this is the thing: Everything is moving by a process of natural motion. Everything has an internal drive. Just like you. Everything is trying to get where it belongs. Everything has a natural place. Everything is moving on purpose. Everything is trying to get where it belongs.
Notice how meaningful this view of things is: Everything is moving, just like you. You're doing things to get where you belong. And when you are where you belong, then that's the fulfillment of your goals. That's what makes your life meaningful. So all of these things, the whole, everything in this cosmos, […] is moving purposefully, meaningfully.
Is Aristotle’s idea scientifically correct? No, certainly not. We know better today. But that’s beside the point here.
Does Aristotle provide a meaningful explanation of what we can all observe everywhere around us? Yes. It might not be scientifically correct, but it is fully compatible with our everyday experience — it makes sense. We can connect to it more than to most scientific explanations of today.
This is not an argument to ignore science or correctness! It rather is an argument to stop ignoring if something makes sense to us or not. Ideally, we want both knowledge based on the best science and understanding compatible with our everyday experience.
In touch with reality
Aristotle has a sense that we can still appreciate. He has a sense of "this is how we get in contact with reality”, and “this is the pattern that is making sense to me". And what I mean by that is: Even though you and I are post-Descartes, post-Newton, post-Copernicus, we still move around the Earth as if it's at the center and that the Earth isn't moving and that objects fall directly down, etc.
So given that, given the tremendous plausibility of Aristotle's proposal, we can now put these two sides together:
You've got the geo-centric world — and by world I don't just mean the Earth, I mean the Cosmos — with the Earth at the center and everything moved by natural motion.
And then what we have over here is: we have the conformity theory, knowing — and I'm going to hyphenate these words because these are not separate for this theory the way they are for us — knowing-being. It’s a way of being and a way of knowing.
And what I want you to see is how much they mutually support each other. This is very plausible. That's why I told you that whole story about the person who knows how to make the chair. And once you admit that this is plausible, and you use Aristotle's test, it supports this view of things. Because if the conformity theory is right, and I do all of this rational reflection, this is the intelligible pattern that I see.
I can look at this [geo-centric view] and say "this is the intelligible pattern and it's plausible." That makes sense of so many things. And that view of the world then lends evidence that I am in fact in conformity with reality. It provides evidence for the conformity theory. And notice these two things are now mutually supporting each other.
That's how you get a worldview: you have an account of the world, and you have an account of how you know the world that mutually support each other in very strong bonds of plausibility.
Now that sets something out for us: Notice that there is now a deep connection, a deep bonding as I say, between your understanding of your understanding and your understanding of the world.
Aristotle’s worldview was integrated — the way the world works and the way we make sense of how the world works were mutually supportive. Our contemporary scientific worldview can’t provide that.
What if we can describe the world accurately with all the insights modern science affords us, and make sense of it, in a way that’s aligned with how we experience it every day? Can we find a path to not just blindly trust experts with their advanced theories and believe in objective propositions that we have no intuitive understanding of, that have no meaning to us, that we can’t feel connected to?
Agent and arena
Let's try and put this together.
Arena
This [geo-centric view] is a view of the world that totally makes sense of your actions. This is a world organized according to purpose, things are moving on purpose. Things are trying to get where they belong. The structure of the world is very, very similar to the meaningful structure of your experience.
This view, basically — if you'll allow me a term that I've crafted with Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic in our book — this basically makes the external world an arena.
An arena is a place that's organized such that you know how you can act in it. It makes sense to you. You know where things belong, what actions are appropriate, how to measure and calibrate your performance. And I don't mean just your physical performance, also your intellectual performance.
If you are a football player and you go into a football arena, things are organized in such a way that you know intimately how to be involved and how to interact. You can conform — listen to my language — you can conform to that situation very powerfully.
Agent
This [conformity theory] is how you become an agent. To be an agent is to be capable of pursuing your goals. It's to be able to organize your cognition and your behavior so that your actions fit the situation, they fit the environment.
So what you have, when you have a worldview, is you've got this agent and arena coupling. Aristotle is explaining to you how you become an agent, how you know and structure yourself to act accordingly. And then he's telling you how the world is organized (cosmos) so that you can meaningfully interact within it.
Co-identification
And these two [agent and arena] — there's a process here of co-identification:
The identity of [the arena] is determined by and determines the identity of [the agent].
And the identity of [the agent] is determined by and determines [the arena].
So the professional football player is a particular kind of agent. They're a football player, and they go into an arena. The arena allows them to be a football player. It affords them. Then, being a football player, makes sense of why this part of the world is structured the way it is. They co-identify. The identity as an arena and the identity as the agent co-identify.
This is important! We need to stop here and take a little bit more care because I want to introduce an idea to you — this co-identification — because this is something you're doing all the time.
You're always assuming an identity. I'm doing it now. I'm assuming the identity of someone giving a talk, and I'm assigning an identity to everything around me. Everything has the meaning of how it's facilitating and affording my talk. And even you as the audience have been assigned a particular identity.
I'm always assigning an arena and assuming agency, and they are co-defining together. That is an existential mode, to use a term. This process by which you are co-identifying agency and arena, so that they fit together and make sense of each other, and you get a coherent and functioning worldview — that's your existential mode. And of course it matters really greatly to you.
The mutual support of a meaningful structure of the world and a meaningful structure of your experience of it, enables an existential mode in which the world makes sense to you. You become an agent in an arena, your actions make sense in the environment.
It is no accident that games — both physical and virtual ones — act as extremely good examples for this. Usually, a game world has been optimized for such understanding. It makes sense to us, such that we can easily co-identify how that game world works and how we can perform our agency in it.
Often it works so perfectly in well-designed games that we have no issues reaching a deep flow state while playing: We understand how the game environment operates, we know what actions we can perform, and we know how to perform them. Everything makes sense. There is no confusion. Our existence is grounded. We act, the environment responds. Often in the way we expect it to, sometimes in ways that may surprise us but don’t overwhelm us, so we can adapt and grow quickly and get better at playing the game. And it’s fun when that happens!
Wouldn’t it be cool if the real world would be more like that? Well, it kind of should be (and in many specific situations it still is), but if you zoom out far enough…
Worldview attunement
Existential modes — meta-meaning systems
Existential modes, they are "meta-meaning" relations. What does that mean?
If you do not have the agent-arena relationship, then none of your particular actions have meaning. If I put the tennis player into the football arena, it's absurd. It doesn't make any sense. The tennis player can do all they want and it doesn't make any sense. The environment is like "What? What's going on? That's absurd!" Notice that word, we're going to come back to it.
Unless the coupling works, your individual actions and projects of meaning don't work. It's a meta-meaning system because this mode makes possible an entire system of meanings. It means that the throwing the ball has a meaning for the football player. The catching the ball, the running here, all of these different things take on their meaning, because an agent-arena relationship has been set up.
You're doing it right now. You have assumed a particular identity, you've assigned an identity to me, and within that existential mode everything you're doing and I'm doing take on whatever meaning they have.
Worldview attunement
This is very, very important: this idea of your existential mode being a meta-meaning relationship, and that what it does is it’s an instance, a particular way of enacting this worldview relationship. Geertz calls this, this thing we're seeing in Aristotle, the way you get this mutual support, mutual intelligibility — not as a static relation but as an unfolding process — he calls this worldview attunement.
So one of the things that's really important to you, is that your existential mode — the way in which you are creating co-identifications of agent and arena — actually fit into a process of worldview attunement. If you don't have a worldview with worldview attunement, then ultimately you can't get this going.
You will be like the tennis player trying to play tennis in the football arena. You will start to experience your existence as absurd. It won't make any sense to you. And that matters because one of the ways in which the meaning crisis expresses itself is in people saying that they feel existence is absurd.
People often express the opposite of absurdity when they articulate that they have a meta-meaning existential mode that affords a functioning worldview attunement which gives them ways in which they are co-creating, with the world, the agent-arena relationship.
Notice what this has done, what Aristotle has done here that's so powerful: He's given us a way, a language of articulating a connection between what we often don't see: a deep connection between our projects of trying to intellectually understand the world and our existential projects of trying to feel like we fit in and belong in a meaningful fashion. That's what's so beautiful about Aristotle. He's given an integrated account of both of these.
And for many of us today we don't find that clear, consonant connection. We have a scientific world view — a view of how things are, how we understand things given our science — but one of the most common complaints of that worldview is it gives us no existential guidance. It doesn't tell us how to make our lives meaningful.
While we may still find worldview attunement (and perhaps even flow) in many specific situations of our daily lives — perhaps when playing games, perhaps in your job, perhaps in moments of connection in the communities you are part of — the further we zoom out and ask existential questions, the less existential guidance there is in our world today.
It appears that ability to connect existentially in a participatory fashion is essential for us to make sense of the world and to thrive in it.
If you are new to this series, start here: A secular definition of sacredness