Finding paths and closing loops

Another brief look into my process — because I screwed up this week and didn’t manage to get the next post of this series ready in time. :/

It’s Friday, 1:21pm. About 4.5 hours before I’m supposed to publish today’s newsletter. You can probably tell from this intro, this one is going to be different. As I decided to be rigorous about posting every week at the same time — Fridays at 6pm UK time — I will do so again today, whatever it takes. I promise that it’ll be still worth your time.

The last several days I was struggling to put together the next combination of video clips and transcriptions for the next remaining concept to be explored to reach the goal of explaining Christopher Alexander’s Mirror of the Self concept with cognitive science.

There are several drafts. Unfinished, of course. Rough. Some just a single video fragment that needs expansion and explication. Others too long, clip and transcription after clip and transcription, but no coherence, no story. I messed around with several drafts throughout the week, and made some progress, but none of them are ready. And I’m running out of time to get them where they need to be.

Making coherence emerge

What’s interesting is that this is genuinely the first week since I started where I haven’t reached that moment where one of the explored paths leads to a bright clearing, a sudden realization of coherence that there is an intelligible narrative here that’s worth telling. It is — by design — an explorative process, and each week I don’t know the exact path I’m going to take until I walk it.

It was quite an experience to have been going through that process for more than 20 weeks now. Sometimes I reached the moment of emerging coherence early on a Monday. Sometimes I had “leftovers” from the week before that helped. Sometimes it was Wednesday or even Thursday, and I started to worry. But sure enough, it would always happen: Suddenly, what didn’t seem to connect at all, snaps together effortlessly. Once the spark of connection appears, everything else lights up and reveals the narrative. All the pieces fall into place almost automatically. From that moment on, looking back feels strange. “How did I not see that narrative before? It’s so obvious!” Clearly, an insight-like self-transformation has taken place.

It’s the moment you reach the top of the mountain, and from here you can oversee everything. Before you got to the top, you couldn’t quite tell for sure that there won’t be another fork in the path or another steep rocky wall that requires all your climbing skills. But now that you got to the top, the way down feels effortless, because from up here you can see exactly where you need to go.

That has not yet happened this week. And of course, I wonder: Why?

Almost there

We are getting close to the overall objective of this series. One of the drafts I have, which is actually in considerably good shape already, is the “final”* post that closes the loop back to the beginning. I use it to become aware of which concepts we have yet to cover. Once more, we will revisit the first video clip I started this series with, and go through the transcript, sentence by sentence. But this time we’ll make sense of every word and (hopefully) understand.
[* This newsletter will continue after that, exploring how what we learned can be applied to creative processes, personal knowledge management, and software development.]

The reason we’re not quite there yet is that there are still some gaps. Big ones. We’ll still have to tackle concepts like spirituality and sacredness. Yeah, you know, little, totally uncontroversial and easy to grasp things like that. But I can see a path now that will lead us there. It’s just that there are still some segments of that path I can’t see from here until we’ve walked more and got even closer. More clearings to discover as we hike through the dark forest towards our destination.

So that can’t be the problem, because we know where we are going, and I have a pretty good idea of what the missing pieces are to get there.

Distractions

I have to admit that I began to trust the magic of this ultimately creative process to work somewhat reliably. Perhaps a little too much. This week I was traveling until Wednesday, so I didn’t even start thinking about this week’s post until I was back. Three days should be enough, I thought. It worked out fine before…

Apart from travels, over the last few weeks I was also distracted with other material. I recently finished reading Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach again. It connects beautifully to the story which unfolds here, and seems especially relevant if your mission is to try to connect all this to computation and software development. Rest assured, we will get into that here soon after we wrapped up the explanation of the Mirror of the Self.

I’m also halfway into Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. Another re-read, which I hope will reveal some lower-level mathematical insights about the fundamentals of computation and how minimal computational systems can possibly become an interesting playground and laboratory to systematically explore beauty and wholeness in software.

Of course, inspired by all that exciting material, I also can’t help myself taking copious amounts of notes about wholeness and beauty and meaning in software — what will eventually become the continuation of this newsletter. At the same time I’m looking at my note taking and personal knowledge management process to see how these can be improved with insights from this series. I’ve recently drafted a list of what I now consider common misconceptions in software development, which I can’t wait to share with all of you shortly to kick off a discussion about meaningful software design.

And there’s a lot happening with AI at the moment. You probably heard. I can proudly say that so far you have not read a single sentence in this newsletter that has been generated by AI, and I’m not planning to have an AI take over anytime soon. I am, however, actively experimenting with how large language models can help with my creative process. With all what’s been going on lately, it seems ignoring it is no longer an option.

On top of all that I’m also preparing a presentation for the Nature of Order webinar as part of the Building Beauty program. The presentation is due on April 20th and will cover mostly content from this newsletter, hopefully in an even more advanced narrative that condenses several of the hard-earned insights here into a ~1 hour presentation. You will hear more about this here as we get closer to the deadline. At the moment, I have parts of a rough outline and some ideas on the narrative glue binding it together, but obviously this will take a lot more work in the coming weeks.

So, all these distractions are surely not conducive to finishing my next post. But is it really just that I didn’t block enough time? I think there is more to it than that — and I’m not trying to be apologetic; I’m trying to tease out another insight from this, self-referentially applying what I have learned.

Less familiarity with more complex concepts

As I’m exploring the source material, I naturally became more familiar with the “easier” or more basic concepts that we then covered early in this series. I am still learning, and I am still having moments of discovering connections in the original material that I had missed earlier. Just yesterday I ended up re-watching episode 17 about gnosis, following another of those connections I overlooked, and now I’m wondering how much of it I need to discuss here.

As we get closer to tying all of the concepts together to get to the “final” explanation that uses them all, things get a lot more complex and intertwined. This is also where this newsletter format isn’t ideal. If you joined recently and try to make sense of what’s going on here, it’s going to be more difficult with each episode. I have to build on previously explained concepts, and I try to help by linking back to what you need to understand the currently discussed concept, but realistically the only way to get the most out of this series is to start at the beginning and read everything in order. I wish there was a way to “catch up” new subscribers more quickly, but that’s a “Sorry, but I didn’t have the time to write a shorter letter” problem, which requires a complete rewrite of the whole series.

The most recent posts in this series were largely explaining aspects of John Vervaeke’s Relevance Realization framework. That is quite a complex beast in itself, and putting these posts together already seemed a lot more intense than previous ones. However, I managed to get a good grasp on relevance realization just in time to understand it deeply enough to know what to use and what to skip, and the coherent narratives kept emerging in time.

Now, as I’m trying to build the foundation for discussing what all of this has to do with spirituality and sacredness, I have finally caught up with my own horizon of understanding. I have all the parts, but I’m still trying to find the eidos, the structural-functional organization, to reveal the whole that is more than just the sum of its parts. I have analyzed all the features, but I haven’t been able to fully integrate them yet, such that everything collapses into a meaningful gestalt. I have not yet had the transformational insight that allows me to fully take Vervaeke’s perspective and see that part of the world through his eyes.

Oh, you know, that episode about gnosis I mentioned earlier, I think part of it fits right here:

Perspectival-participatory transformation

We've talked about a worldview. And a worldview is when you have a way… You have this deeply integrated, dynamically coupled way of seeing yourself, your agency, and seeing the world as an arena. You have this bi-directional modeling. It is simultaneously modeling the world to you and modeling you to shape the world. This mutual conformity, this reciprocal revelation. That's a worldview.

Now, this has happened to me, and I hope something similar has happened to you: Perhaps when you're reading a book, a novel, or… I'll use an example:

I'm reading the works of a particular philosopher, let's say it's Spinosa. And I'll be reading, and Spinosa is a profound and deep thinker, and you spend a lot of time and you're reading the arguments and you're trying to understand. You can come to follow the arguments. You can come to follow the inferences. You can even come to believe some of Spinoza's conclusions. And so you have a lot of beliefs — and they don't even have to be inchoate — they can be sort of systematically related together.

But then something else happens. Sometimes. Not always. But it's happened to me on multiple occasions. And it's often what I'm trying to convey above and beyond what I'm saying when I'm teaching other people. When reading Spinosa, there's this change: I go from seeing what Spinosa is saying to seeing things the way Spinosa says.

Spinosa goes from, “I believe what Spinosa is saying there and there and there and there about the world and about what it is to be a human being.” I go from that to actually seeing the world “spinozisticly". It's because Spinoza is now — to use a metaphor — the lens by which I'm both seeing the world and myself. I am now living the world as if “Spinoza” was an adverb. I'm living the world “spinozisticly". I have the perspective of what it is like to see the world the way Spinoza did and what it is like to participate in that worldview. You get this advent of the viability, the livability of a worldview.

James talks about that. William James, the great psychologist and philosopher. He talks about the difference between believing things and it actually being a live option to you.

What happens there is, at least for some period of time, the agent-arena relationship, the perspectival and the participatory knowing, are now conformed to — at least it seems to me to be that way — to what Spinoza had. Not just what Spinoza said. Who and what Spinoza was and what his world was to him has become available to me.

This depth of understanding, on a perspectival and participatory level, is at a minimum extremely helpful, if not absolutely necessary to successfully teach others. And this deep form of understanding is what I am ultimately aiming for with this series.

First of all just for myself: I study the source material not to collect facts — propositions and beliefs — but I want to reach a shift in perspective that is at least closer to seeing the world with the eyes of Vervaeke and Alexander and the people they refer to and rely on.

And ultimately, I hope you also already had a few moments like this as you were reading this series. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely. The current structure of my posts is not the best to afford these insights. I’m providing you with what I believe are the key sections in the source material that eventually lead me to such perspective shifts and transformative insights.

But I watched more than just those clips. And I watched a lot of them countless times. And I dissected each clip word for word, to correct the transcripts, sometimes even writing them from scratch myself. And more often than not that very slow and sometimes painful process of contemplating each word one by one has lead me to that final missing piece of the puzzle, that last important connection, that spark which ignites the fire of self-transformation and affords the change in the agent-arena relationship that makes a small fraction of Vervaeke’s or Alexander’s worldview accessible to me. I think. That’s what it feels like.

I hope what I select for publication here each week is exactly what’s needed to get you to those same insights, but realistically that is just too difficult to achieve with such a small subset of the material, leaving out so many connections that exist in the originals, and contributing little else than some editorial filtering and rearranging. However, I can hope that sometimes I picked just the right things and just enough such that it still happens. And perhaps sometimes I at least manage to get you close enough that you feel motivated to explore the original material.

You can see how I’m trying to close this loop back to the beginning, wrap up this first iteration of this series, map a first path through all the content that is enough to thoroughly explain the Mirror of the Self. Once that is done, I will hopefully have the understanding that is needed to find even better, more concise and more effective ways to teach, and to apply.

I’ll keep working on that. Now I have another week to make insight happen.

(It’s 5:56pm now. Phew… just in time.)

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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.