Previously… — a recap
Let’s start into the new year with a recollection of the story so far to refresh our memory on important concepts already covered in all 13 posts from 2022.
Happy new year and a great start into 2023!
To kick off the new year (and to mask that I didn’t work on any new posts over the holidays), let’s revisit the concepts we’ve encountered so far.
Here are links to the first 13 articles with a brief synopsis:
01 | A secular definition of sacredness
How artists and creators inspire awe by finding a meaningful connection between their product of creation and their self.
The series begins with a challenge: If there is a link between objective reality and our subjective experience, can we explain what is the nature of this connection? To investigate this, I propose that John Vervaeke and Christopher Alexander have both articulated the nature of this connection in different ways. It is the goal of this series to use both of their works to make sense of it, such that we can take advantage of this understanding to create better things.
Vervaeke offers a cognitive scientific explanation, Alexander offers a process of putting it to good use. Both of them rest on a foundation of meaning — the way we make sense of the world.
02 | Challenging your belief system
Are you supposed to start believing in magic, esoteric, spiritual woo-woo to understand »The Nature of Order«? A rationalist's guide to reading Christopher Alexander.
Reading Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order is challenging. In particular, if you have a scientific mindset. To make sense of it, we don’t have to give up rationality, but we have to understand what rationality really is.
In this article I share my own personal experience of struggling with Alexander’s scientific voice in The Nature of Order colliding with his detailed descriptions of carefully observed phenomena that science can hardly explain and venture into the borderline supernatural.
03 | Mind vs. matter
Our capacity to make sense of the world impacts our understanding, our beliefs, our actions, our creations, and our culture. What are the consequences, if we get it wrong?
The struggle to coherently combine objective science and subjective experience is historic. Descartes and Hobbes tried to figure it out in the 17th century and ultimately failed. Even today, the mind-body problem is unsolved. Neither blind faith nor absolute certainty are valid recipes to make sense of the world and thrive in it.
With awareness of that limitation of the mechanistic-scientific worldview, we can open up to a worldview that integrates subjective experience and can potentially explain observations the classic mechanical model cannot. That means that our minds are not merely machines.
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.
Leaving mechanical models of explaining the world behind sounds like some sort of faith in the supernatural is necessary. And if you happen to study theoretical physics and quantum mechanics you may be surprised how the latest research points towards exactly that. But that still doesn’t account for the other important part that creates our subjective experience — cognition.
Critiquing Alexander’s attempt at an ultimate (physical) explanation, I offer pointers to an alternative based on cognition by George Lakoff: experiential realism, or experientialism for short. If believing in supernatural stuff isn’t your thing, perhaps a solid scientific argument with lots of empirical evidence rooted in linguistics that comes to similar conclusions is for you.
05 | The Meaning Crisis
Does a collapse of meaning result in the collapse of a civilization?
The disconnect between objective reality and subjective experience and its long history has caused deep cultural problems, which both Alexander and Vervaeke identify as the main and probably most important problem of our time — a crisis of meaning.
We assume to understand most of the world around us with science, but we can’t explain our own experience scientifically, and we have no existential guidance and are left without purpose or meaning. This perspective is not only challenging, but potentially damaging, to us individually, and likely also collectively.
06 | Four ways of knowing
Propositional tyranny made us lose touch with other kinds of knowing. How can we re-connect to the knowledge we have lost and to our self, our world, and other people?
Diving deeper into specifics of Vervaeke’s theory, we expand the realization for a new worldview that integrates science and experience with his model of four different kinds of knowing.
While science pretends that everything can be reduced to computation — propositions and statements about their truth, Vervaeke suggests that there are other ways to know that involve other parts of our mind beyond the logical-analytical processing of our conscious mind.
07 | Orders of Meaning
The three interconnected axes of the space of meaning: coherence, purpose, and significance.
Meaning in life is a surprisingly well-researched topic, and trying to be more specific about what “meaning” means will help us better understand how we can find such meaning in our lives. As it turns out, it even enables another perspective on Alexander’s concept of wholeness or life.
What all different flavors of meaning point to is that we are fundamentally disconnected from the world, ourselves, and each other. To recover meaning in life, we will have to find ways to reconnect.
08 | Existential modes
In a world centered around what we have, don't be confused about what you need to become.
Pontificating about meaning in life seems grand and perhaps overreaching, but meaning, or the lack of it, has immediate consequences on even our most mundane activities. Every decision we make, everything we create or help to create is shaped by how we make sense of it all.
Erich Fromm’s existential modes are a powerful mental model to make sense of what it means to manipulate the world and grow within it — and how we can sometimes be modally confused about when to control and when to grow. Especially in modern times (thanks, capitalism!).
09 | Profoundness
If we can't have certainty, we can settle for plausibility, and still find what is profound.
If there are more ways to know than just propositional, then logic, math and certainty are concepts restricted and useful to only a tiny part of our experience. In fact, for almost all everyday problems finding certain solutions is impossible; the best we can do is settle for plausible ones.
Yet, as humans we have evolved into powerful general-purpose problem-solvers. We even invented science, which is not about achieving certainty, but about self-correcting plausibility. Plausibility and the methods to cultivate it, ultimately lead to profoundness — and it is the profound that we need to live up to our capacity for rationality.
10 | Problem solving and combinatorial explosion
Rationality involves more than just being logical. Is a capability for insight what differentiates us from machines?
While we can take advantage of algorithms to find solutions, just like computers do, we mostly operate on heuristics to avoid combinatorial explosion and hone in on what’s relevant without wasting our vast but still precious processing resources — unlike computers do.
Problem-solving based on heuristics means we are subject to biases and therefore potential self-delusion. Insight reconfigures our cognitive system to suddenly see what was previously unthinkable. A change in perspective can make solutions obvious.
11 | Attention and insight
Dynamic, self-organizing feedback processes structure our attention. What can guide us to insight, can also lead us into self-deception.
Insight is interwoven with attention, which we can purposefully direct, but which can also be caught. This article offers a detailed look into a useful model of attention, which goes beyond the common analogy to shining a spotlight on what you focus on.
Scaling our attention up and down is the key to generating insights. But we are prone to self-deception, because we can’t help letting our attention be captured by the wrong things.
12 | Knowing, making, being
Our fundamental grasp is intuitive: embodied understanding of how parts are structured so they function as a whole — deeply embedded in subconscious, pre-conceptual, cognitive processing.
Who knows a thing better, those who can most accurately describe it, or those who can build it? There is something more to fully grasping something than just a feature list of verifiable propositions about it. Plato and Aristotle provide us with mental models shockingly useful even today.
When we make something, we know (or learn) how to cause something to be. The separation between knowing and being becomes blurry. Making is in-form-ing something and con-form-ing to it. What if knowing is being?
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.
Being in touch with reality requires a relationship between our environment and our experience. A connection we so carefully severed over the last few centuries. We can only make sense if we belong.
Cognitive scientifically speaking, we need to have a coherent agent-arena relationship, where our agency and the environment co-identify to enable us to act meaningfully.
I can hardly believe that it’s been already three months and we’re thirteen posts into this journey! I hope you’re still able to follow along and so far everything made sense to you. If not, please reply to these emails or use the comments feature on the website to ask questions. I’d love to engage in conversation about this.
As I set out in the first post, we have covered some of the concepts needed to make sense of what Vervaeke calls the Sacred and what Alexander calls the Mirror of the Self, but there are still a few more to go until we can close the circle and revisit the beginning, hopefully being able to fully understand. Naturally, the concepts left are more complex and rely on understanding of what we covered so far.
Without any good reasoning to base this on, I do think we are about halfway towards a conclusion of this series. I can’t really tell, as I’m trying to find my way through the material as we move along the narrative. But if everything goes well, sometime in April we should be able to close the loop and revisit the beginning of this series — hopefully with deep understanding.
I appreciate your questions and comments, and if you know anyone who might be interested in this series, please feel free to share it with them!
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.