Previously… — recap #2
A brief summary and recollection of the second half — posts 14-26 — of my Mirror of the Self series.
Last week we concluded the Mirror of the Self series by closing the loop and revisiting the beginning. Today I want to provide a summary of the second half, for those of you (re)discovering the series, or trying to find a particular article.
Here are links to the second 13 articles with a brief synopsis:
14 • What is intelligence?
Looking at various ways of how we interact with our environment — with objects, solving problems, or communicate with other people — a fundamental pattern emerges.
We have to avoid combinatorial explosion when processing our environment to put our vast but still limited cognitive resources to good use. Somehow we are able to figure out what is relevant. More often than not, out of the almost infinite options around us, the right ones are obvious to us. We are astonishingly capable to realize relevance, and it seems that this is indicative of our general intelligence.
This turns out to also be extremely interesting in artificial intelligence research. If we understand how we realize relevance, perhaps we can then build machines that can do it?
15 • The Relevance Problem
At the core of what makes us intelligent is our capacity to zero in on what is relevant. Can we have a scientific theory about relevance? A deep journey into how science works suggests we cannot.
If relevance realization is at the core of what makes us intelligent, how does it relate to meaning? At the core of meaning is our capability to connect to the world, to our selves, and to other people. Meaningful connections are relations of relevance, and they come about through our capacity for relevance realization.
Can we figure out how relevance realization works? What is needed for a scientific theory of relevance? How does science work? As we understand how science functions and as we try to get to the essence of relevance, we realize that nothing is essentially relevant and there cannot be a scientific theory about relevance.
16 • Dynamical systems
Turning our view from the structural aspects of cognition to its procedural nature, we discover surprising connections to the act of designing things.
If relevance is not in the things we find relevant, perhaps it emerges out of a process? After all, we are complex living beings and our cognition is highly dynamic.
We embark on a journey through dynamical systems theory to put foundations in place to understand the process of relevance realization. What makes living things special? What makes them alive? And ultimately, how do they develop, grow, transform? Darwin’s theory of evolution — the first dynamical systems theory in history — turns out to be a perfect example.
17 • The essence of design
What do evolution, design, and consciousness have in common?
From evolution we learned that adaptation causes fitness: Organisms adapt to their environment, their fitness — their design — is an emergent property that seems to have similar issues as relevance. There is no essential design — it always depends on the context. But that is why Darwin’s theory is not about fitness (the “result”), but evolution (the process).
Is it possible that relevance similarly emerges out of a dynamical system and that therefore relevance is always context dependent? If so, can we have a scientific theory about the process of relevance realization? And doesn’t this all also look shockingly similar to Alexander’s fundamental process?
18 • Opponent processing
A continuous trade-off between selection for efficiency and variation for resiliency enable our capacity for growth. Processes that appear to work against each other cause progress on a higher level.
Zooming in on what seems to be the core of how evolution works, we identify parallels in our cognitive process and find surprising overlap in many examples.
At the root of progress, at the core of what makes fitness emerge in evolution and relevance in cognition, are opposing processes acting on the same dynamical system. An eternal conflict between efficiency and resiliency, selection and variation, drives adaptation and relevance realization.
19 • Here- and Now-ness
Our consciousness performs incredible work to present us with what we find salient in the present moment. Can we get a grasp on what consciousness does and is?
With a deeper dynamic understanding of the process of relevance realization, we turn to presence and consciousness. What is the function of consciousness? Why are some things in our environment more salient to us than others? How does relevance realization cause that?
At the edge of our self-awareness we are deeply in touch with the world. Relevance realization provides us with a salience landscape and defines what we pick up on and what we ignore. We take a detailed look into how the deeper ways of knowing — participatory, perspectival, and procedural — work together, to create the mental representations of our environment.
20 • Flow and intuition
The flow state and our ability for implicit learning are a powerful combination to enhance our cognition — and to hone in on what really matters in the creative process.
Being present in the here and now, being in touch with our environment, being in the flow state gives us cognitive superpowers. We effortlessly detect complex patterns in our environment that we can’t even make sense of analytically. We know what to do next without conscious thought. And we have a pretty good time.
We look into how all these capabilities emerge out of higher-order relevance realization and make a connection to Alexander’s fundamental process and the important role “feeling” (in the Alexandrian sense) plays.
21 • Metaphor
Bridges between concepts balance similarities and differences and connect abstract ideas with our intuition for embodied interaction — to help us make meaning.
Our cognition relies extensively on metaphor, and metaphor is the bridge between symbolic systems like language and our deeper ways of knowing. Metaphors are not just a rhetoric device, they are everywhere — they are so common that we don’t realize them anymore.
We look into what metaphors are, how they work, and what role they play in out cognition. As it turns out, human language is not just a symbolic representation that affords reasoning and computation. It is deeply connected to our embodied cognition.
22 • Fundamental framing and human spirituality
All we make sense of and we make sense with — concepts, categories, beliefs, ego, truth, goodness, beauty — is grounded in something nameless, without substance, without form, yet intensely personal.
This post begins a reflection on how human spirituality fits into relevance realization. Some aspects of relevance realization seem spiritual in nature. At the deepest level of our participatory knowing in our subconscious mind there are processes at work that are fundamentally difficult to describe with the very system — mental concepts and language — that emerges out of these processes.
Vervaeke explains this with a confrontation of our fundamental framing, which resembles Alexander’s concept of The Ground. Both of them turn to religion as something that provided people with an important level of connectedness in the past, but both conclude that a return to classic religions is unfeasible. Can we at least salvage the parts that gave us meaning?
23 • The mystery of wonder and awe
What is phenomenologically mysterious isn’t necessarily also inexplicable. Differentiating between propositional and perspectival knowing, we can understand the mystery of relevance realization.
Even secularism sometimes has to deal with mystery. What exactly makes us experience mystery? How does it connect to Alexander’s description of the deepest experience of order? How do our experiences of wonder and awe fit into the framework of relevance realization?
There may very well be many things that we can’t explain, but we can investigate the phenomenological experience of them. If we can at least understand why we experience what we experience, can this offer us any insight into the nature of spirituality?
24 • Opening the Eye to the Storm
Our capacity for framing breaks in confrontation with the mystery of our ultimate insignificance. Fascinated and horrified we remember that we are finite, mortal, human beings.
How can places and things make us feel a deep connectedness to them? When we confront mystery, we can experience the numinous with wonder and awe, and sometimes it can even take us to the edge of horror. Can we understand and explain what is going on?
When we are taken to the edge of our cognitive abilities, we can be fascinated and horrified at the same time. Overwhelming mystical experiences point towards our ultimate insignificance as finite mortal human beings, to remind us of our humility. To create real beauty, Alexander wants us to tap into this.
25 • Sacredness and the sacred
What does it mean to experience sacredness? What makes something sacred? And does it have to be rooted in something supernatural?
Concluding the reflection on human spirituality we confront the sacred. Armed with our phenomenological understanding of mystical experience, we try to tackle the psycho-existential experience of sacredness and come to a surprising conclusion — we don’t need a category of the supernatural to explain the sacred.
Alexander’s and Vervaeke’s explanations merge in their perspective on what the sacred is: a strange experience of deep connection between our self and reality — our inexhaustible process of relevance realization meets the inexhaustible complexity of reality.
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?
Putting all the pieces together we revisit the video clip that started it all. Does it make sense now?
After summarizing the whole series with plenty of links to all the individual articles, Christopher Alexander gets to have the last word, reminding us that all the understanding we have gained needs to be in service of creating things we can truly like from the heart.
Strangely, I managed to split the recaps perfectly in the middle, without planning for it. Even just a few weeks ago, I wasn’t quite sure if there’ll be 24 or 28 articles total in the end, or anything in between. And yet, my feeling that we were “halfway towards a conclusion” when I wrote the last recap a few months ago, turned out to be accurate.
I hope you enjoy(ed) reading this series as much as I enjoyed putting it together. There is a lot more work that needs to be done to make it more accessible, explain it in easier to understand terms, perhaps rearrange some concepts to create a better flow and coherence. I may or may not revisit this series in the future to approach some of these ideas of how to improve it, but at this very moment I’m planning to take a break from this particular topic and move on to more practical application of some of the concepts towards creating better software, in particular software that is supposed to augment our intellect (or shall I say various ways of knowing).
I’d be extremely grateful if you can point people to this series, if you think they would benefit from the knowledge shared here. Thanks for following along, and let’s see where we will go next.
PS The Building Beauty program hosted me yesterday for my presentation “Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order — A cognitive-scientific perspective on Christopher Alexander”. I’ll tell you more about that next week.
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.