What I got out of watching Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

The other day a friend asked, “What did you get out of watching the whole series of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis?”

A beautiful prompt to frame my learnings with, which also happens to serve as another great entry point into the previous posts.

Useful mental models

Vervaeke presents several mental models that I find extremely useful for understanding how we think and experience the world around us, and how we are easily mislead by our biases and untrained ways of paying attention to the wrong things.

4 Ways of Knowing — a model for describing different kinds of knowing beyond propositional knowing in the form of beliefs in facts, integrating all four of them such that it doesn’t prefer a particular kind and thus avoid polarization.
Potentiality and actuality, growth and development as transformation, in-form-ation as actualizing potential, making and being, be-cause (causing something to be), conformity theory (knowing as being), enabling and selective constraints — this is a powerful lens that integrates knowing and being into one, things we usually consider to be very different from each other.
Insight as participatory self-transformation instead of accumulating propositional knowledge, the importance of changing perspective to generate insight, algorithms vs. heuristics, obviousness, salience landscaping — how real insight is not inferential, but comes from realizing things in our environment we didn’t realize before.
Attention, transparency-opacity and feature-gestalt shifting to scale attention up and down, disruptive strategies to provoke insight — a comprehensive model for attention and how we constantly oscillate between different modes of perception to make sense of our surroundings.
Certainty vs. plausibility, how certainty is limited to logic and math, how science works (and when it doesn’t), what makes models elegant and profound — an important refinement of scientific understanding that let’s us keep most of the progress and insight we gained from the scientific revolution, but integrates them with our subjective experience.
Agent and arena, co-identification, transjective relationships (transcending objective and subjective) — an incredible picture for what is at the guts of our subconscious creating everything our analytical mind can latch onto as concepts and identity.
Existential having and being modes, categorical vs. individual relationships, reciprocal realization, knowing as loving, modal confusion — helpful to identify patterns in our thinking where we are misled down the wrong path, when we abstract away personal connection in search of objective, utilitarian productivity, when what we really need is developmental growth.
Opponent processing as an integrated model to optimize dynamical systems and a response to simplistic polarization — perhaps the most important mental model from the series, it has the power to turn every confrontation of opponents into a recipe for progress, and an understanding for otherwise unintuitive failure modes.
There can’t be an essence of design, fittedness is constantly dynamically adapted through opponent processing within a bio-economy of variance and selection pressures — the consequence of opponent processing serves as the basis for understanding design and the design process, and ultimately also Alexander’s fundamental process.
Complexification: differentiate + integrate — what Alexander calls Unfolding is the yin and yang of differentiating features from the gestalt while preserving the structure of the whole.

History and Science go together

Vervaeke gave me a whole new perspective on history, and how it relates to knowledge and science:

How intertwined history and science are — had history in school been presented with a cognitive-scientific context, I would’ve been so much more interested.
Much appreciation for Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and their early but profound models of the world, and how much of modern science still relies on parts of them.
How science and secularism became as important as they are today, and why that’s problematic; but also a different perspective on how people before the scientific revolution tried to make sense of the world and how much wisdom is encoded in myths that are too easily dismissed as stories without scientific relevance.

Providing more grounding for Alexander’s ideas

Vervaeke enables me to access and fully embrace — and perhaps eventually explain — Alexander’s ideas, in particular the more spiritual concepts (which I struggled with a lot):

Deeper understanding of cognitive concepts

Vervaeke suggests deeper cognitive explanations for concepts I picked up from Lakoff and Johnson, and where Lakoff and Johnson laid the groundwork for changing my worldview from unreflected objectivism to experientialism, Alexander and Vervaeke made that new worldview practical and inhabitable.

Part-whole-configuration schema as structural-functional organization (eidos)
How metaphor works cognitively, and its meta-application for symbols
Categorization as a way to make sense of the world in the Having mode, in contrast to growth in the being mode through reciprocal realization
Meaning as establishing relations of relevance
At the core of meaning lies relevance, not causality.
Truth vs. salience

Outlook for meaningful software design

Found what I was missing in my software-related work, and what I have always been subconsciously attracted to — meaningful design. Vervaeke gave me new vocabulary and depth for explaining why meaningful software is crucial:

3 orders of meaning for software: coherence, purpose, and significance in software design
Formal systems get their power from abstracting away context and meaning to maximize generality. Dynamical systems live from context and meaning to optimize fittedness.

To create meaningful software we need a second process embracing context and meaning and maximizing for specificity to act as an opposing process to maximizing for generality.

Our technology stacks have grown so complex, we don’t fully understand them anymore, we divide and conquer and specialize on features, but how are we supposed to design them holistically when we only understand parts of it?
Discovering a new way of designing and creating meaningful things through a process of unfolding, exploration and understanding, divergence and convergence, differentiation and integration — harmonizing science and art or technology with the humanities.

Bonus: a new perspective on AI

Somewhat unexpectedly, but then not entirely surprisingly, Vervaeke provided a new perspective on artificial (general) intelligence:

If we figure out AGI, if we create an actual sentient being, we practically also figure out how cognition works (although it might still be too late then).
Now I have a much deeper understanding and can elaborate why I think AGI is generally achievable, and why current technologies are nowhere near getting us there.
Importance of dynamical systems in cognitive processing — whether human- or machine-based.
Relevance realization as a model for artificial general intelligence, pointing out quite explicitly what is missing from current approaches to AI.

Mirror of the Self is a fortnightly newsletter series investigating the connection between creators and their creations, trying to understand 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: 01 • A secular definition of sacredness. Overview and synopsis of articles 01-13: Previously… — A Recap. Overview and synopsis of articles 14-26: Previously… — recap #2.

Another great way to start is my recent presentation Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order.