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The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find our Place in the Universe
"A profound personal meditation on human existence and a tour-de-force weaving together of historic and contemporary thought on the deepest question of all: why are we here?"
-- Gabor Mat� M.D., author, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
As our civilization careens toward climate breakdown, ecological destruction, and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. The dominant worldview of disconnection, which tells us we are split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world, has been invalidated by modern science.
Award-winning author, Jeremy Lent, investigates humanity's age-old questions - Who am I? Why am I? How should I live? - from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom.
The result is a breathtaking accomplishment: a rich, coherent worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other, and with the entire natural world. It offers a compelling foundation for a new philosophical framework that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on a flourishing Earth.
The Web of Meaning is for everyone looking for deep and coherent answers to the crisis of civilization.
-- Gabor Mat� M.D., author, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
As our civilization careens toward climate breakdown, ecological destruction, and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. The dominant worldview of disconnection, which tells us we are split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world, has been invalidated by modern science.
Award-winning author, Jeremy Lent, investigates humanity's age-old questions - Who am I? Why am I? How should I live? - from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom.
The result is a breathtaking accomplishment: a rich, coherent worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other, and with the entire natural world. It offers a compelling foundation for a new philosophical framework that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on a flourishing Earth.
The Web of Meaning is for everyone looking for deep and coherent answers to the crisis of civilization.
528 pages, Hardcover
First published July 12, 2021
About the author
Jeremy Lent
3 books176 followersI’m author of The Patterning Instinct, (Prometheus Books, May 2017), and founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute. I’m passionate about doing my part to make a difference in humanity’s future trajectory. I’ve come to believe that our global society needs a transformational shift in our underlying values if we want a sustainable and flourishing future for the human race.
The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Future, is based on a simple but compelling theme – culture shapes values, and those values shape history. The book identifies the root metaphors that cultures have used to construct meaning into their universe – from hunter-gatherer times to our current precarious civilization – and traces how these have affected the course of history. Taking the reader on an archaeology of the mind, it reveals the hidden layers of values that form today’s cultural norms and asks: how can we shape humanity’s destiny by consciously forging our own structures of meaning into our lives?
The Liology Institute, of which I’m president, is dedicated to fostering a worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth. Liology offers the experience of living life in an integrated, embodied and connected manner. Instead of the conventional search for a transcendent source of meaning, liology finds the most profound meaning in life arising from our intrinsic connectedness with every cell and integrated system within our own bodies and with every living entity in the natural world in which we are embedded. Liology sees humanity as a fractal entity within the natural system of the earth.
Years ago, in what seems like another life, I was founder and CEO of an internet company. Now, I’m living happily in the San Francisco Bay Area with my amazing wife, Lisa Ferguson. Together, we’re trying to do our bit to make the world a better place.
The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Future, is based on a simple but compelling theme – culture shapes values, and those values shape history. The book identifies the root metaphors that cultures have used to construct meaning into their universe – from hunter-gatherer times to our current precarious civilization – and traces how these have affected the course of history. Taking the reader on an archaeology of the mind, it reveals the hidden layers of values that form today’s cultural norms and asks: how can we shape humanity’s destiny by consciously forging our own structures of meaning into our lives?
The Liology Institute, of which I’m president, is dedicated to fostering a worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth. Liology offers the experience of living life in an integrated, embodied and connected manner. Instead of the conventional search for a transcendent source of meaning, liology finds the most profound meaning in life arising from our intrinsic connectedness with every cell and integrated system within our own bodies and with every living entity in the natural world in which we are embedded. Liology sees humanity as a fractal entity within the natural system of the earth.
Years ago, in what seems like another life, I was founder and CEO of an internet company. Now, I’m living happily in the San Francisco Bay Area with my amazing wife, Lisa Ferguson. Together, we’re trying to do our bit to make the world a better place.
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December 21, 2021
This is a book of two halves. In the first half, Lent seeks to describe dozens of scientific concepts such as complexity theory, modern genetics, fascinating recent advances in understanding the nature of plants and links it all with historic philosophies such as neo-confusionism and the ancient greeks. As a broad, easy to read literature review, this section is enjoyable, sometimes insightful and provided many references to books I now want to read. After 150 odd pages, I was thinking about recommending this book to others.
In the second half Lent slowly turns from description to analysis. Lent wants to argue for a Gaia-style 'we are all connected' modern consciousness that will see humanity fix racism, save the animals, end climate change, install communal gardens on every block, and make us all love each other. And he wants you to believe that modern science has 'proven' every idea of indigenous or historical societies, and their common endorsement of his preferred view.
I have no problem with what Lent argues. I am deeply troubled by how he argues it.
Take the idea that we can integrate science and traditional wisdom. It's the subtitle of the book, so its clear Lent believes in it. Yet every time he gets near to talking about this relationship problems emerge. There is a cherry picking of global traditions to find a convenient basis, incredibly vague descriptions of said traditions that sap much of the life and rigour out of these rich philosophies, startling claims about how it has all been 'demonstrated' by modern science (by citing perhaps one or two studies that supports somewhat a tangential principle), and a rapid shift onto the next topic. It's maddening. It shows utter disrespect for traditional systems of belief. Lent reduces them all to amorphous 'love mother nature, we are all connected' mumbo jumbo. There is no serious engagement with the actual views, just a smash and grab appropriation.
It gets worse when Lent talks about views he disagrees with. A professor of mine once said the key to arguing is knowing your adversary's views better than they know them. Certainly a deep comfort with the arguments you critique is a requirement for effective criticism, let alone the synthesis Lent claims he seeks. However, when it comes to discussing capitalism, the only spokesman for this system is Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street. Lent's version of capitalism is not so much a strawman as just a bundle of straw. There's no evidence of thought about how such a system operates or why it has such strengths and weaknesses.
Which is a shame, because, for a book which claims to be interested in 'integrating' different forms of understanding, there's a lot he could use. Lent stresses the importance of self-organisation and cooperation in how nature functions. Want to know who would agree firmly with this? Friedrich Hayek. Capitalism is self-organizing. It's also inherently cooperative (Lent wrote the book and has my money, I now have access to his ideas. We cooperated to mutual benefit). That doesn't mean the system as currently operating shouldn't be significantly changed, but it's a telling case where Lent not only doesn't understand what he's arguing against, but misses ways to actually strengthen his own argument!
This book really is 2 halves. I really enjoyed some of the first 150-200 pages. I learned a lot and I found myself compelled by it. I've bought several books thanks to his compelling summaries. But the more he spoke about areas I do know something about (modern development debates or Enlightenment thinkers for instance) the more I was troubled by the very questionable absolutist claims and rapid shifts in focus that suggested either an inability to trace out a line of thought or a deliberate effort to mislead. If nothing else, any book which uses Hobbes as a stand in for the entire liberal tradition, dismisses out of hand the work of David Chalmers on the Hard Problem of consciousness, and portrays Blaise Pascal as a non-believer suggests a lack of authorial and editorial care.
So I'm left with some parts as worth 4 stars and some a 1 star. I really did want to like this book, but that only made my frustration with the slippery, cherry picked, under-done nature of the argument deeply all the more frustrating.
In the second half Lent slowly turns from description to analysis. Lent wants to argue for a Gaia-style 'we are all connected' modern consciousness that will see humanity fix racism, save the animals, end climate change, install communal gardens on every block, and make us all love each other. And he wants you to believe that modern science has 'proven' every idea of indigenous or historical societies, and their common endorsement of his preferred view.
I have no problem with what Lent argues. I am deeply troubled by how he argues it.
Take the idea that we can integrate science and traditional wisdom. It's the subtitle of the book, so its clear Lent believes in it. Yet every time he gets near to talking about this relationship problems emerge. There is a cherry picking of global traditions to find a convenient basis, incredibly vague descriptions of said traditions that sap much of the life and rigour out of these rich philosophies, startling claims about how it has all been 'demonstrated' by modern science (by citing perhaps one or two studies that supports somewhat a tangential principle), and a rapid shift onto the next topic. It's maddening. It shows utter disrespect for traditional systems of belief. Lent reduces them all to amorphous 'love mother nature, we are all connected' mumbo jumbo. There is no serious engagement with the actual views, just a smash and grab appropriation.
It gets worse when Lent talks about views he disagrees with. A professor of mine once said the key to arguing is knowing your adversary's views better than they know them. Certainly a deep comfort with the arguments you critique is a requirement for effective criticism, let alone the synthesis Lent claims he seeks. However, when it comes to discussing capitalism, the only spokesman for this system is Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street. Lent's version of capitalism is not so much a strawman as just a bundle of straw. There's no evidence of thought about how such a system operates or why it has such strengths and weaknesses.
Which is a shame, because, for a book which claims to be interested in 'integrating' different forms of understanding, there's a lot he could use. Lent stresses the importance of self-organisation and cooperation in how nature functions. Want to know who would agree firmly with this? Friedrich Hayek. Capitalism is self-organizing. It's also inherently cooperative (Lent wrote the book and has my money, I now have access to his ideas. We cooperated to mutual benefit). That doesn't mean the system as currently operating shouldn't be significantly changed, but it's a telling case where Lent not only doesn't understand what he's arguing against, but misses ways to actually strengthen his own argument!
This book really is 2 halves. I really enjoyed some of the first 150-200 pages. I learned a lot and I found myself compelled by it. I've bought several books thanks to his compelling summaries. But the more he spoke about areas I do know something about (modern development debates or Enlightenment thinkers for instance) the more I was troubled by the very questionable absolutist claims and rapid shifts in focus that suggested either an inability to trace out a line of thought or a deliberate effort to mislead. If nothing else, any book which uses Hobbes as a stand in for the entire liberal tradition, dismisses out of hand the work of David Chalmers on the Hard Problem of consciousness, and portrays Blaise Pascal as a non-believer suggests a lack of authorial and editorial care.
So I'm left with some parts as worth 4 stars and some a 1 star. I really did want to like this book, but that only made my frustration with the slippery, cherry picked, under-done nature of the argument deeply all the more frustrating.
August 2, 2021
The thing about a dominant worldview is that those who embrace its underlying assumptions are often blind to the possibility that those assumptions may be wrong or misguided. But every now and then, a book comes along that challenges conventional wisdom in such a way as to shake people out of their “dogmatic slumber,” causing them to reevaluate their basic orientation to the world. For many readers, this may be just such a book.
Having spent the greater part of 10 years researching the sources of meaning, Jeremy Lent presents an integrated worldview that challenges the Western conception of life as a reductive, radically individualistic, competitive struggle for survival. In fact, modern science paints the opposite picture: life and evolution are every bit as much about cooperation as they are about competition.
Lent provides numerous examples of how cooperation has been the catalyst to virtually every major transition in the evolution of life, and that, on a deeper level, all life is fundamentally connected and interdependent. The Western mind—which often fails to recognize the limits of language to capture the full complexity of the world—focuses on artificial divisions and reductionist investigations into the material world when, more often than not, it’s the relationships between things, and in particular between people, that are far more consequential than the granular descriptions of the things themselves.
The wisdom traditions of the East that have known this all along—most prominently Taoism and Zen Buddhism—offer a different way of contemplating the world that is less aggressively individualistic and more attuned to the integrated nature of all living things. While Western thinking identifies individuals based exclusively on their “conceptual consciousness”—i.e., their ability to translate and describe experience using language and abstract concepts—the Eastern mind considers the individual to be a combination of both conceptual consciousness and “animate consciousness”—the aspect of our consciousness that places us in direct contact with the world via our five senses. To understand the difference, think of the contrast between describing the experience of drinking tea using language (conceptual consciousness), for example, and the actual experience of drinking tea (animate consciousness), with all of its associated aromas, flavors, colors, sensations, and temperatures.
The Eastern mind is simply more in tune with direct experience and with the dynamic, complex, and interdependent aspects of nature for which language and abstractions can only superficially capture. Whereas a Western scientist, for instance, may believe that all biological, psychological, and social phenomena ultimately reduce to the laws of particle physics, the ancient Eastern way of thinking recognizes the importance of emergent properties and relationships that cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts.
Because Eastern thinking is not reductive, and not solely focused on the individual in isolation from the contexts in which they live and flourish, Eastern philosophies provide a strong counterpoint to the individualistic, greedy, competitive drive for material gain and profit characteristic of the West.
Of course, Western philosophy and science have contributed greatly to the improvement of human well-being through technology, medicine, specialization, and trade, and Lent does not deny this. It is undeniable that reductionist science has resulted in longer, healthier lives and greater material well-being. But this has all come at a cost: namely, the prospect of ecological collapse, massive inequities in income and wealth, and a sense of disconnection from nature and from each other.
The brilliance of Lent’s book is in its integration of modern science and capitalism with an Eastern conception of interdependence and a greater conception of the common good. There is no reason—now that we know that social Darwinism and neoliberalism are misguided ideologies—that we cannot simultaneously enjoy the benefits of Western science and capitalism while also tempering them with a greater concern for the common good. In other words, there is no reason to continue to allow the “free market” to dictate our lives and our values.
Lent uses an apt analogy. Markets, like fire, are useful and serve their purpose, but let them run uncontrolled and they end up destroying everything in their path. The ironic part is that we perpetually fear the creation of uncontrolled artificial intelligence and yet stand oblivious to the fact that we’ve already created it: an entity called the corporation that is given the legal rights of an individual without any of the associated social obligations. The sole concern of corporations is the maximization of profits at all costs; so when we give them free reign to accomplish this, we really shouldn’t be surprised when the environment gets destroyed, workers get exploited (while shareholders grow ever richer), and consumers get harmed.
As a country, we’re obsessed with the idea of freedom, but today freedom from the “tyranny of the market” is what we should be most concerned with. The neoliberal world in which the corporation became king was a world where money and material wealth were the only goods and where cut-throat individualistic competition was the metaphor for life. With the world careening towards environmental catastrophe and growing inequality, it’s time for a new metaphor and more robust controls on corporate greed. But this cannot come from top-down central planning or control; it has to come from the bottom up—from the collective actions of individuals that recognize a deeper sense of connection to nature and to each other. This book can help get us started down this more integrated and desirable path.
Having spent the greater part of 10 years researching the sources of meaning, Jeremy Lent presents an integrated worldview that challenges the Western conception of life as a reductive, radically individualistic, competitive struggle for survival. In fact, modern science paints the opposite picture: life and evolution are every bit as much about cooperation as they are about competition.
Lent provides numerous examples of how cooperation has been the catalyst to virtually every major transition in the evolution of life, and that, on a deeper level, all life is fundamentally connected and interdependent. The Western mind—which often fails to recognize the limits of language to capture the full complexity of the world—focuses on artificial divisions and reductionist investigations into the material world when, more often than not, it’s the relationships between things, and in particular between people, that are far more consequential than the granular descriptions of the things themselves.
The wisdom traditions of the East that have known this all along—most prominently Taoism and Zen Buddhism—offer a different way of contemplating the world that is less aggressively individualistic and more attuned to the integrated nature of all living things. While Western thinking identifies individuals based exclusively on their “conceptual consciousness”—i.e., their ability to translate and describe experience using language and abstract concepts—the Eastern mind considers the individual to be a combination of both conceptual consciousness and “animate consciousness”—the aspect of our consciousness that places us in direct contact with the world via our five senses. To understand the difference, think of the contrast between describing the experience of drinking tea using language (conceptual consciousness), for example, and the actual experience of drinking tea (animate consciousness), with all of its associated aromas, flavors, colors, sensations, and temperatures.
The Eastern mind is simply more in tune with direct experience and with the dynamic, complex, and interdependent aspects of nature for which language and abstractions can only superficially capture. Whereas a Western scientist, for instance, may believe that all biological, psychological, and social phenomena ultimately reduce to the laws of particle physics, the ancient Eastern way of thinking recognizes the importance of emergent properties and relationships that cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts.
Because Eastern thinking is not reductive, and not solely focused on the individual in isolation from the contexts in which they live and flourish, Eastern philosophies provide a strong counterpoint to the individualistic, greedy, competitive drive for material gain and profit characteristic of the West.
Of course, Western philosophy and science have contributed greatly to the improvement of human well-being through technology, medicine, specialization, and trade, and Lent does not deny this. It is undeniable that reductionist science has resulted in longer, healthier lives and greater material well-being. But this has all come at a cost: namely, the prospect of ecological collapse, massive inequities in income and wealth, and a sense of disconnection from nature and from each other.
The brilliance of Lent’s book is in its integration of modern science and capitalism with an Eastern conception of interdependence and a greater conception of the common good. There is no reason—now that we know that social Darwinism and neoliberalism are misguided ideologies—that we cannot simultaneously enjoy the benefits of Western science and capitalism while also tempering them with a greater concern for the common good. In other words, there is no reason to continue to allow the “free market” to dictate our lives and our values.
Lent uses an apt analogy. Markets, like fire, are useful and serve their purpose, but let them run uncontrolled and they end up destroying everything in their path. The ironic part is that we perpetually fear the creation of uncontrolled artificial intelligence and yet stand oblivious to the fact that we’ve already created it: an entity called the corporation that is given the legal rights of an individual without any of the associated social obligations. The sole concern of corporations is the maximization of profits at all costs; so when we give them free reign to accomplish this, we really shouldn’t be surprised when the environment gets destroyed, workers get exploited (while shareholders grow ever richer), and consumers get harmed.
As a country, we’re obsessed with the idea of freedom, but today freedom from the “tyranny of the market” is what we should be most concerned with. The neoliberal world in which the corporation became king was a world where money and material wealth were the only goods and where cut-throat individualistic competition was the metaphor for life. With the world careening towards environmental catastrophe and growing inequality, it’s time for a new metaphor and more robust controls on corporate greed. But this cannot come from top-down central planning or control; it has to come from the bottom up—from the collective actions of individuals that recognize a deeper sense of connection to nature and to each other. This book can help get us started down this more integrated and desirable path.
August 11, 2021
I appreciate the work and efforts of Jeremy Lent. His previous book The patterning instinct (2017) is a valuable book. The work Lent does is much needed and I suppose many people will feel like he is a brother to us. For a proper summary of The web of meaning I refer to the well-written review, here on Goodreads, of Ryan Boissonneault.
Basically, I agree with Lent’s diagnoses and conclusions. In this review I like to zoom in on an aspect of his conclusion. I hope I will not take Lent’s conclusion too much out of context:
Connectivity is a central theme in this book. Lent concludes in chapter 11:
"the interconnectivity of the universe creates innumerable meaning potentials, but we must actively participate in attuning to those potentials in order to actualize the meaning.”
In other words: “we must tune in to the deep connectivity of the cosmos in order to enact its meaning.”
And: “Meaning is a function of connectedness: the more extensively we connect something with other aspects of our lives, the more meaningful it is to us.”
I would like to bring forward an alternative perspective that is critical to Lent’s take on “tuning in to deep connectivity”.
The pursuit of connectivity (as something valuable) only makes sense after mental conditioning has fragmented reality into seemingly self-existing objects and subjects. Not only is connectivity not intrinsic to reality, also the fragmentation that is presupposed by connectivity is not intrinsic to reality. Fragmentation is man-made, mind-born.
Fragmenting our reality is something we do ourselves; it is usually not our intention to do this, yet it happens. It’s a by-product of how we have come to think and how we understand our thinking and its relation to reality. Fragmentation happens unnoticed and determines our experience of reality and our self-experience.
Those who appreciate more substantiation here, I refer to the opening chapter of David Bohm’s Wholeness and the implicate order.
When we regularly break something, we may value the healing of the broken parts. We can even gradually develop expertise in the healing of broken parts - but why not focus on learning to stop breaking things in the first place? It is better - if possible - to prevent than to cure. Better to learn to stop fragmenting reality than to continually work on realizing (re)connections. And of course there’s a difference between discernment, which is desirable, and fragmentation.
I believe Jeremy Lent is familiar with this alternative perspective. Here are three quotes from his book that express the perspective I am trying to bring to attention.
“the Chinese view was that one simply had to unlearn the layers of misconception that society placed on a person as they grew up”...
“The bodhisattva has achieved the realization that the boundaries separating the self from others are all mere constructions of a conditioned mind.”
[quoting Rumi:] “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
These quotes emphasise unlearning, deconditioning, and breaking down barriers. Unlearning, deconditioning and breaking down barriers are not really different from deconstruction, which is a proper term to use here. But the term ‘deconstruction’ is used here in a different way from the way it is used in philosophical traditions like existentialism and post-structuralism.
The main difference is that the dominant currents of existentialism and poststructuralism consider reality and human beings to be conditioned while the alternative perspective views reality and human beings as being both conditioned and unconditioned. Unfortunately, the dominant currents of existentialism and poststructuralism disregard the unconditioned domain.
This difference of worldview - is the unconditioned included or ignored and excluded? - matters much, because what remains after (successful) deconstruction is as different in these two cases as day and night.
The dynamics of deconstruction turn out to be such that only what is conditioned can be deconstructed. The unconditioned cannot be deconstructed.
After deconstruction existentialism and poststructuralism remain empty-handed: what is left is nihilism with an optional heroic acceptance of nihilism as a bonus.
In the alternative perspective brought forward here - found in Taoism, Advaita vedanta and Buddhism and some (apophatic) western traditions - deconstruction (of conditionings) brings human beings not to nihilism but to flourishing. The result of deconstruction is not problematic, it is natural and unproblematic.
So, if we find out that our reality is fragmented, and we acknowledge that this is not the way it should be and need be, we have an option to connect the fragments and we have an option to begin to deconstruct our own ‘reality-fragmenting mental habits’.
The intended purpose in Jeremy Lent’s book and in the perspective brought in here in this review is the same: well-being, flourishing, maturation. Yet, the explanations (of the nature of the problem) and the indications (of the solutions) are different. These different ways of presenting the problem and solutions do not exclude each other, they may be helpful in different contexts, and it is up to each of us to sense which presentations of the problem and which solutions suit us.
Though I brought in a critical perspective, I respect the way Jeremy Lent presents the problem and solution and I hope it will be experienced as useful by many readers.
Basically, I agree with Lent’s diagnoses and conclusions. In this review I like to zoom in on an aspect of his conclusion. I hope I will not take Lent’s conclusion too much out of context:
Connectivity is a central theme in this book. Lent concludes in chapter 11:
"the interconnectivity of the universe creates innumerable meaning potentials, but we must actively participate in attuning to those potentials in order to actualize the meaning.”
In other words: “we must tune in to the deep connectivity of the cosmos in order to enact its meaning.”
And: “Meaning is a function of connectedness: the more extensively we connect something with other aspects of our lives, the more meaningful it is to us.”
I would like to bring forward an alternative perspective that is critical to Lent’s take on “tuning in to deep connectivity”.
The pursuit of connectivity (as something valuable) only makes sense after mental conditioning has fragmented reality into seemingly self-existing objects and subjects. Not only is connectivity not intrinsic to reality, also the fragmentation that is presupposed by connectivity is not intrinsic to reality. Fragmentation is man-made, mind-born.
Fragmenting our reality is something we do ourselves; it is usually not our intention to do this, yet it happens. It’s a by-product of how we have come to think and how we understand our thinking and its relation to reality. Fragmentation happens unnoticed and determines our experience of reality and our self-experience.
Those who appreciate more substantiation here, I refer to the opening chapter of David Bohm’s Wholeness and the implicate order.
When we regularly break something, we may value the healing of the broken parts. We can even gradually develop expertise in the healing of broken parts - but why not focus on learning to stop breaking things in the first place? It is better - if possible - to prevent than to cure. Better to learn to stop fragmenting reality than to continually work on realizing (re)connections. And of course there’s a difference between discernment, which is desirable, and fragmentation.
I believe Jeremy Lent is familiar with this alternative perspective. Here are three quotes from his book that express the perspective I am trying to bring to attention.
“the Chinese view was that one simply had to unlearn the layers of misconception that society placed on a person as they grew up”...
“The bodhisattva has achieved the realization that the boundaries separating the self from others are all mere constructions of a conditioned mind.”
[quoting Rumi:] “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
These quotes emphasise unlearning, deconditioning, and breaking down barriers. Unlearning, deconditioning and breaking down barriers are not really different from deconstruction, which is a proper term to use here. But the term ‘deconstruction’ is used here in a different way from the way it is used in philosophical traditions like existentialism and post-structuralism.
The main difference is that the dominant currents of existentialism and poststructuralism consider reality and human beings to be conditioned while the alternative perspective views reality and human beings as being both conditioned and unconditioned. Unfortunately, the dominant currents of existentialism and poststructuralism disregard the unconditioned domain.
This difference of worldview - is the unconditioned included or ignored and excluded? - matters much, because what remains after (successful) deconstruction is as different in these two cases as day and night.
The dynamics of deconstruction turn out to be such that only what is conditioned can be deconstructed. The unconditioned cannot be deconstructed.
After deconstruction existentialism and poststructuralism remain empty-handed: what is left is nihilism with an optional heroic acceptance of nihilism as a bonus.
In the alternative perspective brought forward here - found in Taoism, Advaita vedanta and Buddhism and some (apophatic) western traditions - deconstruction (of conditionings) brings human beings not to nihilism but to flourishing. The result of deconstruction is not problematic, it is natural and unproblematic.
So, if we find out that our reality is fragmented, and we acknowledge that this is not the way it should be and need be, we have an option to connect the fragments and we have an option to begin to deconstruct our own ‘reality-fragmenting mental habits’.
The intended purpose in Jeremy Lent’s book and in the perspective brought in here in this review is the same: well-being, flourishing, maturation. Yet, the explanations (of the nature of the problem) and the indications (of the solutions) are different. These different ways of presenting the problem and solutions do not exclude each other, they may be helpful in different contexts, and it is up to each of us to sense which presentations of the problem and which solutions suit us.
Though I brought in a critical perspective, I respect the way Jeremy Lent presents the problem and solution and I hope it will be experienced as useful by many readers.
July 29, 2021
This book got me through the extreme heat in BC.
It is highly readable and engaging and examines the philosophical underpinnings of why we treat the planet the way we do.
After finishing the book, I feel a profound sense of connection with all of life and a commitment to be part of the change to the world we want in my own unique way.
Please give this book a read, especially if you're feeling discouraged about the state of the world.
It is highly readable and engaging and examines the philosophical underpinnings of why we treat the planet the way we do.
After finishing the book, I feel a profound sense of connection with all of life and a commitment to be part of the change to the world we want in my own unique way.
Please give this book a read, especially if you're feeling discouraged about the state of the world.
September 11, 2021
I can heartily agree with what Lent is saying and I’m impressed by his knowledge and scope of research he’s done. However, I have to be skeptical about Eastern religion and philosophy. His take on this subject betrays his Eurocentric world view: what is wrong is the mistake of the greedy West, destroying the pristine East. Well, being a member of Eastern culture, it is quite capable of screwing things up on its own without any Western influence at all! When, for example, China built a massive naval fleet in the fifteenth century, it denuded rain forest of SE Asia, causing a war between China and Vietnam. Where were Buddha and Mencius then? That said, I like his appeal for a path away from the current system of economy and city planning. We humans are just parts of this gib lifeform called earth, but that we’re becoming nothing but cancer cells seems quite obvious. Before we’re surgically removed, we have to become something benign, otherwise the whole earth dies, and so will we.
May 13, 2023
My favourite book of the year so far haha. An absolutely fantabulastic book that integrates vast swathes of human experience to create a rich map of reality; I highly recommend this to anyone. It picks up where his previous ‘The Patterning Instinct’ left off. Fortunately, Lent employs the Jonathan Haidt method of chapter recapitulation, which is useful for writing up a synopsis. It’s structured in 6 parts (but I only summarise 5) that each answer a profound question, answers which are inspired by the emerging metamodern worldview. The answer is given at the end of the last paragraph of each section.
WHO AM I?
Taoists make a distinction between wu-wei (effortless action) and yu-wei (purposive action) identifying this latter with a specific cognitive faculty, the prefrontal cortex, which allows language, goal orientation, planning, etc, and which led to civilization and alienation. We are split creatures; we possess animate (lower, emotional) consciousness and conceptual (higher, cognitive) consciousness. The Greeks deified and identified with their reasoning mind at the expense of their emotional mind, but we need to integrate them both. Animate intelligence pervades all of life, from cells to plants to worms to birds to orcas to fungi. However, this doesn’t detract from the specialness of conceptual consciousness, most highly developed in humans.
Through living in pre-human communities, our ancestors were able to take the metacognitive capacity of self-reflection to new heights, whereupon a new distinction was drawn between the ‘I’ of conceptual consciousness and the ‘self’ of animate consciousness. The self exists only in the present, whereas the I can weave a narrative linking different selves through time; I am system 2, the self is system 1. The split is experienced cross-culturally, but it’s only in the West that we have turned this split into an unbridgeable chasm (Plato, Descartes, Chalmers.) My true identity doesn’t exist in ‘I’ or my ‘self’ but emerges dynamically from how I interact with my self. I am the integrated product of my animate and conceptual consciousness - an ongoing process of I and self continually interacting.
WHERE AM I?
Everything in the universe is composed of qi (matter + energy) and li (how the qi is patterned.) The li underlie everything in the natural world. Physicists call the ultimate state of a system its attractor. (The resting place of a pendulum is its attractor.) Self-organized systems are different because we can never predict where they will end up even though they remain within their parameters. Think of a flame; it will remain visibly a flame, keeping within the parameters of the average flame state, while constantly oscillating and swaying to and fro. You can’t predict where it will go, but you can bet that it will remain quite robust in the face of perturbations, in this case a breeze. Despite the robustness, a tipping point can be reached where the system alters dramatically, a change known as a phase transition. If there’s a breeze, the flame will sway, but if it’s strong enough, the flame will be extinguished. But transitions are not all bad; emergence is also a phase transition; where a system’s complexity reaches a critical mass that transforms into a new coherence that couldn’t have occurred by simply adding up each of the system’s elements. Entirely new patterns emerge that are more than the sum of their parts.
Another attribute of self-organized systems is their propensity to repeat patterns at ever-increasing scales, fractally. This is the holarchical understanding of life. There is a also a consistent inverse logarithmic relationship between the amplitude of a fluctuation and its frequency; many small fluctuations, comparatively fewer large ones. Further, the networks in these systems exhibit another power-law distribution; many nodes have few connections while a few have many. In a complex system, the ways in which things connect are frequently more important than the things themselves. Life isn’t a thing, but an ongoing integrated process of self-generation and self-maintenance known as autopoeisis; everything is dynamically related to everything else.
What has evolved on earth, in all its glory, is a harmonic web of dynamic activity. The Modern Sythensis is too reductionistic, and for that we need the Extended synthesis. Genes aren’t the only form of inheritance but are participants in a larger process that includes the transmission of hormones, antibodies, culture. He then goes over the history of cooperation of life (See Wright, Sahtouris, Wilson, Margoulis, Raihani, Hare and Woods, etc, for details.) Every major evolutionary step was a result of increased cooperation between various organisms. An ecosystem arises from organisms acting together in a complex interweaving of both competition and cooperation: a harmonic dance of life. I exist in a fractally connected, self-organized universe where everything relates dynamically to everything else.
WHAT AM I?
Intrinsic purpose is a defining characteristic of life. Evolution does have a direction. Teleology is so fundamental to life that each of its defining features can be understood by how its serves negentropy. What constitutes life? To be alive, an entity must have: a boundary between order inside and chaos outside; a continually dynamic metabolic flow, repairing and rebuilding its parts constantly; and the ability to self-reproduce. Life’s deep purpose is to maintain and regenerate itself to make more life, in rebellion against entropy. Every organism is a purposive, persistent, dynamic pattern of energy flow, and evolution is the process of life developing increasingly sophisticated ways to maximise the conversion of energy into negentropy.
General principles that apply to living entities at all fractal scales:
Redundancy: multiple ways to accomplish the same goal.
Conservatism: once life has found something that works well, it reuses it.
Modularity: populations of cells can do their thing relatively unhindered.
Innovation: cells self-organise to arrive at new ways to solve problems.
Coordination: cells need to nonetheless work together in networks.
What would the principles of self-organisation say about human consciousness? If our minds are like other strange attractors, they should exhibit fractal patterns and remain relatively stable, while occasionally undergoing phase transitions. The Lévy flight pattern is mathematically demonstrated to optimise foraging success when the goal is scarce and randomly distributed. The default mode network (DMN) is a salience seeker in the same way: we explore neural pathways to seek what’s important, bringing it to conscious awareness to mull it over if we deem it necessary to do so. We can reshape our attractors of consciousness for beneficial effect. Momentary streams of qualia can coalesce into moods and then into states of mind. Over time, some become more powerful. (Depressed people are stuck in negative loops.)
Lent criticises Dawkins’ concept of the meme, suggesting instead that we approach the study of cultural transmission through the concept of a cultural attractor. (While I appreciate what he’s saying, I think it makes more sense to ‘augment’ the study of cultural transmission with this idea, not replace the idea entirely. Did we get rid of the gene when adopting the Extended Synthesis?) A cultural attractor arises and maintains itself according to dynamic patterns in the collective consciousness of a culture; they’re never fixed but some, like healthy ecologies, show remarkable resilience over generations, and even over millennia. The longest lasting are the archetypes, shared patterns of human behaviour that are deeply meaningful and universal to the human experience. Other cultural attractors arise and then disintegrate; fads turn into trends turn into generations turn into eras turn into worldviews. Cultural transformations follow the same underlying principles as other self-organised, adaptive systems.
The principles that apply to complex systems apply to ourselves; consciousness is something we enact as a continual process of linkage and differentiation through billions of interconnecting neuronal pathways. As a part of life, I am an integrated, dynamic flow of negentropy, following the same general principles as the rest of the natural world.
HOW SHOULD I LIVE?
Aristotle differentiated between hedonia (transient happiness) and eudaimonia (fulfilling one’s purpose.) We can cultivate ourselves as though we are tending to a plant, only the plant in this instance is our ‘selves’. Meditation helps to reorient ourselves away from hedonia and more towards eudaimonia. First comes materialism, no doubt, since we must be able to sustain our physical selves. But once this reaches adequate levels (use discrimination wisely) then we must transcend (and include!) these base desires and focus on what is truly meaningful. We cannot flourish if our dominant societal values (hedonia) are oppositional to sustained well-being. Health has a fractal quality; it requires healthy systems harmonising within the organism and healthy external systems on which the organism relies. There’s no point tending delicately to a plant that exists within poisoned soil!
What values should we prioritise? Values first arose when the first protocells made a determination about which molecules were beneficial to its continued rebellion against entropy; the complexification of life entailed a complexification of value judgement. The reptilian stem emphasises physical security; the limbic system brought forth the engagement ethic of care; the neocortex birthed the sophisticated perspective-taking faculty. And it is this (our ability to coordinate with others, mediated by the neocortex) that differentiated us from other primates. Boehm’s reverse dominance hypothesis states that we act morally because it feels right to do so; it’s not an act of cold calculation. Why is civilisation, then, the history of atrocity after atrocity? Agriculture increased the size of tribes to the point where even Dunbar was confused (although Eisler and Graeber/Wengrow would question this) so we couldn’t keep ambitious upstarts down anymore. Haidt shows how our moral intuitions are both innate and encultured; Sapolsky agrees saying that our guts learn their intuitions. The expanding, nested hierarchy model of moral evolution reveals a bias in the Western importance attributed to the individual; indigenous communities everywhere emphasise the importance of the community at the expense of the individual. The community is at the centre, not the individual. A truly integrated system of values would be based on the foundational principle of interconnectedness, not “merely” the sanctity of the individual.
Nature is a palimpsest of what it once was thanks to the actions of humanity. But its obviously not all of humanity that has perpetrated this crime, merely the West’s reliance on global capitalism and its unending desire to consume the world for its own growth. By tending nature, humans can fulfill their destiny while nurturing life to thrive in its glory - allowing the symbiotic flourishing of humans and the Earth. As a living being in the midst of life, I should pursue symbiotic, fractal flourishing for myself, for humankind and for all life.
WHY AM I?
We need to get a better grasp on the nature of ‘meaning’. James and Huxley both thought that mystical states of consciousness were worth pursuing; academics have identified a common set of features that come with these states. There’s a loss of ego with its chattering I and fixed boundaries; a temporary ridding of the linear, logical, processing of system 2; a vast sense of oneness with everything in the cosmos; an experience filled with meaning; and even a glimpse at ultimate reality. Lent analyses the claims of the perennial philosophy, which states that there is a universal truth, open to people to experience through mystical states (despite differential interpretation through contrasting cultural lenses) and this will transform people’s lives. Lent goes on to criticise this philosophy by quoting Steven Katz who claims that there are no unmediated experiences, such that a traditions beliefs define in advance what the experience will be like. To this I shall say: of course our experiences need to be interpreted by cultural artifacts, otherwise they would be empty. However, the subjective and constructed cognitive frames don’t preclude the existence of a unitary Oneness that lies behind the experience. In any case, he continues, by stating that transcendence is not the only path for attaining a sense of oneness; this can equally be found through immanence, in this chaotic jumble of a world. He quotes Master Rinzai, who says that if you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion.
What might we find if we investigate mystical claims using the tools of systems-based sciences? On psychedelics, the brain’s normal patterns of activity, with its habitual modes of assigning meaning to things are dismantled; other networks come to dominate. Does the mystic realisation of oneness depict objective reality? A better question is: are rainbows real? There are many things that are emergent phenomena, existing only as a result of complex dynamic interaction between different entities, just like meaning. We enact meaning by the way in which we attune to the connective rhythms of the universe. Like music being played, like the refracted sunlight in the rain, the meaning potential is always there, waiting for us to tune in and engage.
Meaning is a function of connectedness. Just as music is an emergent phenomenon arising between a player and listener attuning through patterns of vibrations, so meaning is an emergent phenomenon enacted by a conscious entity as it related an experience to other experiences. The more extensively we connect something with other parts of our lives, the more meaningful it is to us. The meaning of something may be understood as the network of relationships it is perceived to have, and a more extensive and integrated network makes it more meaningful. Once we conceive of meaning as a function of connectivity, it becomes clear why a mystical experience, with its flood of massively interconnected linkages through a person’s neural networks, would feel some intensely meaningful. When we are disconnected from things, when things lose their meaning, we feel bad. When a new pattern comes together, we feel good.
The left-brain way of understanding meaning is (Lent denigrates this aspect; but I believe it complements what he’s saying, although it’s always the emissary, never the master) the following: for something to be meaningful, it’s assumed that it must have a point. The conflation arises from Western culture’s focus on linear, purpose-driven behaviour; actions with a beginning, middle, and endpoint. If we see meaning arising from an infinite array of interconnections, we would not expect any point; on the contrary, each point is a node that only contains meaning to the extent its connected to other nodes in the web of meaning. (But I believe this to be more complementary than incompatible.) Is meaning intrinsic to the universe? The interconnectivity of the universe creates innumerable meaning potentials, but we must actively participate in attuning to those potentials in order to actualise the meaning. To the extent that a mystical experience leads to a sense of purpose, it often revolves around a vision of unconditional and universal love. Like meaning, love may be defined in terms of connectivity, specifically as the realisation and embrace of connectedness.
The web of meaning is an integrated web. The realisation of meaning as a function of connectedness doesn’t require merging everything into an undifferentiated oneness. Instead, it celebrates all the different elements within us, within our communities, within the variegated fabric of humanity and within the stunning diversity of life. Diversity did not rupture Oneness. Oneness expressed itself in diversity without itself falling into diversity.
Now we need practical answers, since people are rejecting the dogmas of traditional monotheistic faiths, while wondering how to make sense of their lives. Scientism should rightfully be called ontological reductionism, since science per se isn’t the same as reductionism, and it’s reduction that people ought to be questioning. We need to integrate the fixed laws of reductionist science, the organising principles of complex systems, teachings from the wisdom traditions and spiritual insights of subjective experience to arrive at a coherent appreciation of the universe and our place within it. Once we recognise spirit as a coherent series of dynamic patterns - or li - we can appreciate that the li of our loved ones lives on in us, a la Hofstadter. We can define spirituality as seeking meaning in the coherent connections between things, rather than in the things themselves. In this sense, spirituality and systems thinking are intrinsically aligned. From this perspective, the moral significance becomes clear. Once we recognise that we are life, we are called by the overriding imperative to devote our own little eddy of sentience to the flourishing of all life, of which we are but one tiny part. With an expanded sense of identity, this becomes not so much a moral obligation as a natural instinct. Everything we do, every word we speak, created li ripples in the fabric of existence. I am here to weave my unique strand into the web of meaning.
WHO AM I?
Taoists make a distinction between wu-wei (effortless action) and yu-wei (purposive action) identifying this latter with a specific cognitive faculty, the prefrontal cortex, which allows language, goal orientation, planning, etc, and which led to civilization and alienation. We are split creatures; we possess animate (lower, emotional) consciousness and conceptual (higher, cognitive) consciousness. The Greeks deified and identified with their reasoning mind at the expense of their emotional mind, but we need to integrate them both. Animate intelligence pervades all of life, from cells to plants to worms to birds to orcas to fungi. However, this doesn’t detract from the specialness of conceptual consciousness, most highly developed in humans.
Through living in pre-human communities, our ancestors were able to take the metacognitive capacity of self-reflection to new heights, whereupon a new distinction was drawn between the ‘I’ of conceptual consciousness and the ‘self’ of animate consciousness. The self exists only in the present, whereas the I can weave a narrative linking different selves through time; I am system 2, the self is system 1. The split is experienced cross-culturally, but it’s only in the West that we have turned this split into an unbridgeable chasm (Plato, Descartes, Chalmers.) My true identity doesn’t exist in ‘I’ or my ‘self’ but emerges dynamically from how I interact with my self. I am the integrated product of my animate and conceptual consciousness - an ongoing process of I and self continually interacting.
WHERE AM I?
Everything in the universe is composed of qi (matter + energy) and li (how the qi is patterned.) The li underlie everything in the natural world. Physicists call the ultimate state of a system its attractor. (The resting place of a pendulum is its attractor.) Self-organized systems are different because we can never predict where they will end up even though they remain within their parameters. Think of a flame; it will remain visibly a flame, keeping within the parameters of the average flame state, while constantly oscillating and swaying to and fro. You can’t predict where it will go, but you can bet that it will remain quite robust in the face of perturbations, in this case a breeze. Despite the robustness, a tipping point can be reached where the system alters dramatically, a change known as a phase transition. If there’s a breeze, the flame will sway, but if it’s strong enough, the flame will be extinguished. But transitions are not all bad; emergence is also a phase transition; where a system’s complexity reaches a critical mass that transforms into a new coherence that couldn’t have occurred by simply adding up each of the system’s elements. Entirely new patterns emerge that are more than the sum of their parts.
Another attribute of self-organized systems is their propensity to repeat patterns at ever-increasing scales, fractally. This is the holarchical understanding of life. There is a also a consistent inverse logarithmic relationship between the amplitude of a fluctuation and its frequency; many small fluctuations, comparatively fewer large ones. Further, the networks in these systems exhibit another power-law distribution; many nodes have few connections while a few have many. In a complex system, the ways in which things connect are frequently more important than the things themselves. Life isn’t a thing, but an ongoing integrated process of self-generation and self-maintenance known as autopoeisis; everything is dynamically related to everything else.
What has evolved on earth, in all its glory, is a harmonic web of dynamic activity. The Modern Sythensis is too reductionistic, and for that we need the Extended synthesis. Genes aren’t the only form of inheritance but are participants in a larger process that includes the transmission of hormones, antibodies, culture. He then goes over the history of cooperation of life (See Wright, Sahtouris, Wilson, Margoulis, Raihani, Hare and Woods, etc, for details.) Every major evolutionary step was a result of increased cooperation between various organisms. An ecosystem arises from organisms acting together in a complex interweaving of both competition and cooperation: a harmonic dance of life. I exist in a fractally connected, self-organized universe where everything relates dynamically to everything else.
WHAT AM I?
Intrinsic purpose is a defining characteristic of life. Evolution does have a direction. Teleology is so fundamental to life that each of its defining features can be understood by how its serves negentropy. What constitutes life? To be alive, an entity must have: a boundary between order inside and chaos outside; a continually dynamic metabolic flow, repairing and rebuilding its parts constantly; and the ability to self-reproduce. Life’s deep purpose is to maintain and regenerate itself to make more life, in rebellion against entropy. Every organism is a purposive, persistent, dynamic pattern of energy flow, and evolution is the process of life developing increasingly sophisticated ways to maximise the conversion of energy into negentropy.
General principles that apply to living entities at all fractal scales:
Redundancy: multiple ways to accomplish the same goal.
Conservatism: once life has found something that works well, it reuses it.
Modularity: populations of cells can do their thing relatively unhindered.
Innovation: cells self-organise to arrive at new ways to solve problems.
Coordination: cells need to nonetheless work together in networks.
What would the principles of self-organisation say about human consciousness? If our minds are like other strange attractors, they should exhibit fractal patterns and remain relatively stable, while occasionally undergoing phase transitions. The Lévy flight pattern is mathematically demonstrated to optimise foraging success when the goal is scarce and randomly distributed. The default mode network (DMN) is a salience seeker in the same way: we explore neural pathways to seek what’s important, bringing it to conscious awareness to mull it over if we deem it necessary to do so. We can reshape our attractors of consciousness for beneficial effect. Momentary streams of qualia can coalesce into moods and then into states of mind. Over time, some become more powerful. (Depressed people are stuck in negative loops.)
Lent criticises Dawkins’ concept of the meme, suggesting instead that we approach the study of cultural transmission through the concept of a cultural attractor. (While I appreciate what he’s saying, I think it makes more sense to ‘augment’ the study of cultural transmission with this idea, not replace the idea entirely. Did we get rid of the gene when adopting the Extended Synthesis?) A cultural attractor arises and maintains itself according to dynamic patterns in the collective consciousness of a culture; they’re never fixed but some, like healthy ecologies, show remarkable resilience over generations, and even over millennia. The longest lasting are the archetypes, shared patterns of human behaviour that are deeply meaningful and universal to the human experience. Other cultural attractors arise and then disintegrate; fads turn into trends turn into generations turn into eras turn into worldviews. Cultural transformations follow the same underlying principles as other self-organised, adaptive systems.
The principles that apply to complex systems apply to ourselves; consciousness is something we enact as a continual process of linkage and differentiation through billions of interconnecting neuronal pathways. As a part of life, I am an integrated, dynamic flow of negentropy, following the same general principles as the rest of the natural world.
HOW SHOULD I LIVE?
Aristotle differentiated between hedonia (transient happiness) and eudaimonia (fulfilling one’s purpose.) We can cultivate ourselves as though we are tending to a plant, only the plant in this instance is our ‘selves’. Meditation helps to reorient ourselves away from hedonia and more towards eudaimonia. First comes materialism, no doubt, since we must be able to sustain our physical selves. But once this reaches adequate levels (use discrimination wisely) then we must transcend (and include!) these base desires and focus on what is truly meaningful. We cannot flourish if our dominant societal values (hedonia) are oppositional to sustained well-being. Health has a fractal quality; it requires healthy systems harmonising within the organism and healthy external systems on which the organism relies. There’s no point tending delicately to a plant that exists within poisoned soil!
What values should we prioritise? Values first arose when the first protocells made a determination about which molecules were beneficial to its continued rebellion against entropy; the complexification of life entailed a complexification of value judgement. The reptilian stem emphasises physical security; the limbic system brought forth the engagement ethic of care; the neocortex birthed the sophisticated perspective-taking faculty. And it is this (our ability to coordinate with others, mediated by the neocortex) that differentiated us from other primates. Boehm’s reverse dominance hypothesis states that we act morally because it feels right to do so; it’s not an act of cold calculation. Why is civilisation, then, the history of atrocity after atrocity? Agriculture increased the size of tribes to the point where even Dunbar was confused (although Eisler and Graeber/Wengrow would question this) so we couldn’t keep ambitious upstarts down anymore. Haidt shows how our moral intuitions are both innate and encultured; Sapolsky agrees saying that our guts learn their intuitions. The expanding, nested hierarchy model of moral evolution reveals a bias in the Western importance attributed to the individual; indigenous communities everywhere emphasise the importance of the community at the expense of the individual. The community is at the centre, not the individual. A truly integrated system of values would be based on the foundational principle of interconnectedness, not “merely” the sanctity of the individual.
Nature is a palimpsest of what it once was thanks to the actions of humanity. But its obviously not all of humanity that has perpetrated this crime, merely the West’s reliance on global capitalism and its unending desire to consume the world for its own growth. By tending nature, humans can fulfill their destiny while nurturing life to thrive in its glory - allowing the symbiotic flourishing of humans and the Earth. As a living being in the midst of life, I should pursue symbiotic, fractal flourishing for myself, for humankind and for all life.
WHY AM I?
We need to get a better grasp on the nature of ‘meaning’. James and Huxley both thought that mystical states of consciousness were worth pursuing; academics have identified a common set of features that come with these states. There’s a loss of ego with its chattering I and fixed boundaries; a temporary ridding of the linear, logical, processing of system 2; a vast sense of oneness with everything in the cosmos; an experience filled with meaning; and even a glimpse at ultimate reality. Lent analyses the claims of the perennial philosophy, which states that there is a universal truth, open to people to experience through mystical states (despite differential interpretation through contrasting cultural lenses) and this will transform people’s lives. Lent goes on to criticise this philosophy by quoting Steven Katz who claims that there are no unmediated experiences, such that a traditions beliefs define in advance what the experience will be like. To this I shall say: of course our experiences need to be interpreted by cultural artifacts, otherwise they would be empty. However, the subjective and constructed cognitive frames don’t preclude the existence of a unitary Oneness that lies behind the experience. In any case, he continues, by stating that transcendence is not the only path for attaining a sense of oneness; this can equally be found through immanence, in this chaotic jumble of a world. He quotes Master Rinzai, who says that if you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion.
What might we find if we investigate mystical claims using the tools of systems-based sciences? On psychedelics, the brain’s normal patterns of activity, with its habitual modes of assigning meaning to things are dismantled; other networks come to dominate. Does the mystic realisation of oneness depict objective reality? A better question is: are rainbows real? There are many things that are emergent phenomena, existing only as a result of complex dynamic interaction between different entities, just like meaning. We enact meaning by the way in which we attune to the connective rhythms of the universe. Like music being played, like the refracted sunlight in the rain, the meaning potential is always there, waiting for us to tune in and engage.
Meaning is a function of connectedness. Just as music is an emergent phenomenon arising between a player and listener attuning through patterns of vibrations, so meaning is an emergent phenomenon enacted by a conscious entity as it related an experience to other experiences. The more extensively we connect something with other parts of our lives, the more meaningful it is to us. The meaning of something may be understood as the network of relationships it is perceived to have, and a more extensive and integrated network makes it more meaningful. Once we conceive of meaning as a function of connectivity, it becomes clear why a mystical experience, with its flood of massively interconnected linkages through a person’s neural networks, would feel some intensely meaningful. When we are disconnected from things, when things lose their meaning, we feel bad. When a new pattern comes together, we feel good.
The left-brain way of understanding meaning is (Lent denigrates this aspect; but I believe it complements what he’s saying, although it’s always the emissary, never the master) the following: for something to be meaningful, it’s assumed that it must have a point. The conflation arises from Western culture’s focus on linear, purpose-driven behaviour; actions with a beginning, middle, and endpoint. If we see meaning arising from an infinite array of interconnections, we would not expect any point; on the contrary, each point is a node that only contains meaning to the extent its connected to other nodes in the web of meaning. (But I believe this to be more complementary than incompatible.) Is meaning intrinsic to the universe? The interconnectivity of the universe creates innumerable meaning potentials, but we must actively participate in attuning to those potentials in order to actualise the meaning. To the extent that a mystical experience leads to a sense of purpose, it often revolves around a vision of unconditional and universal love. Like meaning, love may be defined in terms of connectivity, specifically as the realisation and embrace of connectedness.
The web of meaning is an integrated web. The realisation of meaning as a function of connectedness doesn’t require merging everything into an undifferentiated oneness. Instead, it celebrates all the different elements within us, within our communities, within the variegated fabric of humanity and within the stunning diversity of life. Diversity did not rupture Oneness. Oneness expressed itself in diversity without itself falling into diversity.
Now we need practical answers, since people are rejecting the dogmas of traditional monotheistic faiths, while wondering how to make sense of their lives. Scientism should rightfully be called ontological reductionism, since science per se isn’t the same as reductionism, and it’s reduction that people ought to be questioning. We need to integrate the fixed laws of reductionist science, the organising principles of complex systems, teachings from the wisdom traditions and spiritual insights of subjective experience to arrive at a coherent appreciation of the universe and our place within it. Once we recognise spirit as a coherent series of dynamic patterns - or li - we can appreciate that the li of our loved ones lives on in us, a la Hofstadter. We can define spirituality as seeking meaning in the coherent connections between things, rather than in the things themselves. In this sense, spirituality and systems thinking are intrinsically aligned. From this perspective, the moral significance becomes clear. Once we recognise that we are life, we are called by the overriding imperative to devote our own little eddy of sentience to the flourishing of all life, of which we are but one tiny part. With an expanded sense of identity, this becomes not so much a moral obligation as a natural instinct. Everything we do, every word we speak, created li ripples in the fabric of existence. I am here to weave my unique strand into the web of meaning.
July 19, 2021
Having been a voracious reader and fan of The Pattering Instinct, Jeremy Lent’s first book, I was excited to see that his second book was recently released. I have not been disappointed. The last section of the Patterning Instinct, the one looking to the future seemed to be the most unpolished or incomplete part of the work as the author was still speculating with ideas as he turned from the past and readers were dealing with the implications of the previous chapters. I was delighted to discover that The Web of Meaning picks up from where Patterning Instinct left off, and describes a vision of ourselves, our future, our entire reality and life itself that is rooted deeply in the new science and understanding of life, and reaches bravely towards a future we are yet to craft, providing solid foundations for a way of looking at the world that favours cooperation over competition, altruism over selfishness, meaning over emptiness, and deep companionship over loneliness, and is not based on wishful thinking. It is not a catalogue of possible practical solutions - there are plenty of those on the shelves. Rather, it is a work of deep and very down-to-Earth (in all senses) philosophy that provides a framework and compelling argument for finally implementing those solutions. Reading works like The Web of Meaning, absorbing and discussing their ideas and finding our way forward into a future we are crafting is a journey we need to embark upon for the sake of all life as we know it, including our own, as our species grows up from its adolescence. The Web of Meaning is definitely a book to have in the backpack along the journey, and I would dare to recommend The Patterning Instinct as well. And I am sure there will be plenty of time, reason and opportunity to argue specifics along the way.
July 19, 2021
Having been a voracious reader and fan of The Pattering Instinct, Jeremy Lent’s first book, I was excited to see that his second book was recently released. I have not been disappointed. The last section of the Patterning Instinct, the one looking to the future seemed to be the most unpolished or incomplete part of the work as the author was still speculating with ideas as he turned from the past and readers were dealing with the implications of the previous chapters. I was delighted to discover that The Web of Meaning picks up from where Patterning Instinct left off, and describes a vision of ourselves, our future, our entire reality and life itself that is rooted deeply in the new science and understanding of life, and reaches bravely towards a future we are yet to craft, providing solid foundations for a way of looking at the world that favours cooperation over competition, altruism over selfishness, meaning over emptiness, and deep companionship over loneliness, and is not based on wishful thinking. It is not a catalogue of possible practical solutions - there are plenty of those on the shelves. Rather, it is a work of deep and very down-to-Earth (in all senses) philosophy that provides a framework and compelling argument for finally implementing those solutions. Reading works like The Web of Meaning, absorbing and discussing their ideas and finding our way forward into a future we are crafting is a journey we need to embark upon for the sake of all life as we know it, including our own, as our species grows up from its adolescence. The Web of Meaning is definitely a book to have in the backpack along the journey, and I would dare to recommend The Patterning Instinct as well. And I am sure there will be plenty of time, reason and opportunity to argue specifics along the way.
July 30, 2021
Easy reading but some big ideas!
Some lovely pulling together of east and west science and mysticism pointing at different way of being in the world.
Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and lots of biology from single cells to ecosystem...
Some lovely pulling together of east and west science and mysticism pointing at different way of being in the world.
Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and lots of biology from single cells to ecosystem...
April 6, 2024
Prikkelend en overtuigend betoog om ons meer bewust te zijn van onze diepe verbondenheid met de levende wereld om ons heen.
Lent legt uit dat onze intelligentie bestaat uit "animate intelligence", of een dierlijk brein, en het rationele brein. Waar ons rationele brein ons in staat stelt de werking van individuele componenten nauwgezet te doorgronden, kan ons dierlijke brein ons helpen verbanden te leggen en zaken in samenhang te bezien.
In het Westen zijn we het rationele brein langzamerhand als de enige legitieme bron van kennis gaan zien. Het dierlijke brein wordt beschouwd als een belemmering. Daaraan gekoppeld zit ook een moreel ordeel; de ratio is objectief, zuiver en neigt naar het volmaakte, terwijl het dierlijke brein leugenachtig is en ons van het waarachtige afleidt. Dat dogmatische oordeel komt voort uit Plato, onze monotheïstische geloofsgeschiedenis en het Verlichtingsdenken ("Ik denk dus ik ben".).
De focus op ratio heeft ons wereldbeeld en onze wetenschappelijke traditie bepaald. We zijn onszelf gaan zien als losstaand van de natuur, terwijl we een integraal onderdeel zijn. Daarnaast hanteren we een wetenschappelijke traditie waarin we elementen zoveel mogelijk los van elkaar bestuderen. Daarbij proberen we de relatie tussen de wetenschapper en het object zoveel mogelijk te beperken, dan wel te negeren. Dit in tegenstelling tot bijvoorbeeld de oud-Chinese of inheems tradities, waarbij elementen juist in samenhang werden bestudeerd.
Onze wetenschap heeft daardoor de afgelopen eeuwen enorme stappen kunnen zetten om individuele elementen te begrijpen. Meer en meer stuit de wetenschap echter op de conclusie dat elementen onderling verbonden zijn en dus niet in isolatie bestudeerd kunnen worden. Één neuron uit ons brein kan ons niet laten zien wat bewustzijn is. Bewustzijn ontstaat als een samenspel van miljarden neuronen, non-lineaire relaties en feedbackloops. Weliswaar weten we van bijna alles de werking, vaak begrijpen we nog niets van de dieperliggende betekenis.
Door deze disbalans leven we in een wereld die nog nooit zo rijk is geweest en die tegelijkertijd nog nooit zulke grote problemen heeft gekend. Naast ongebreideld kapitalisme en mentale problemen door eenzaamheid en een individualistische prestatiecultuur, wordt de levende wereld als geheel inmiddels bedreigd door de klimaat- en biodiversiteitscrisis. Als de mensheid op dit pad doorgaan, zo waarschuwt Lent, graven we onvermijdelijk ons eigen graf, en dat van de wereld om ons heen.
Systeemdenken en een besef van onze onderlinge verbondenheid kan onze redding zijn. Juist door onze onderlinge verbondenheid kan er snel een wereldwijde omslag in onze culturele normen plaatsvinden, zoals de MeToo-discussies en de Black Lives Matter-bewegingen hebben laten zien.
Bij tijd en wijle vervalt Lent nog in een confirmation bias, waarbij hij enkel die studies noemt die zijn betoog ondersteunen of wetenschappers conclusies in de mond legt waar ze het zelf vrijwel zeker niet mee eens zouden zijn. Ook schaart hij voor het gemak alle jagers-verzamelaarssamenlevingen, van de Amazone tot prehistorisch Europa, onder de noemer "Inheemse volken", alsof die volken geen diversiteit kennen.
Over het algemeen geeft Lent echter een zorgvuldige, goed onderbouwde analyse, waarmee de Web of Meaning zich echt onderscheidt van ecologische betogen die ik eerder heb gelezen. Jeremy Lent erkent wat onze huidige culturele en wetenschappelijke traditie ons heeft opgeleverd en toont tegelijkertijd aan welke problemen onze dogma's ons opleveren. Hij betoogt daarom niet om onze wetenschap met het badwater weg te gooien, maar hij juist voor integratie met systeemdenken.
Daarmee is de Web of Meaning een aanrader, een boek dat je echt je wereldbeeld kan laten bijstellen.
Lent legt uit dat onze intelligentie bestaat uit "animate intelligence", of een dierlijk brein, en het rationele brein. Waar ons rationele brein ons in staat stelt de werking van individuele componenten nauwgezet te doorgronden, kan ons dierlijke brein ons helpen verbanden te leggen en zaken in samenhang te bezien.
In het Westen zijn we het rationele brein langzamerhand als de enige legitieme bron van kennis gaan zien. Het dierlijke brein wordt beschouwd als een belemmering. Daaraan gekoppeld zit ook een moreel ordeel; de ratio is objectief, zuiver en neigt naar het volmaakte, terwijl het dierlijke brein leugenachtig is en ons van het waarachtige afleidt. Dat dogmatische oordeel komt voort uit Plato, onze monotheïstische geloofsgeschiedenis en het Verlichtingsdenken ("Ik denk dus ik ben".).
De focus op ratio heeft ons wereldbeeld en onze wetenschappelijke traditie bepaald. We zijn onszelf gaan zien als losstaand van de natuur, terwijl we een integraal onderdeel zijn. Daarnaast hanteren we een wetenschappelijke traditie waarin we elementen zoveel mogelijk los van elkaar bestuderen. Daarbij proberen we de relatie tussen de wetenschapper en het object zoveel mogelijk te beperken, dan wel te negeren. Dit in tegenstelling tot bijvoorbeeld de oud-Chinese of inheems tradities, waarbij elementen juist in samenhang werden bestudeerd.
Onze wetenschap heeft daardoor de afgelopen eeuwen enorme stappen kunnen zetten om individuele elementen te begrijpen. Meer en meer stuit de wetenschap echter op de conclusie dat elementen onderling verbonden zijn en dus niet in isolatie bestudeerd kunnen worden. Één neuron uit ons brein kan ons niet laten zien wat bewustzijn is. Bewustzijn ontstaat als een samenspel van miljarden neuronen, non-lineaire relaties en feedbackloops. Weliswaar weten we van bijna alles de werking, vaak begrijpen we nog niets van de dieperliggende betekenis.
Door deze disbalans leven we in een wereld die nog nooit zo rijk is geweest en die tegelijkertijd nog nooit zulke grote problemen heeft gekend. Naast ongebreideld kapitalisme en mentale problemen door eenzaamheid en een individualistische prestatiecultuur, wordt de levende wereld als geheel inmiddels bedreigd door de klimaat- en biodiversiteitscrisis. Als de mensheid op dit pad doorgaan, zo waarschuwt Lent, graven we onvermijdelijk ons eigen graf, en dat van de wereld om ons heen.
Systeemdenken en een besef van onze onderlinge verbondenheid kan onze redding zijn. Juist door onze onderlinge verbondenheid kan er snel een wereldwijde omslag in onze culturele normen plaatsvinden, zoals de MeToo-discussies en de Black Lives Matter-bewegingen hebben laten zien.
Bij tijd en wijle vervalt Lent nog in een confirmation bias, waarbij hij enkel die studies noemt die zijn betoog ondersteunen of wetenschappers conclusies in de mond legt waar ze het zelf vrijwel zeker niet mee eens zouden zijn. Ook schaart hij voor het gemak alle jagers-verzamelaarssamenlevingen, van de Amazone tot prehistorisch Europa, onder de noemer "Inheemse volken", alsof die volken geen diversiteit kennen.
Over het algemeen geeft Lent echter een zorgvuldige, goed onderbouwde analyse, waarmee de Web of Meaning zich echt onderscheidt van ecologische betogen die ik eerder heb gelezen. Jeremy Lent erkent wat onze huidige culturele en wetenschappelijke traditie ons heeft opgeleverd en toont tegelijkertijd aan welke problemen onze dogma's ons opleveren. Hij betoogt daarom niet om onze wetenschap met het badwater weg te gooien, maar hij juist voor integratie met systeemdenken.
Daarmee is de Web of Meaning een aanrader, een boek dat je echt je wereldbeeld kan laten bijstellen.
August 23, 2022
He said it all in The Patterning Instinct (read my review of it here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).
And then he said it again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
In this book.
Only not as well.
😐
To be sure, this book is chockablock full of mind blowing ideas.
My critique of the book has to do with how repetitive it is to The Patterning Instinct.
I read these two (super long - very similar) books back to back.
And that may be why I’m feeling saturated by the messaging.
Anyhow:
One of the profoundly useful and well applied ideas (in both books) is:
Power Law Distribution.
From Wikipedia: In statistics, a power law is a functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in the other quantity, independent of the initial size of those quantities.
In the abstract, this may be rather meaningless.
But Lent uses the power law construct in a powerful metaphorical (and literal) way.
Lent offers the following (paraphrased):
A group of scientist studying power law distributions looked at piles of uncooked rice.
They added one grain at a time, and noticed that most grains continued to pile up in an orderly way, but then after a certain critical threshold, the next grain added to the pile caused an avalanche.
Like the proverbial straw that broke the camels back. Sudden change can occur in supremely abrupt ways, via seemingly small catalysts (particularly when observed in short term time scale).
Power law distributions have been observed all over nature.
Including social change.
Just as the fucking awful George Floyd video footage, and before that, the Rodney King video footage catalyzed mass insurrection.
Oppressive social order seems to remain in a stasis, and then snap….
Shit happens.
NOTE: Ultimately, Lent argues for a transformation to a more holistically integrated, systemically informed, and life-affirming rather than wealth-affirming ecological civilization.
Um yes please!
Please don’t mistake the fact that I gave the book 3/5 stars for a negative endorsement of Lent’s laudable message.
So much more to this encyclopedia of mind explosives.
Read The Patterning Instinct first.
Read this second if you need to the whole book over all again.
But DEFINITELY read one or the other.
And who knows.
Maybe there are some messages that can’t be overstated.
If that is true.
Than the messages of these books certainly qualify.
And then some 😜
And then he said it again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
In this book.
Only not as well.
😐
To be sure, this book is chockablock full of mind blowing ideas.
My critique of the book has to do with how repetitive it is to The Patterning Instinct.
I read these two (super long - very similar) books back to back.
And that may be why I’m feeling saturated by the messaging.
Anyhow:
One of the profoundly useful and well applied ideas (in both books) is:
Power Law Distribution.
From Wikipedia: In statistics, a power law is a functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in the other quantity, independent of the initial size of those quantities.
In the abstract, this may be rather meaningless.
But Lent uses the power law construct in a powerful metaphorical (and literal) way.
Lent offers the following (paraphrased):
A group of scientist studying power law distributions looked at piles of uncooked rice.
They added one grain at a time, and noticed that most grains continued to pile up in an orderly way, but then after a certain critical threshold, the next grain added to the pile caused an avalanche.
Like the proverbial straw that broke the camels back. Sudden change can occur in supremely abrupt ways, via seemingly small catalysts (particularly when observed in short term time scale).
Power law distributions have been observed all over nature.
Including social change.
Just as the fucking awful George Floyd video footage, and before that, the Rodney King video footage catalyzed mass insurrection.
Oppressive social order seems to remain in a stasis, and then snap….
Shit happens.
NOTE: Ultimately, Lent argues for a transformation to a more holistically integrated, systemically informed, and life-affirming rather than wealth-affirming ecological civilization.
Um yes please!
Please don’t mistake the fact that I gave the book 3/5 stars for a negative endorsement of Lent’s laudable message.
So much more to this encyclopedia of mind explosives.
Read The Patterning Instinct first.
Read this second if you need to the whole book over all again.
But DEFINITELY read one or the other.
And who knows.
Maybe there are some messages that can’t be overstated.
If that is true.
Than the messages of these books certainly qualify.
And then some 😜
February 24, 2023
I am on board with many of the conclusions of this book regarding our impact as a species on the planet and the need to change our wanton ecocide. This book is a combination of “pie in the sky” ideas, polemic, and the author’s own journey through his process of sensemaking recent scientific findings and what they say about the embodied experience of being an animal, in our case a human animal, during the current climate crisis. He identifies humanity’s problem as the dominance of our “conceptual consciousness” over our “animate consciousness,” which gives us an “I” separate from our embodied experience, and he is very influenced in his thinking by his exposure to Taoism. From the standpoint of wanting to see what is happening in eco-spiritual discourse, this book is a valuable read (if a long one). It was interesting to see what he was pulling out from science to discuss. I was occasionally puzzled (maybe it was the tone of the audiobook narrator, who used a surprised, excited affect sometimes) that some things were treated as such a big deal as they were — doesn’t everyone know that not thinking about something complicated directly is the best way to figure it out, just like how you look slightly off-center when viewing faint objects through a telescope so you can see the object better? I’ve used my mental back burner since I was a young child! And doesn’t everyone have the sense that their thoughts and emotions are pulsing like a piece of music? I wouldn’t have that pulsing-tone-delicate-light-stillness experience meditating if it wasn’t like that. Still, many of the examples were cool and interesting, and I'm happy that I read this book because it was a useful intellectual experience.
The rest of this review focuses more on why I gave the book three stars.
Before I get started, I want to point to the danger of one of the things Lent said — that readers, in order to understand reality and be properly embodied, would have to concede all points to him because he was correct, with the implication that those who were holdouts just didn’t get it or had some kind of bias against truth. This man needs Parmenides and the Parmenides; or, in the words of the elevator operator in the SNL David Pumpkins sketch, there are 100 floors, and not all of them are gonna be winners.
Speaking as a (nonacademic) Platonist, I have some concerns about the framing and disagreements with the way he was presenting this material. Obviously, from my perspective, Lent’s argument that all consciousness is emergent is the exact opposite of the Platonic system; we have a top-down causal system where everything begins at the One, most expertly explained by Proclus in his Elements of Theology. I appreciated how, eventually, Lent started to come out swinging against evangelistic monotheisms and their world-denying doctrines, as they have done a lot of damage, but he fundamentally misunderstands Platonism and decided to include Platonism in that out-of-control train. It is true that an appropriation of Platonism has been used in Christian and other monotheistic religions to justify a mind-body dualism and the exploitation of the world, but the Platonic system itself is much more complicated. There is a reason why Christian Platonists love Plotinus so much. Plotinus is the Platonist most well-known for a negative view of matter (although that itself may be a misinterpretation of what he meant), and there is a reason why Christian theologians really don’t like the Platonists who came after Plotinus, as Platonism moved into a more integrated mode through Iamblichus, and despite having a lot of respect for Plotinus and calling him divine as a marker of his important, divinely-inspired insights, Platonists who picked up the torch after him do disagree with some of his interpretations. It’s also easy to take Plotinus because, unlike Plato, Proclus, Iamblichus, and others, Plotinus tends to speak more vaguely about the divine (the Gods). I think Lent was really fighting to find a villain among everything produced in the Mediterranean and Near East (except, somehow, Lent loves Aristotle, which was really surprising because Aristotle was not “with it” on a lot of things), and Plato is convenient because almost nobody reads him properly nowadays. There were occasions when Lent was contrasting Platonism with Taoism when I was thinking, “Wait, don’t we think that way, too, about this? Where is he getting his information? Is he saying that, as a Platonist, I should dislike Taoism?” I feel cheated because there are actual differences between the philosophical schools; using a distorted straw-man doesn’t help us compare and contrast anything.
The two keys to a proper understanding of the mainstream Platonic position on this are rooted in the concept that there are Gods. In the Timaeus, we learn that the physical universe is a divine agalma (a statue of worship) of the Gods and a Goddess in her own right; in the Phaedrus, we learn that the Gods are constantly at banquet, giving without cease to one another. The ideal image of the world is a world of love, charity, and compassion; through their goodness, they produce the world and all of the beauty within it without even trying. (Evil is a parasitic interference pattern that comes from what happens when the intelligible gets “flattened” or “stretched” into space and time and clumped into matter.) Our soul itself, while often interpreted in a dualistic mode, is a much more complicated system — we call souls that embody in incarnational cycles “partial/individual souls” (us), which have a lasting, immortal component (often called the rational soul, but in practice, this can be likened to the puruṣa in Yogic philosophy) and that put on garments in descent (there are many of these), the most obvious being the emotional soul (which corresponds to the harmony states that Lent discusses at length) and the appetitive soul (which is the seat of desire, be it for sex or an iPhone). These lower souls are not immortal and rely a lot on the actual conditions of the body, including its species and genes/nurture. A well-ordered soul is one that learns how to “ride” properly on emotion and appetition while embodied, which involves applying some level of limit to appetition (because out-of-control appetition leads to tyranny, greed, and addiction) and emotion (out-of-control emotion is usually maladaptive). The “conceptual consciousness” that Lent is discussing so negatively all of the time does not straightforwardly correspond to the rational soul, as the highest cognition the partial/individual soul is capable of (intuitive reasoning) is a certain mode of insight. We know this from the Divided Line in the Republic (Intuitive, Mathematical | Opinative, Fantastical). Similarly, the concept of the individual soul does not straightforwardly lead to the pathologized concept of the individual that Lent discusses. Souls that incarnate have some level of choice of lives based on the constraints of what is possible for them, and souls that learn how to cultivate justice through correct actions towards others are going to have a better lives-paths than those who behave badly towards others. Furthermore, each of us is linked to a specific God, so in a certain way, we are each an expression of that God’s activity in the world, according to varying levels of ordered coherence. What our current cultural mode does is prioritize an unrestrained appetitive soul and an inflamed emotional soul, which is intrinsically out of balance/order. Lent mentions Buddhist bodhisattvas at one point, and while there are philosophical differences between Buddhism and Platonism, being coherently-ordered inherently leads to prosocial and compassionate behavior in both traditions.
The Platonic way of interpreting the indigenous harvesting and hunting practices that Lent discusses is also much more integrated, and it avoids straying into the “Noble Savage” trope that Lent sometimes engages in. To the first point, Lent seems to believe that these cultural phenomena are emergent, but these cultural phenomena are expressions of a people’s contact with the numinous, be they Gods or land spirits or ancestors or other divine persons. Giving ritual offerings before fishing for salmon is a theurgic activity that places what is done during the fishing experience in a divine mode, and these rituals ultimately come from the Gods and spirits, transmitted to human communities through divinely-inspired progenitors (that intuitive level of the Divided Line is important here). As Europe, North Africa, and the Near East were Christianized, sacred groves were cut down because the Gods and spirits worshipped within them were demonized, and they were occasionally replaced by churches or saint-worship sites when the locals felt a certain kind of way about it. We can directly trace the desacralization in recent memory to what started in the 300s CE in the Mediterranean! A spiritual system that does not view the universe as a living agalma or a being of respect and that performs predatory or violence-driven proselytization is always followed by heartbreaking loss as it desacralizes what is around it. Just look at the myth of Erysichthon. To the second point, the reason that indigenous communities seem more “with it” is partly due to the fact that they have been under proselytizing imperialist threats within the past 500 years of well-documented, printing-press-enhanced history (we see a lot of long-term, tenacious resistance against evangelism in a lot of cultures that use writing in the context of their resilience strategies, even when those cultures have a strong oral component), although I do agree that another enormous component is that the land management practices used in the indigenous Americas before settler-colonialism were brilliant and genius. The rest of the world can learn a lot from those techniques — as long as the Native cultures that created them are properly attributed with the respect they are owed for what they have invented. But there’s no reason to exoticize any of it! I mean, we don’t exoticize the invention of movable type by Bi Sheng. Give people credit in a culturally appropriate and (depending on context) reparative way — don’t develop exoticizing headcanons.
There is no fixing any of this unless we approach repair from a theurgic mode and wake up to the sacred. And, to that point, Lent would do well to actually acknowledge that the Earth is a Goddess, not just our mother in an abstract sense. I mean, it’s kinda odd that he doesn’t, given that Taoism also has many Gods and spirits, including the Goddess Queen of the Earth. It’s almost like he wants to pull some sort of abstract, conceptual-consciousness Taoism out of the actual living tradition of Taoism.
The rest of this review focuses more on why I gave the book three stars.
Before I get started, I want to point to the danger of one of the things Lent said — that readers, in order to understand reality and be properly embodied, would have to concede all points to him because he was correct, with the implication that those who were holdouts just didn’t get it or had some kind of bias against truth. This man needs Parmenides and the Parmenides; or, in the words of the elevator operator in the SNL David Pumpkins sketch, there are 100 floors, and not all of them are gonna be winners.
Speaking as a (nonacademic) Platonist, I have some concerns about the framing and disagreements with the way he was presenting this material. Obviously, from my perspective, Lent’s argument that all consciousness is emergent is the exact opposite of the Platonic system; we have a top-down causal system where everything begins at the One, most expertly explained by Proclus in his Elements of Theology. I appreciated how, eventually, Lent started to come out swinging against evangelistic monotheisms and their world-denying doctrines, as they have done a lot of damage, but he fundamentally misunderstands Platonism and decided to include Platonism in that out-of-control train. It is true that an appropriation of Platonism has been used in Christian and other monotheistic religions to justify a mind-body dualism and the exploitation of the world, but the Platonic system itself is much more complicated. There is a reason why Christian Platonists love Plotinus so much. Plotinus is the Platonist most well-known for a negative view of matter (although that itself may be a misinterpretation of what he meant), and there is a reason why Christian theologians really don’t like the Platonists who came after Plotinus, as Platonism moved into a more integrated mode through Iamblichus, and despite having a lot of respect for Plotinus and calling him divine as a marker of his important, divinely-inspired insights, Platonists who picked up the torch after him do disagree with some of his interpretations. It’s also easy to take Plotinus because, unlike Plato, Proclus, Iamblichus, and others, Plotinus tends to speak more vaguely about the divine (the Gods). I think Lent was really fighting to find a villain among everything produced in the Mediterranean and Near East (except, somehow, Lent loves Aristotle, which was really surprising because Aristotle was not “with it” on a lot of things), and Plato is convenient because almost nobody reads him properly nowadays. There were occasions when Lent was contrasting Platonism with Taoism when I was thinking, “Wait, don’t we think that way, too, about this? Where is he getting his information? Is he saying that, as a Platonist, I should dislike Taoism?” I feel cheated because there are actual differences between the philosophical schools; using a distorted straw-man doesn’t help us compare and contrast anything.
The two keys to a proper understanding of the mainstream Platonic position on this are rooted in the concept that there are Gods. In the Timaeus, we learn that the physical universe is a divine agalma (a statue of worship) of the Gods and a Goddess in her own right; in the Phaedrus, we learn that the Gods are constantly at banquet, giving without cease to one another. The ideal image of the world is a world of love, charity, and compassion; through their goodness, they produce the world and all of the beauty within it without even trying. (Evil is a parasitic interference pattern that comes from what happens when the intelligible gets “flattened” or “stretched” into space and time and clumped into matter.) Our soul itself, while often interpreted in a dualistic mode, is a much more complicated system — we call souls that embody in incarnational cycles “partial/individual souls” (us), which have a lasting, immortal component (often called the rational soul, but in practice, this can be likened to the puruṣa in Yogic philosophy) and that put on garments in descent (there are many of these), the most obvious being the emotional soul (which corresponds to the harmony states that Lent discusses at length) and the appetitive soul (which is the seat of desire, be it for sex or an iPhone). These lower souls are not immortal and rely a lot on the actual conditions of the body, including its species and genes/nurture. A well-ordered soul is one that learns how to “ride” properly on emotion and appetition while embodied, which involves applying some level of limit to appetition (because out-of-control appetition leads to tyranny, greed, and addiction) and emotion (out-of-control emotion is usually maladaptive). The “conceptual consciousness” that Lent is discussing so negatively all of the time does not straightforwardly correspond to the rational soul, as the highest cognition the partial/individual soul is capable of (intuitive reasoning) is a certain mode of insight. We know this from the Divided Line in the Republic (Intuitive, Mathematical | Opinative, Fantastical). Similarly, the concept of the individual soul does not straightforwardly lead to the pathologized concept of the individual that Lent discusses. Souls that incarnate have some level of choice of lives based on the constraints of what is possible for them, and souls that learn how to cultivate justice through correct actions towards others are going to have a better lives-paths than those who behave badly towards others. Furthermore, each of us is linked to a specific God, so in a certain way, we are each an expression of that God’s activity in the world, according to varying levels of ordered coherence. What our current cultural mode does is prioritize an unrestrained appetitive soul and an inflamed emotional soul, which is intrinsically out of balance/order. Lent mentions Buddhist bodhisattvas at one point, and while there are philosophical differences between Buddhism and Platonism, being coherently-ordered inherently leads to prosocial and compassionate behavior in both traditions.
The Platonic way of interpreting the indigenous harvesting and hunting practices that Lent discusses is also much more integrated, and it avoids straying into the “Noble Savage” trope that Lent sometimes engages in. To the first point, Lent seems to believe that these cultural phenomena are emergent, but these cultural phenomena are expressions of a people’s contact with the numinous, be they Gods or land spirits or ancestors or other divine persons. Giving ritual offerings before fishing for salmon is a theurgic activity that places what is done during the fishing experience in a divine mode, and these rituals ultimately come from the Gods and spirits, transmitted to human communities through divinely-inspired progenitors (that intuitive level of the Divided Line is important here). As Europe, North Africa, and the Near East were Christianized, sacred groves were cut down because the Gods and spirits worshipped within them were demonized, and they were occasionally replaced by churches or saint-worship sites when the locals felt a certain kind of way about it. We can directly trace the desacralization in recent memory to what started in the 300s CE in the Mediterranean! A spiritual system that does not view the universe as a living agalma or a being of respect and that performs predatory or violence-driven proselytization is always followed by heartbreaking loss as it desacralizes what is around it. Just look at the myth of Erysichthon. To the second point, the reason that indigenous communities seem more “with it” is partly due to the fact that they have been under proselytizing imperialist threats within the past 500 years of well-documented, printing-press-enhanced history (we see a lot of long-term, tenacious resistance against evangelism in a lot of cultures that use writing in the context of their resilience strategies, even when those cultures have a strong oral component), although I do agree that another enormous component is that the land management practices used in the indigenous Americas before settler-colonialism were brilliant and genius. The rest of the world can learn a lot from those techniques — as long as the Native cultures that created them are properly attributed with the respect they are owed for what they have invented. But there’s no reason to exoticize any of it! I mean, we don’t exoticize the invention of movable type by Bi Sheng. Give people credit in a culturally appropriate and (depending on context) reparative way — don’t develop exoticizing headcanons.
There is no fixing any of this unless we approach repair from a theurgic mode and wake up to the sacred. And, to that point, Lent would do well to actually acknowledge that the Earth is a Goddess, not just our mother in an abstract sense. I mean, it’s kinda odd that he doesn’t, given that Taoism also has many Gods and spirits, including the Goddess Queen of the Earth. It’s almost like he wants to pull some sort of abstract, conceptual-consciousness Taoism out of the actual living tradition of Taoism.
August 18, 2021
Does an excellent job of bringing together western and eastern philosophies to examine the present challenges facing the world. Being an ecologist it is easy for me to connect with the portion of Lent's argument for bringing science into his discussion with philosophy and social economics. His approach is extremely broad, but necessary, to really appreciate how we have arrived here.
At some points in the book, particularly the last chapters, it might be received as a bit preachy. But these chapters are necessary to understand Lent's suggestions for the future. He is not just railing against corporations and consumerism, he is bravely putting forth necessary revisions to our world view that might get us out of the current socio-economic and climatic mess.
At some points in the book, particularly the last chapters, it might be received as a bit preachy. But these chapters are necessary to understand Lent's suggestions for the future. He is not just railing against corporations and consumerism, he is bravely putting forth necessary revisions to our world view that might get us out of the current socio-economic and climatic mess.
December 5, 2021
Superlative treatise on integrating ancient and Indigenous wisdom into a transformative worldview -- precisely what's needed to deal with today's existential crises. Lent makes his case in an accessible discussion with this exhaustively detailed (and notated) text. His argument is sound and his supporting data varied and deep. Modern science seems to support the wisdom espoused by Eastern thinkers (Taosim, Buddhism, New Confucianism, et al.), hundreds of years ago that dualism (the mind/body split, man vs. nature) is a flawed ideology and instead we should rediscover our integrated, systems view in the cosmos. Highly recommended.
June 4, 2022
This was disappointing for me. I liked The Patterning Instinct and this book seemed like it had the potential to take those ideas further. Unfortunately it was written in such a simplistic consumer friendly way that I found it off putting. There just wasn’t anything new or particularly engaging about this book.
June 27, 2024
I’m 11% through and frankly it’s the first time I actively dislike and disagree with the book to the extend it becomes impossible to read on.
The author attempts to argue with the Enlightenment ideas, makes some bold statements but the supportive evidence comes across as trying to fit facts to a narrative
The author attempts to argue with the Enlightenment ideas, makes some bold statements but the supportive evidence comes across as trying to fit facts to a narrative
January 19, 2024
Not AS good as The Patterning Instinct but serves as a extremely suitable thought-continuation sequel. Rather than fundamentally up-ending my entire conception of what life, society, and the world even IS like TPI did, this made me feel a homey, welcome feeling for inhabiting that world. Very useful, but not as much my personal preference as TPI, but I doubt many other books in all of human creation can affect me as deeply as that first one.
When I strip away my hopeful expectations of being blown away with a new worldview coming down from the heavens to define the rest of my entire life that TPI set-up with it's amazing quality... Web of Meaning is just as good. It's just not as 'surprising' and 'novel', but that's the fate of all works that you seek out based on an original one catching your interest. Not the fault of the author, just our brain chemistry.
This book DID make me feel a little more sane, being forced to live on the same planet as the metaphorical 'angry, belligerent uncle' characters this book utilizes, which is a triumph in it's own right!
When I strip away my hopeful expectations of being blown away with a new worldview coming down from the heavens to define the rest of my entire life that TPI set-up with it's amazing quality... Web of Meaning is just as good. It's just not as 'surprising' and 'novel', but that's the fate of all works that you seek out based on an original one catching your interest. Not the fault of the author, just our brain chemistry.
This book DID make me feel a little more sane, being forced to live on the same planet as the metaphorical 'angry, belligerent uncle' characters this book utilizes, which is a triumph in it's own right!
February 9, 2022
Wow I never expected such a thorough and clear argument against reductionism and how this idea—and it’s just that an idea or perspective on the world, not a fact—has permeated the way we live to the detriment of all. He offers an alternative to think not of the particle or anything as fundamental building block of nature but the network because existence of anything, us or particles, is relative. We need connection to derive meaning. These aren’t new ideas but ancient ones as he brings in eastern and indigenous philosophies and compares them to foundations of western thought. Simply a brilliantly written and perspective altering work that I will need to revisit soon. So much here to unpack and study and will certainly be the top book I read this year.
July 10, 2024
Read this with my partner and it was a very welcome and positive experience- both our book club and the book itself. Lent invites us to see how deeply interconnected and part of nature we truly are- Is our idea of ourselves truly us? Our role to protect and nourish all life is elucidated in both an approachable and inspiring way. I don't agree with everything said in this work, but I find the overall experience of engaging with it to be very beneficial. I'd recommend this to anyone who's interested. Be prepared to have your world changed, though in a way that welcomes you to find solace in each other, all of the world, and the cosmos at large. You're it!
July 9, 2024
I read this for my book club with Michael, and it was a journey! Parts of it were a bit dubiously mystical, but for the most part, I think Lent did a great job integrating Eastern philosophy with contemporary science. His ultimate message of living more interconnected with each other, animals, and our environment is something I completely agree with. There were many moments of somewhat mind-boggling phenomena that are hard to wrap your head around, but it ultimately speaks to the astonishing interconnectedness of our universe. I will definitely read more on this subject!
April 15, 2022
This is my Bible now 🌍🌈☮️
June 5, 2024
Didn’t touch much on anything except for Chinese philosophy and mainly was just a collection of scientific results. Was disappointed that it didn’t connect the scientific and spiritual more.
July 15, 2024
Denna bok öppnade verkligen mina ögon och förändrade till viss del hela min världsbild. Boken känns som ett svar på det som har känns fel och meningslöst i världen, därför kändes det som en lättnad (att få svar på frågor jag inte visste att jag hade).
January 18, 2022
An incredible weaving together of science and traditional Eastern and Indigenous philosophies to put forth a new worldview and story for ourselves as humans that can lead us out of the crises we’re currently in. It’s a bit repetitive in places, but the overall message is so important; should be read by everyone.
August 9, 2024
This was very meaningful to me since I have been seeing the connections in all things.
January 27, 2022
This is one of the best book I have ever read in this genre and I read a lot! Jeremy waves together ancient and resent wisdom, and show us the flaws in our current world view.
He shows us a way to change this. A path of integration, recognizing our deep interconnectedness, and leading toward a new ecological civilization. I definitely know that I want to be part of this ecological civilization. A beautiful future where all humans can thrive. This book is a treasury.
I had a beautiful connecting conversation with Jeremy on my podcast Inside Ideas where we talked about this book and his earlier book Patterns of Meaning. He also mentioned that he is working on book number 3 writing about ecological civilization.
“The future is not like some spectator sport. It’s not something that is happening ‘out there’. The future is actually something that we are co-creating. It is a process that each of us is part of. And, even more than that, the future that we want is something that we can live into every day of our lives. “ Jeremy Lent, episode 152, you can listen to it here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5hSd...
Or check out the links below:
https://medium.com/inside-ideas/jerem...
https://www.innovatorsmag.com/why-an-...
He shows us a way to change this. A path of integration, recognizing our deep interconnectedness, and leading toward a new ecological civilization. I definitely know that I want to be part of this ecological civilization. A beautiful future where all humans can thrive. This book is a treasury.
I had a beautiful connecting conversation with Jeremy on my podcast Inside Ideas where we talked about this book and his earlier book Patterns of Meaning. He also mentioned that he is working on book number 3 writing about ecological civilization.
“The future is not like some spectator sport. It’s not something that is happening ‘out there’. The future is actually something that we are co-creating. It is a process that each of us is part of. And, even more than that, the future that we want is something that we can live into every day of our lives. “ Jeremy Lent, episode 152, you can listen to it here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5hSd...
Or check out the links below:
https://medium.com/inside-ideas/jerem...
https://www.innovatorsmag.com/why-an-...
September 27, 2022
A journalist plays the role of the judge when it comes to science.
Historian Ian Morris said:
“The problem is, if you are a serious scholar, you know that all other serious scholars disagree about absolutely everything… you just don’t know the kind of knife fights that go on in the long grass over these tiny little details. If you don’t at least understand how the arguments have been waged, you’re not in a position to say, “OK, here I’ve got three world-famous experts disagreeing about X... Which am I going to believe? Whose story is more plausible?” You’re just not in a position to judge that, unless you at least know how the arguments get waged.”
Returning to this book, how did Lent decide which studies are “true”? Was he biased to start with?
Studies are presented as facts, some of which are debated or proven wrong! I did the same thing the author did in the book :)
I was excited to read this book. A friend recommended it after a long discussion about the differences between easter and western philosophy.
I meditate, study Buddhism, the concepts of nondualism, and Li, read work of Sapolsky, Kahneman, and Dawkins, and I have Damasio next on the list… and I felt richer with every one of those.
But I have a problem when people try to make things up and find a connection between easter philosophy and “modern science” by cherry-picking. At the same time making a caricature of “western science”…
Red flags early on:
The author tries to make a point about self-control and uses “The marshmallow test” study to confirm it. Then again, brings another study, “the hungry judge” to make another point.
If in 2021, someone publishes a book that claims to be scientific and presents those 2 studies as facts, there's a problem. The marshmallow test is highly debated, and newer studies dismiss the original findings. I ask myself what other “facts” in the book could be misrepresented or ignored, or simply made up…
A logical fallacy is foundational to the book: Competition and selfish genes are not the norms, but cooperation. And provides “evidence”.
Symbiosis proves there is cooperation, true. But it does not disprove competition, what Lent is trying to show. As a matter of fact, it enforces the idea that competition exists. Two organisms work together to get better results. But they compete with other organisms, maybe other species altogether, for water, nutrients, light... If 2 people cooperate, they do it to get better results.
So the idea of following's own interests and competition is not rebuked but reinforced.
He strawmans the idea of no free will, by exaggerating the connection between free will and the “I”. The research should be dismissed because of the researcher’s ignorance and dualistic view of the world. There is no "I" to start with...
Well, Sapolsky who is positively referenced in the book, is about to publish a book called: ”Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will”. He talked extensively about the lack of free will as we see it.
Unfortunately, this is book is scientism, not science. As much as I would like the world to be better than it is now, pretending that we have “the answers” will not help. I agree there's a capitalist religion ruling the world and taking it toward ecological and climate disasters. But replacing it with another religion, presented as science, is not the way to go.
Historian Ian Morris said:
“The problem is, if you are a serious scholar, you know that all other serious scholars disagree about absolutely everything… you just don’t know the kind of knife fights that go on in the long grass over these tiny little details. If you don’t at least understand how the arguments have been waged, you’re not in a position to say, “OK, here I’ve got three world-famous experts disagreeing about X... Which am I going to believe? Whose story is more plausible?” You’re just not in a position to judge that, unless you at least know how the arguments get waged.”
Returning to this book, how did Lent decide which studies are “true”? Was he biased to start with?
Studies are presented as facts, some of which are debated or proven wrong! I did the same thing the author did in the book :)
I was excited to read this book. A friend recommended it after a long discussion about the differences between easter and western philosophy.
I meditate, study Buddhism, the concepts of nondualism, and Li, read work of Sapolsky, Kahneman, and Dawkins, and I have Damasio next on the list… and I felt richer with every one of those.
But I have a problem when people try to make things up and find a connection between easter philosophy and “modern science” by cherry-picking. At the same time making a caricature of “western science”…
Red flags early on:
The author tries to make a point about self-control and uses “The marshmallow test” study to confirm it. Then again, brings another study, “the hungry judge” to make another point.
If in 2021, someone publishes a book that claims to be scientific and presents those 2 studies as facts, there's a problem. The marshmallow test is highly debated, and newer studies dismiss the original findings. I ask myself what other “facts” in the book could be misrepresented or ignored, or simply made up…
A logical fallacy is foundational to the book: Competition and selfish genes are not the norms, but cooperation. And provides “evidence”.
Symbiosis proves there is cooperation, true. But it does not disprove competition, what Lent is trying to show. As a matter of fact, it enforces the idea that competition exists. Two organisms work together to get better results. But they compete with other organisms, maybe other species altogether, for water, nutrients, light... If 2 people cooperate, they do it to get better results.
So the idea of following's own interests and competition is not rebuked but reinforced.
He strawmans the idea of no free will, by exaggerating the connection between free will and the “I”. The research should be dismissed because of the researcher’s ignorance and dualistic view of the world. There is no "I" to start with...
Well, Sapolsky who is positively referenced in the book, is about to publish a book called: ”Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will”. He talked extensively about the lack of free will as we see it.
Unfortunately, this is book is scientism, not science. As much as I would like the world to be better than it is now, pretending that we have “the answers” will not help. I agree there's a capitalist religion ruling the world and taking it toward ecological and climate disasters. But replacing it with another religion, presented as science, is not the way to go.
Read
September 18, 2022This is not an easy read, though the argument Jeremy Lent makes is clearly presented.
Lent sets out to change the way you view the world. The whole book is aimed at showing that the current dominant worldview is deeply flawed. He calls this view "the Uncle Bob speech", which boils down to: "Humans are selfish individuals. All creatures are selfish - in fact, selfish genes are the driving force of evolution. Nature is just a very complex machine, and human ingenuity has, for the most part, figured out how it works. The modern world is the spectacular result of technology enabled by the market forces of capitalism, and in spite of occasional setbacks, it's continually improving. There may be problems, such as global poverty or climate change, but technology, powered by the market, will solve them - just as it always has in the past."
The rest of the book aims to discard this worldview and exchange it with one based on connection. So in an organizational context, replacing Taylor with Senge. A group of white males came up with the mechanistic worldview in the seventeenth century and it provided the basis for the industrial revolution. But it's time has now run out. Lent shows how existential questions (commercial success, followed by personal bereavement) and man's search for meaning are better served by an integrated worldview.
The first question he deals with is: Who am I? He contrasts wu-wei (going with the flow of its nature) with yu-wei (goal-oriented). Cook Ding starts learning goal-orientedly, to finally be able to carve an ox in flow. "Somehow, something happened to humanity that caused us to lose wu-we most of the time. Instead, our lives are filled with effort. We find ourselves working hard, pushing against resistance in one form or another." Humans used to live more harmoniously with nature, but our unique human cognition, leading to language and technology and other good things, also engendered alienation from nature. Animate consciousness (Self) became separated from, and sometimes opposed to conceptual consciousness (I). Unique moment-to-moment experiences (qualia), always in the present become swamped by a driving mind (and shame, guilt and pride). The I is capable of mental time travel and constructing the 'I' as an abstraction that does not objectively exist, like a bird's flight path or a stellar constellation. More complex problems are beyond the I and best left to the self. 'Tiren' - embodied knowing has no European counterpart. 'For a person in wu-wel, the mind is embodied and the body is mindful; the two systems hot and cold, fast and slow are completely integrated. The result is an intelligent spontaneity that is perfectly calibrated to the environment (Slingerland)".
Part Two is about the question: 'where am I?' and starts of with the paradox of Theseus' ship - if it is completely renewed, is it still Theseus' ship? As with a river or a person. Heraclitus, the philosopher of flux - 'you can never step in the same river twice'. The rest of the chapter is about complex systems, and humans being part of them. The way in which things are connected is more relevant than the thing itself. I Ching - the book of changes. Qi = life energy, comprised of yin (soft, wet, dark, receptive) and yang (hard, dry, light activity). Li is the ever-moving, ever-present set of patterns that flow through everything. These ideas, and the idea of Tao permeated Eastern thought over centuries. In the Christian West, the mind was separated from the body - nature reduced to a machine and as for God, there was 'no need of that hypothesis' (LaPlace). (BTW As a Christian I felt that the Paulinian divide between mind and body has indeed created many problems. But there is as much ancient wisdom in the Bible as there is Greek thinking. I'd be interested how Lent would read Dominion.) Weinberg stated the reductionist position 'with dreadful clarity': 'the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless'. 'Like other fundementalist creeds, ontological reductionism shuts complexity out of its reckoning', Lent concludes. 'What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning'. Complex systems tend to be self-organized, and in a flux-balance (fluctuate within parameters, like waves on a beach). Natural attractors converge systems towards their natural end. Another characteristic are fractal patterns and emergence: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Paradigm shifts occur at times. So I exist in a fractally connected, selforganized universe.
Part three starts with Aristotle disagreeing with Plato - living beings act according to their own nature, rather than some external ideal. Lord Kelvin in the nineteenth century formulated the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that all things tend to entropy. In 1944 Schrödinger found a loophole, called life. (Interestingly enough, Cesar Hidalgo in his 'Why Information grows' makes the same claim for information - so is Information Life?)
Blind and deaf Helen Keller, who had no language until she was seven is one of the few humans who can tell the story of what it was like to learn language. Human consciousness can be seen as a self-organized natural process, not some kind of absolute. Starlings navigate on just a few rules: 'don't get too close to your neighbours, hold the same direction as the one next to you and avoid becoming isolated'. This works for 'memes' as well on the internet. There are thus feedback loops to amplify actions and negative feedback once the amplification is 'loud' enough. Tononi applies this to thinking - Integrated Information Theory: consciousness is the 'more' in the sum of the parts. Archetypes are deep cultural attractors. Our own nature and culture are guided by the same principles as complex, self-organized systems.
Having placed us firmly within nature and part of the same complex, self-adapting systems - Lent then asks: how should we live? More integrated is the short answer. The WHO defined health as a state of 'physical, mental and social well-being' rather than just the absence of disease or infirmity. Health, like consciousness is a natural attractor. Frankl: 'someone who knows the 'why' for his existence, will be able to bear almost any how'. Lent: 'The relationship between I and self doesn't have to be one of hostility, but can be more like a dance set to the music of life.' We exist in a holarchy, individuals need a healthy society to flourish (Fractal flourishing). Morality is a function of our identity and formed by our society. integrated values would be based on the principle of interconnectedness. Natures splendor has shrunk because of the ideology of human supremacy.
The fifth part of the book starts with the Jewel Net of Indra, everything connected opposed to Catch-22 ('I'd be a fool to act any other way'), the anthem of individuality. Meaning is a function of connectivity - mystic experiences (like a human on magic mushrooms) are massively interconnected. Love is the realization of connectedness. Fractal flourishing increases life.
Finally: Where are we going? Being a tiny part of a whole can give rise to feelings of meaninglessness. But in fact - illustrated by the rice pile - however inconsequential our own actions might appear in relation to the massive forces driving the world their potential resonance goes beyond our imagining. There is an awesome responsibility that goes with this empowerment. To weave your own sacred and precious, unique strand.
Lent sets out to change the way you view the world. The whole book is aimed at showing that the current dominant worldview is deeply flawed. He calls this view "the Uncle Bob speech", which boils down to: "Humans are selfish individuals. All creatures are selfish - in fact, selfish genes are the driving force of evolution. Nature is just a very complex machine, and human ingenuity has, for the most part, figured out how it works. The modern world is the spectacular result of technology enabled by the market forces of capitalism, and in spite of occasional setbacks, it's continually improving. There may be problems, such as global poverty or climate change, but technology, powered by the market, will solve them - just as it always has in the past."
The rest of the book aims to discard this worldview and exchange it with one based on connection. So in an organizational context, replacing Taylor with Senge. A group of white males came up with the mechanistic worldview in the seventeenth century and it provided the basis for the industrial revolution. But it's time has now run out. Lent shows how existential questions (commercial success, followed by personal bereavement) and man's search for meaning are better served by an integrated worldview.
The first question he deals with is: Who am I? He contrasts wu-wei (going with the flow of its nature) with yu-wei (goal-oriented). Cook Ding starts learning goal-orientedly, to finally be able to carve an ox in flow. "Somehow, something happened to humanity that caused us to lose wu-we most of the time. Instead, our lives are filled with effort. We find ourselves working hard, pushing against resistance in one form or another." Humans used to live more harmoniously with nature, but our unique human cognition, leading to language and technology and other good things, also engendered alienation from nature. Animate consciousness (Self) became separated from, and sometimes opposed to conceptual consciousness (I). Unique moment-to-moment experiences (qualia), always in the present become swamped by a driving mind (and shame, guilt and pride). The I is capable of mental time travel and constructing the 'I' as an abstraction that does not objectively exist, like a bird's flight path or a stellar constellation. More complex problems are beyond the I and best left to the self. 'Tiren' - embodied knowing has no European counterpart. 'For a person in wu-wel, the mind is embodied and the body is mindful; the two systems hot and cold, fast and slow are completely integrated. The result is an intelligent spontaneity that is perfectly calibrated to the environment (Slingerland)".
Part Two is about the question: 'where am I?' and starts of with the paradox of Theseus' ship - if it is completely renewed, is it still Theseus' ship? As with a river or a person. Heraclitus, the philosopher of flux - 'you can never step in the same river twice'. The rest of the chapter is about complex systems, and humans being part of them. The way in which things are connected is more relevant than the thing itself. I Ching - the book of changes. Qi = life energy, comprised of yin (soft, wet, dark, receptive) and yang (hard, dry, light activity). Li is the ever-moving, ever-present set of patterns that flow through everything. These ideas, and the idea of Tao permeated Eastern thought over centuries. In the Christian West, the mind was separated from the body - nature reduced to a machine and as for God, there was 'no need of that hypothesis' (LaPlace). (BTW As a Christian I felt that the Paulinian divide between mind and body has indeed created many problems. But there is as much ancient wisdom in the Bible as there is Greek thinking. I'd be interested how Lent would read Dominion.) Weinberg stated the reductionist position 'with dreadful clarity': 'the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless'. 'Like other fundementalist creeds, ontological reductionism shuts complexity out of its reckoning', Lent concludes. 'What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning'. Complex systems tend to be self-organized, and in a flux-balance (fluctuate within parameters, like waves on a beach). Natural attractors converge systems towards their natural end. Another characteristic are fractal patterns and emergence: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Paradigm shifts occur at times. So I exist in a fractally connected, selforganized universe.
Part three starts with Aristotle disagreeing with Plato - living beings act according to their own nature, rather than some external ideal. Lord Kelvin in the nineteenth century formulated the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that all things tend to entropy. In 1944 Schrödinger found a loophole, called life. (Interestingly enough, Cesar Hidalgo in his 'Why Information grows' makes the same claim for information - so is Information Life?)
Blind and deaf Helen Keller, who had no language until she was seven is one of the few humans who can tell the story of what it was like to learn language. Human consciousness can be seen as a self-organized natural process, not some kind of absolute. Starlings navigate on just a few rules: 'don't get too close to your neighbours, hold the same direction as the one next to you and avoid becoming isolated'. This works for 'memes' as well on the internet. There are thus feedback loops to amplify actions and negative feedback once the amplification is 'loud' enough. Tononi applies this to thinking - Integrated Information Theory: consciousness is the 'more' in the sum of the parts. Archetypes are deep cultural attractors. Our own nature and culture are guided by the same principles as complex, self-organized systems.
Having placed us firmly within nature and part of the same complex, self-adapting systems - Lent then asks: how should we live? More integrated is the short answer. The WHO defined health as a state of 'physical, mental and social well-being' rather than just the absence of disease or infirmity. Health, like consciousness is a natural attractor. Frankl: 'someone who knows the 'why' for his existence, will be able to bear almost any how'. Lent: 'The relationship between I and self doesn't have to be one of hostility, but can be more like a dance set to the music of life.' We exist in a holarchy, individuals need a healthy society to flourish (Fractal flourishing). Morality is a function of our identity and formed by our society. integrated values would be based on the principle of interconnectedness. Natures splendor has shrunk because of the ideology of human supremacy.
The fifth part of the book starts with the Jewel Net of Indra, everything connected opposed to Catch-22 ('I'd be a fool to act any other way'), the anthem of individuality. Meaning is a function of connectivity - mystic experiences (like a human on magic mushrooms) are massively interconnected. Love is the realization of connectedness. Fractal flourishing increases life.
Finally: Where are we going? Being a tiny part of a whole can give rise to feelings of meaninglessness. But in fact - illustrated by the rice pile - however inconsequential our own actions might appear in relation to the massive forces driving the world their potential resonance goes beyond our imagining. There is an awesome responsibility that goes with this empowerment. To weave your own sacred and precious, unique strand.
December 27, 2021
If you are concerned, as you should be, with the future, read this book and learn what we have to do, what we all have to do to create an avalanche of change for the better. A must read that puts it all together.
January 23, 2023
One of the best, most sensible and most hopeful books I have read about the current dominant worldview (reductionist, individualist, capitalist) and the increasingly robust and convincing holistic/systemic alternatives. Highly recommended.
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