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Andrew's Reviews > The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find our Place in the Universe

The Web of Meaning by Jeremy Lent
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it was amazing
bookshelves: on-the-path

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.
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January 6, 2022 – Started Reading
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January 10, 2022 – Shelved as: on-the-path
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