Brett, thank you for this very interesting article!
I am interested in the work of Vervaeke, Peterson, McGilchrist and others, and I appreciate very much how you have connected the dots between their works for me.
Reflecting on your article, it seems to me that being at the edge of chaos is also much related to Nassim Taleb´s work on antifragility. Taleb suggests, in my own words, that systems that are antifragile should combine and perhaps balance efficiency and resilience. In today´s world we focus, in his view, too much on the efficiency thereby largely ignoring the resilience part. Now I am thinking about it, could it be that the political spectrum (progressive - conservative but also change vs. tradition) reflect the same kind of opponent processing, so that -if we balance these two parts- we do the best relevance realization for society as a whole? This would mean that free speech is indispensible but currently unfortunately under threat. Curious about your thoughts on this.
Similarly, McGilchrist empasizes that, in Western societies, we rely too much on the LHS of the brain and too little on the the RHS. As a consequence, we (again) seem not able to do the best possible relevance realization, given that the RHS is crucial for checking whether our «maps of the world» ultimately make sense in the «real» world.
Finally, I wanted to ask you whether (some) gender differences may reflect opponent processes that are beneficial in, for instance, child rearing. I look forward to hearing from you!
Thanks Auke. Yep, I think Taleb is picking up on the same pattern. And I think that his idea that Western culture is too focused on efficiency (which is often neat and orderly) over resilience (which is often messy and chaotic) is very much in alignment with McGilchrist's thesis about the hemispheres. I may write about that at some point. And yes, the proper role for conservatives/progressives IMO is to engage in opponent processing but that has broken down for a variety of reasons. I haven't thought much about sex differences in parenting styles as a form of opponent processing but that's a very cool idea and I suspect that something like that is going on!
This is a mindblowing article on many levels, yet I do think it begs for a deeper look into the role of technology in the future, and how we reconcile our expanding influences with the delicate and complex web of "the ecosystem", as well as the role of art, and its higher potentials to transform our image of ourselves. As a solid starting point, this is one of the greatest things on the internet (Not much competition as far as I am aware) ;)
Is the average person able to accept "the process itself is the goal" or does the Death of God break the average person's brain too much? In "democracies" I'd like to believe the former, but I wonder to what extent Noble Lies, however useful, can or cannot be abandoned in the future. There was a Charles Murray tweet a few months ago I can't find about his thinking there can only ever be six religious traditions on which the world can stand, and that all else rests on sand.
My sense is that, for the average person, abstract ideas are far less important than the narrative, ritual, music, and community that goes along with any functional worldview. The ideas in this article are not necessarily aimed at the average person, but at influencing intellectual culture.
Brett thanks for this very powerful essay! A lot of questions and insights. What I find most impactful is the necessity for the human being to be part of the creative process to find meaning/relevance. This is true!
Thank you Brett for a profoundly insightful essay. I consider myself an aesthetic and philosophical patternist, yet I experience a paradoxical surge of creativity in my mind’s increased chaos at 2:00 a.m. Your interweaving and proposals provide a crèche of creative possibility!
Wow! What a delight to have someone recognize three of my favorite books in the same paragraph —Wright, Turchin and Stewart. I have never even read anyone else who mentioned Stewart's great book before.
Two suggestions. First, I am not sure that I would agree that either biological or cultural evolution "have a direction." Yes, there is a huge payoff to solving the dilemma of cooperation, but the vast majority of species never come close to solving it, and most societies do not grow or increase in complexity. Indeed., I would argue that 99.9% of all species and most societies have taken a direction that led to extinction. The breakthroughs to nucleated cells or multicellularity or social insect colonies are rare and special with, in some cases, hundreds of millions of years between breakthroughs. Most forager tribes didn’t become states, most states didn’t become nations, and so on.
Now it may be true that higher levels of coordination are possible, and fruitful in competitive environments. But saying that is the direction of evolution is like saying the direction of playing football is winning the Super Bowl. True in one sense, but misleading too, as most teams lose and most wanna-be players never even get on the field.
The second push back is that Wright's preferred term of "non-zero sumness" is super awkward and downright clunky. I would suggest something more elegant such as "coordination" which includes cooperation, altruism, complex interaction and even constructive competition.
Hope you don’t mind a few minor suggestions to a brilliant article.
"...the vast majority of species never come close to solving it, and most societies do not grow or increase in complexity. Indeed., I would argue that 99.9% of all species and most societies have taken a direction that led to extinction. The breakthroughs to nucleated cells or multicellularity or social insect colonies are rare and special with, in some cases, hundreds of millions of years between breakthroughs. Most forager tribes didn’t become states, most states didn’t become nations, and so on."
All of what you said there is obviously true and common knowledge. Given that, do you think you might have misunderstood what is meant by "direction"?
Coordination does sound more elegant but it seems to imply that the process is intentional when most of the time it's not.
I don’t think I misunderstand what is meant by "direction" when used conventionally. If a million boats float out to sea and one and only one of them lands on Easter Island, it is not conventional in any way to say that the general direction of the current is toward Easter Island, even though if enough set out eventually one is bound to hit it. Food for thought?
Good point on Coordination. It can imply intentionality. Still, I have always cringed at non-zero sum.
I have read both and have always been extremely impressed with (and influenced by) Wright's book. I understand that something which is extremely rare but which is more stable or which replicates faster can come to dominate a population over time. However, this is a very distinct and conventionally counterintuitive type of direction. It is a direction which implies most attempts fail, so we need lots of attempts. A system of trial and error might be said to have a direction toward success, but we need to remember we are the trials, not the system.
The universe started off with only simple entities. Now it has complex entities (and more complex entities are emerging at an ever faster rate). I call that a direction, regardless of the process involved. If we disagree about that it's probably more semantic than substantial.
Amazing, thank you! Helps explain and articulate much of the way I see the world, and expands on it beautifully too.
CG Jung say Christ was a symbol of the self. A symbol - rather that a sign, which only points - meaning we could say Christ is a meta pattern that we ourselves can participate in in order to co-create the world. Which you've kind of touched on anyway.
Well I tried posting once before but I hadn't created an account yet, and so it didn't appear, and so I'm trying again, much more abbreviated this time. Excellent synthesis of highly relevant stuff! Just a couple of questions for ya: how can something capable of fine-tuning the universe over 200 different parameters, to multiple decimal points, be nothing more than some sort of groping creative force with no foresight into what it is trying to produce? Assuming that an infinite multiverse in which we just happen to be alive because our universe luckily fine-tuned itself accidentally, is an inadequate explanation? McGilchrist points approvingly, in The Matter with Things, to fine-tuning as pointing to something beyond the mechanical underlying and permeating the world, but insists he is not endorsing a designing God. Alternatively, if there is a designing God, why not fine-tune away at least SOME of the fiendish, diabolical parasitism and red tooth and claws rife throughout nature, as well some of the worst avoidable (by a desingning God) human tragedy and waste? The need for "opponent processors" and such doesn't cut it as an explanation. I was on a zoom conference devoted to the last chapter on the Sacred a few months ago, but was unable to pose any questions, so I'm hoping you can just dash off an answer in your spare time, not too much to hope for, is it? Lol.
Thanks Keith. The best answer I’ve seen to your question about fine-tunibg can be found in Lee Smollin’s The Life of the Cosmos. It’s a speculative and weird answer, but still the best I’ve come across.
You seem to me to be making the assumption that human beings are the most complex type of entity on Earth.
For my part I assume that Gaia (see Tim Lenton's Gaia 2.0 for example) is an entity, given it has been actively regulating the earth system over billions of years, and that the whole universe is also something like an entity (see Thomas Hertog's The Origin of Time), based on Stephen Hawking claiming this to be the case (page 258). If nested communities of cosmic-order entities, which I and many others who have experientially delved deep ontologically seem to agree ('to know even as you are known' is a statement rooted in experience of human being encountering cosmic Being rather than a matter of faith), then the worldview intimations you are reaching for take on quite different parameters.
I further assume you merely claim that humans are the most complex entities because you see no need to treat the currently dominant worldview of scientific materialism as a set of assumptions even though you are setting out to explore intimations of the next worldview.
I want to question this for a couple of reasons.
One is because I have been driven by mystical experiences, to wonder about what a worldview might be that makes sense of my experiences that is also rooted in the scientific method, but not bounded by materialist assumptions that contradict my own and many others experiences over millennia.
The second is that I think unconsciously asserted assumptions about the nature of reality underpin not only what we claim is real and not real, but also what can be real and cannot.
And, to me at least, this tendency matters now in a more significant way than it perhaps ever has previously, given that we are breaching planetary boundaries that are increasingly disrupting the continuity of the earth systems most species rely on. As I can see, at the root of these breaches is our own dominant story about reality and at the root of this story are our own unspoken assumptions.
If you had set out your intimations in the context of the root assumptions they are based on, that would leave room for other sets of assumptions on which other views of reality could reasonably be constructed. And if you are going to speculate about what might be next in terms of worldviews it seems to me that it would be helpful to make the fundamental tenets on which the currently dominant worldview is based as explicit as possible. This will allow room for others to join in who see from more diverse points of view than can be accommodated when you do not make such an effort.
For example, the scientific materialist worldview leads to the assumption that there is no point in considering the possibility of how to practice attuning ourselves to cosmic entities, even though if they exist they will harbor wisdom immeasurably greater than our own. And, in my own direct experience, do.
In my own investigations into the parameters of a worldview that can accommodate my experience of cosmic entities I found it significant that GI Gurdjieff arrived at the claim that Life on Earth has 'her' own purposes for human beings, in a similar way to humans using the wool and flesh of sheep, or sheep feeding on grass.
And that the cultural stories we tell ourselves as human beings about our situation and possibilities may be a form of mass self-hypnosis that we compete to evolve into more and more convincing forms, in ways that keeps us purposefully distracted from attending to our actual situation and cosmic functions.
I only mention these as inferences that arise from a different set of (but in my view more coherent set of) root assumptions.
I get that from the inside of the set of assumptions of scientific materialism these kinds of insights have little or no ground for serious consideration. But then if I asked you for the evidence that tests and proves the hypothesis that cosmic entities do not exist, I think you would need to acknowledge that this is not settled science.
Given how high the stakes are in the struggle to reach towards the outlines of a more adequate worldview I think it makes sense to speculate in ways that make more room for diverse perspectives than you have opted for.
Brett, thank you for this very interesting article!
I am interested in the work of Vervaeke, Peterson, McGilchrist and others, and I appreciate very much how you have connected the dots between their works for me.
Reflecting on your article, it seems to me that being at the edge of chaos is also much related to Nassim Taleb´s work on antifragility. Taleb suggests, in my own words, that systems that are antifragile should combine and perhaps balance efficiency and resilience. In today´s world we focus, in his view, too much on the efficiency thereby largely ignoring the resilience part. Now I am thinking about it, could it be that the political spectrum (progressive - conservative but also change vs. tradition) reflect the same kind of opponent processing, so that -if we balance these two parts- we do the best relevance realization for society as a whole? This would mean that free speech is indispensible but currently unfortunately under threat. Curious about your thoughts on this.
Similarly, McGilchrist empasizes that, in Western societies, we rely too much on the LHS of the brain and too little on the the RHS. As a consequence, we (again) seem not able to do the best possible relevance realization, given that the RHS is crucial for checking whether our «maps of the world» ultimately make sense in the «real» world.
Finally, I wanted to ask you whether (some) gender differences may reflect opponent processes that are beneficial in, for instance, child rearing. I look forward to hearing from you!
Thanks Auke. Yep, I think Taleb is picking up on the same pattern. And I think that his idea that Western culture is too focused on efficiency (which is often neat and orderly) over resilience (which is often messy and chaotic) is very much in alignment with McGilchrist's thesis about the hemispheres. I may write about that at some point. And yes, the proper role for conservatives/progressives IMO is to engage in opponent processing but that has broken down for a variety of reasons. I haven't thought much about sex differences in parenting styles as a form of opponent processing but that's a very cool idea and I suspect that something like that is going on!
Thank you so much Brett for your Swift reply. Keep up the great work; it is so interesting!
I REALLY enjoyed this article and sent it to many people some ~1-1.5 years ago.
This is a mindblowing article on many levels, yet I do think it begs for a deeper look into the role of technology in the future, and how we reconcile our expanding influences with the delicate and complex web of "the ecosystem", as well as the role of art, and its higher potentials to transform our image of ourselves. As a solid starting point, this is one of the greatest things on the internet (Not much competition as far as I am aware) ;)
Is the average person able to accept "the process itself is the goal" or does the Death of God break the average person's brain too much? In "democracies" I'd like to believe the former, but I wonder to what extent Noble Lies, however useful, can or cannot be abandoned in the future. There was a Charles Murray tweet a few months ago I can't find about his thinking there can only ever be six religious traditions on which the world can stand, and that all else rests on sand.
My sense is that, for the average person, abstract ideas are far less important than the narrative, ritual, music, and community that goes along with any functional worldview. The ideas in this article are not necessarily aimed at the average person, but at influencing intellectual culture.
Brett thanks for this very powerful essay! A lot of questions and insights. What I find most impactful is the necessity for the human being to be part of the creative process to find meaning/relevance. This is true!
Thank you Brett for a profoundly insightful essay. I consider myself an aesthetic and philosophical patternist, yet I experience a paradoxical surge of creativity in my mind’s increased chaos at 2:00 a.m. Your interweaving and proposals provide a crèche of creative possibility!
Wow! What a delight to have someone recognize three of my favorite books in the same paragraph —Wright, Turchin and Stewart. I have never even read anyone else who mentioned Stewart's great book before.
Two suggestions. First, I am not sure that I would agree that either biological or cultural evolution "have a direction." Yes, there is a huge payoff to solving the dilemma of cooperation, but the vast majority of species never come close to solving it, and most societies do not grow or increase in complexity. Indeed., I would argue that 99.9% of all species and most societies have taken a direction that led to extinction. The breakthroughs to nucleated cells or multicellularity or social insect colonies are rare and special with, in some cases, hundreds of millions of years between breakthroughs. Most forager tribes didn’t become states, most states didn’t become nations, and so on.
Now it may be true that higher levels of coordination are possible, and fruitful in competitive environments. But saying that is the direction of evolution is like saying the direction of playing football is winning the Super Bowl. True in one sense, but misleading too, as most teams lose and most wanna-be players never even get on the field.
The second push back is that Wright's preferred term of "non-zero sumness" is super awkward and downright clunky. I would suggest something more elegant such as "coordination" which includes cooperation, altruism, complex interaction and even constructive competition.
Hope you don’t mind a few minor suggestions to a brilliant article.
"...the vast majority of species never come close to solving it, and most societies do not grow or increase in complexity. Indeed., I would argue that 99.9% of all species and most societies have taken a direction that led to extinction. The breakthroughs to nucleated cells or multicellularity or social insect colonies are rare and special with, in some cases, hundreds of millions of years between breakthroughs. Most forager tribes didn’t become states, most states didn’t become nations, and so on."
All of what you said there is obviously true and common knowledge. Given that, do you think you might have misunderstood what is meant by "direction"?
Coordination does sound more elegant but it seems to imply that the process is intentional when most of the time it's not.
I don’t think I misunderstand what is meant by "direction" when used conventionally. If a million boats float out to sea and one and only one of them lands on Easter Island, it is not conventional in any way to say that the general direction of the current is toward Easter Island, even though if enough set out eventually one is bound to hit it. Food for thought?
Good point on Coordination. It can imply intentionality. Still, I have always cringed at non-zero sum.
In response to your first point I would point you towards's Azarian's The Romance of Reality or Robert Wright's Nonzero.
I have read both and have always been extremely impressed with (and influenced by) Wright's book. I understand that something which is extremely rare but which is more stable or which replicates faster can come to dominate a population over time. However, this is a very distinct and conventionally counterintuitive type of direction. It is a direction which implies most attempts fail, so we need lots of attempts. A system of trial and error might be said to have a direction toward success, but we need to remember we are the trials, not the system.
The universe started off with only simple entities. Now it has complex entities (and more complex entities are emerging at an ever faster rate). I call that a direction, regardless of the process involved. If we disagree about that it's probably more semantic than substantial.
Amazing, thank you! Helps explain and articulate much of the way I see the world, and expands on it beautifully too.
CG Jung say Christ was a symbol of the self. A symbol - rather that a sign, which only points - meaning we could say Christ is a meta pattern that we ourselves can participate in in order to co-create the world. Which you've kind of touched on anyway.
Thank you!
Hi Brett. Would love to interview you on the metamodern spirituality podcast. Let's talk. :)
Thanks Brendan. You can email me at brett.p.andersen@gmail.com and we can set something up.
Well I tried posting once before but I hadn't created an account yet, and so it didn't appear, and so I'm trying again, much more abbreviated this time. Excellent synthesis of highly relevant stuff! Just a couple of questions for ya: how can something capable of fine-tuning the universe over 200 different parameters, to multiple decimal points, be nothing more than some sort of groping creative force with no foresight into what it is trying to produce? Assuming that an infinite multiverse in which we just happen to be alive because our universe luckily fine-tuned itself accidentally, is an inadequate explanation? McGilchrist points approvingly, in The Matter with Things, to fine-tuning as pointing to something beyond the mechanical underlying and permeating the world, but insists he is not endorsing a designing God. Alternatively, if there is a designing God, why not fine-tune away at least SOME of the fiendish, diabolical parasitism and red tooth and claws rife throughout nature, as well some of the worst avoidable (by a desingning God) human tragedy and waste? The need for "opponent processors" and such doesn't cut it as an explanation. I was on a zoom conference devoted to the last chapter on the Sacred a few months ago, but was unable to pose any questions, so I'm hoping you can just dash off an answer in your spare time, not too much to hope for, is it? Lol.
Keep up the great work!
Thanks Keith. The best answer I’ve seen to your question about fine-tunibg can be found in Lee Smollin’s The Life of the Cosmos. It’s a speculative and weird answer, but still the best I’ve come across.
You seem to me to be making the assumption that human beings are the most complex type of entity on Earth.
For my part I assume that Gaia (see Tim Lenton's Gaia 2.0 for example) is an entity, given it has been actively regulating the earth system over billions of years, and that the whole universe is also something like an entity (see Thomas Hertog's The Origin of Time), based on Stephen Hawking claiming this to be the case (page 258). If nested communities of cosmic-order entities, which I and many others who have experientially delved deep ontologically seem to agree ('to know even as you are known' is a statement rooted in experience of human being encountering cosmic Being rather than a matter of faith), then the worldview intimations you are reaching for take on quite different parameters.
I further assume you merely claim that humans are the most complex entities because you see no need to treat the currently dominant worldview of scientific materialism as a set of assumptions even though you are setting out to explore intimations of the next worldview.
I want to question this for a couple of reasons.
One is because I have been driven by mystical experiences, to wonder about what a worldview might be that makes sense of my experiences that is also rooted in the scientific method, but not bounded by materialist assumptions that contradict my own and many others experiences over millennia.
The second is that I think unconsciously asserted assumptions about the nature of reality underpin not only what we claim is real and not real, but also what can be real and cannot.
And, to me at least, this tendency matters now in a more significant way than it perhaps ever has previously, given that we are breaching planetary boundaries that are increasingly disrupting the continuity of the earth systems most species rely on. As I can see, at the root of these breaches is our own dominant story about reality and at the root of this story are our own unspoken assumptions.
If you had set out your intimations in the context of the root assumptions they are based on, that would leave room for other sets of assumptions on which other views of reality could reasonably be constructed. And if you are going to speculate about what might be next in terms of worldviews it seems to me that it would be helpful to make the fundamental tenets on which the currently dominant worldview is based as explicit as possible. This will allow room for others to join in who see from more diverse points of view than can be accommodated when you do not make such an effort.
For example, the scientific materialist worldview leads to the assumption that there is no point in considering the possibility of how to practice attuning ourselves to cosmic entities, even though if they exist they will harbor wisdom immeasurably greater than our own. And, in my own direct experience, do.
In my own investigations into the parameters of a worldview that can accommodate my experience of cosmic entities I found it significant that GI Gurdjieff arrived at the claim that Life on Earth has 'her' own purposes for human beings, in a similar way to humans using the wool and flesh of sheep, or sheep feeding on grass.
And that the cultural stories we tell ourselves as human beings about our situation and possibilities may be a form of mass self-hypnosis that we compete to evolve into more and more convincing forms, in ways that keeps us purposefully distracted from attending to our actual situation and cosmic functions.
I only mention these as inferences that arise from a different set of (but in my view more coherent set of) root assumptions.
I get that from the inside of the set of assumptions of scientific materialism these kinds of insights have little or no ground for serious consideration. But then if I asked you for the evidence that tests and proves the hypothesis that cosmic entities do not exist, I think you would need to acknowledge that this is not settled science.
Given how high the stakes are in the struggle to reach towards the outlines of a more adequate worldview I think it makes sense to speculate in ways that make more room for diverse perspectives than you have opted for.