Retrospective 2020-32

This is a summary of my reading and painting last week.

Painting

I painted the following. The painting to the right is from a photo by Skye Hirst (@autognomics).

I am also participating in the #drawingaugust challenge on Twitter (via @janhoglundart).

Reading

Articles

A month ago (week 28, 2020) I started reading the works of Norm and Skye Hirst. This week I read:

• The Discovery of Value Intelligence: Unique to life, a full body/mind process, and
• The New Emergent Life-Itself Paradigm Requires Understanding of Values, For 30th Anniversary of Hartman Institute Conference.

Values are related to the organizing principles which are operative in living processes. “The-way-down-deep errors” that destroy life are the result of defective logic. Not only is a new view of reality required, we also need to change our practices of inquiry to cope with it.

I have also read:

• Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture: The 1982 Debate Between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman | The Katarxis Nº 3 journal
• The Architect of Life by Mae-Wan Ho | Science in Society Archive

The debate between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman is more about order than harmony. Peter Eisenman’s idea of order is about separation and frustation, while Christopher Alexander is convinced that order and harmony are objective facts. On the one hand we have order as something subjective and repressive, and on the other hand order as something objective and generative.

Christopher Alexander says that we are taught to pretend that things are “like little machines” because only then “can you tinker with them and find out what makes them tick”. It’s fine, but it may also be “factually wrong”. “[T]he constitution of the universe may be such that the human self and the substance that things [are] made out of […] are much more inextricably related than we realized.” We have, in other words, “been trained to play a trick on ourselves for the last 300 years in order to discover certain things“.

Mae-Wan Ho writes that “feeling is the key to scientific understanding, indeed, of all understanding”. She asks how we can “claim to understand something we do not feel?” And, yet, that’s what we are “urged to do”. Mae-Wan Ho calls the “feeling” Alexander talks about “a sea of meaning” that immerses us all.

Mae-Wan Ho writes furthermore that “mechanical order” has “taken over the whole of science”. Living order is “a harmonious coherence which fills us and touches us”, and which “cannot be represented as a mechanism”. “[T]he mechanistic view always makes us miss the essential thing.” Ho describes how the mechanistic view of order can be traced back to Descartes, and how it annihilates our inner experience. “Value disappeared, […] and with it, feeling; and so the idea of order fell apart.”

Christopher Alexander identified fifteen properties that occur repeatedly in artifacts which have “life”. Christopher Alexander writes in The Nature of Order, Book 1 (p. 238) that these fifteen properties are “rough approximations” of some “deeper” structure. This “deeper” structure is “something” which allows the fifteen properties to emerge from it. Interestingly, Mae-Wan Ho sees a connection between many of Alexander’s properties and the ones she has proposed for “the living organism, or sustainable systems”. I will come back to this in a future post.

Books

Finally, I want to mention that I started reading The Unknowable by Gregory Chaitin this week. This book is a companion to Chaitin’s The Limits of Mathematics. Gregory Chaiting’s aim is to explain fundamental mathematical ideas understandably. And it’s a fascinating read indeed because Chaitin uses mathematics to look at itself in the mirror. A key takeaway, so far, is that “formalism failed for reasoning, but it succeeded brilliantly for computation“. My hope is to better understand what the limits of formalisms are in relation to understanding living organism, living process.