This is a retrospective of week 35, 2024 (2024-08-20–2024-09-01).
This week, I’ve spent a couple of days in the northern part of Sweden. I visited Umeå and Skellefteå.
Bonnitta Roy has written an interesting essay about Christopher Alexander on Generating a Living World (part 1 & part 2). Roy is one of few who sees the problem with patterns. Bonnitta Roy writes:
Part of the problem, however, lay in the language of patterns themselves. Patterns were taken up as rules to govern design, or instructions to be implemented, rather than as a compendium of examples… This problem stalked the pattern language approach in almost all disciplines… Christopher Alexander himself recognized this shortcoming, which he curiously pre-warned us about in the beginning sections of The Timeless Way of Building.
—Bonnitta Roy, Christopher Alexander: Generating a Living World https://bonnittaroy.substack.com/p/christopher-alexander-generating
I’ve also written about patterns here (2022) and here (2016). Christopher Alexander gives the following advice at the end of The Timeless Way of Building:
…live so close to your heart that you no longer need a [pattern] language…
— Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, p. 547.
Below are some quotes from my other reading during the week. Familiar ways are not the only ways. The question is not what we look at, but what we see (Henry Thoreau).
The ultimate question of human history…is not our equal access to material resources…, much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together. …what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place. … What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if…we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?
—David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
…when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective. Actually, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control.
—David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Equality…[among the Wendat and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee] is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, is its expression. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of ‘equality before the law’, which is ultimately equality before the sovereign – that is, once again, equality in common subjugation.
—David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
The democratic governance of the Wendat and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, which so impressed later European readers, was an expression of the same principle [of freedom]: if no compulsion was allowed, then obviously such social coherence as did exist had to be created through reasoned debate, persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus.
—David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
It seems to me that we face very grave crises indeed, and that, if we are to survive, we need not just a few new measures, but a complete change of heart and mind.
—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
The cerebral and the abstract – for example, management and its systems – have become more highly valued than the hands-on task that management exists to serve, with the odd effect that the higher you rise in your craft, skill or profession, the more you will be removed from its performance in order to manage it.
—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
I happen to think this machine model gets us only some of the way… The difference…is not in the ‘what’, but in the ‘how’ – by which I don’t mean ‘the means by which’ (machine model again), but ‘the manner in which’, something no one ever asked of a machine. I am not interested purely in ‘functions’ but in ways of being, something only living things can have.
—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
…the term enlightenment is problematic since it connotes something to be attained rather than merely awakened to.
—Tim Langdell, Christ Way, Buddha Way
Conventional artificial intelligence (AI) theory believes that the brain is a computer, but perhaps the brain is an antenna where the mind controls the probabilities of synapse firings.
—Doug Matzke & William Tiller, Deep Reality: Why Source Science May Be the Key to Understanding Human Potential
…each generation of scientists developing artificial intelligence (AI) predicts we will have intelligent machines within ten years or so. Unfortunately, this prediction has been made repeatedly over the past sixty years and still no general solution to machine intelligence and machine learning has emerged…
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself…
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard…
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings…
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.—Bronnie Ware, The Regrets of the Dying
…reality has many aspects, and is never fully captured in any model or metaphor.
—Willis Harman, in Thinking Beyond the Brain, edited by David Lorimer
Reductionism prevails…because…Newtonian assumptions…are entrenched in the way all other facets of culture are interpreted and are embodied in modern technology. Hilbert’s formalism in mathematics, for instance, still widely assumed despite having been refuted by Gödel, eliminates reference to an extra symbolic reality and reduces mathematics to the manipulation of symbols.
—Arran Gare, Overcoming the Newtonian paradigm: The unfinished project of theoretical biology from a Schellingian perspective
…management science dominated by Newtonian thinking is now penetrating universities and research institutions… Its proponents are foisting upon these institutions a defective model of their own identity, claiming thereby to be able to anticipate and improve their efficiency in the production of outputs for given inputs. However, there is no algorithm for generating creative thought or predicting it, and to attempt to quantitatively measure the quality of such thought is a category mistake. …efforts to manage science in this way always destroy it…
—Arran Gare, Overcoming the Newtonian paradigm: The unfinished project of theoretical biology from a Schellingian perspective
What about if we tried comprehending rather than explaining away life?
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