Order
In the first part of the book, we argued that our current machine view of the world doesn’t quite cut it: it is based on dubious methodological and philosophical assumptions that unduly restrict our thinking, the questions we can ask, the methods we can use, and the answers we accept as solid and scientific.
The good news is: the machine view is not necessary! It’s not an essential part of performing robust and innovative scientific research. To regain true freedom of inquiry, to unleash the full potential of investigation, to re-empower our science, we must therefore move beyond the age of machines.
As a first step towards achieving this, we said, we have to slay the Laplacean demon, once and for all, lest we get trapped in our mechanistic-computational map. This map leads us astray. Worse: it alienates us from the territory — from the large world we live in. And, in a moment of hubris and weakness, we come to mistake its empty promise of predictability and control for an actual feature of the world.
Our current map is outdated and misleading. It’s taking us nowhere. It’s high time we replace it! But what to replace it with? It’s not immediately obvious. We need a thorough rethink, that’s for sure, from the bottom up. We need an upgrade, a better map, or maybe a whole stack of new maps. In other words, we need a better, more rigorous, and more adaptive scientific worldview for the 21st century.
Earlier, we baptised this rethink the Cartesian mediation of our time. Yes, it’s one of these moments in history again, another kairos — even more earth-shaking and potentially civilization-shattering than the one 400 years ago. In Descartes’ spirit, then, we must set out to radically doubt everything, in order to regain our grip, and to restart from the most solid epistemic foundation possible.
What’s really important though is not to repeat Descartes’ mistakes. They were highly consequential. They are what got us into this mess in the first place. For one, we must avoid Descartes’ solipsistic rabbit hole. Also, we shall refuse any kind of dualism. And, it should go without saying, we can no longer depend on faith in God for the foundation of our theory of knowledge.
For these reasons, we won’t start with the cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” but with “I experience, therefore I am.” This statement is something we cannot seriously doubt, no matter how hard we try. Thinking our own non-existence is utterly incoherent. And, thus, to be meaningful, our worldview and our knowledge of the world must be firmly grounded in the undeniable fact of our personal experience.
This experience goes far beyond thinking: not all knowledge manifests itself through thought, and not all thoughts get expressed by words arranged into propositions. It’d be speciesist of us to assume this. All living beings have the capability to experience and to know the world in their own way.
Because of this, no living being is ever truly isolated: we are not trapped inside our heads or bodies! We never have been. Our alienation is a Cartesian illusion. All living beings are directly and deeply embedded in their environments. Therefore, the fact of our personal experience not only implies we exist, it implies we exist in our world. The two always go together. You cannot have one without the other.
So much for Descartes’ doubts about the external world. It’s not a useful way to think about our human condition. And this is great news, really: it frees us from inventing any dualist divisions between our subjective experience and “the world out there.” No bifurcation of nature this time! No res cogitans vs. res extensa. But also no “software” running in our brain that prevents us from perceiving the world directly.
Instead, we must recognize that all knowledge springs from our direct interaction with the world, from our embeddedness within it. Knowledge is neither subjective nor objective: it is transjective. As Francisco Varela put it: every living being brings forth a world. We do not just passively receive information about our surroundings, we co-create our reality through active exploration.
This world we bring forth is not arbitrary, not purely subjective, never “just in our head.” There is no trace of solipsism to it. Neither is it some form of idealism — mind over matter. Our world is not under our control, or the control of our mind. Instead, it arises from our relation to what is not us, to what is beyond us: the other. To get to know the world is to get in touch with that other. And to be in constant and close contact with the other means to have a grip on reality.
Most people, especially most scientists, think of this reality as something objective, “out there,” existing independently of our thoughts, desires, and goals. Does a falling tree make a noise when nobody is there to hear it fall? Did the world exist before humans were there to experience it? Were atoms around before atomism? Our answer to all these questions is an emphatic “yes.” We are realists after all.
But there is a snag: we’ve encountered the naïve realism of the machine thinker before — the kind of realism that promises us automatic and complete access to objective facts through the scientific method. So we have to be careful. What does “out there” mean? What are “objective facts?” What does the “objective” world look like? What is it made of? Does it have a unique causal structure? How can we gain access to this structure? Can we? It’s far from trivial to answer any of these questions.
The reason is simple: limited beings cannot have access to a “God’s eye view” of the world — what we traditionally think of as purely “objective” knowledge. A view from nowhere. This idea is not even coherent. It does not make any sense. By definition, the world has to be perceived from somewhere. Who, otherwise, would be doing the perceiving? And every perceiver is also an idiosyncratic interpreter.
In our case, we see the world from our own, particularly human, point of view. And this view is necessarily shaped by our previous experience (as individuals, cultures, and species with a particular history and evolutionary lineage), by our cognitive and sensory capabilities and limitations (what I don’t see, does not bother me), and by our opinions, biases, motivations, and goals as epistemic agents. To make sense of the world means to explain it to ourselves. Scientific understanding must be human understanding.
And yet, many famous thinkers have postulated a world that is beyond human reach or comprehension. Immanuel Kant, for example, distinguished between noumena and phenomena: the noumenon — das Ding an sich — is forever beyond our grasp, while what we can perceive is the world of phenomena. This is often misinterpreted in a Platonic manner, as true knowledge lying beyond mere appearances. Remember Plato’s cave? To step into the sunlight? But this is not how Kant meant this. Not at all.
Gregory Bateson has a more explicit way to make the same point: he borrows his terms from Carl Jung who borrowed them from the gnostics in turn. Bateson calls the world “out there” the pleroma. It is formless, filled with raw events that are forced by impacts but without distinctions (or differences) between them. In contrast, the world we can perceive is called the creatura. Here, all events are brought about by differences: differences that make a difference — to us. Differences, in fact, that we have attributed to events, conceptualizations that we impose on reality.
The problem, clearly, lies with the idea that the world is independent of us (or our minds). This idea is not properly worked out. In fact, there are two very different ways in which the world can depend on us (and our minds). First, there are events that are outside of our control. We’ve said this before and nobody in their right mind would doubt it. But there’s another way in which the phenomena of the creatura do depend on us (and our minds). It is the way by which we frame our experiences. To think about anything, we must first recognize it in some way as distinct. It must appear different to us.
The problem is: the world “out there” does not come neatly prepackaged like that. As Bateson says: the pleroma is formless. We impute our distinctions on it. And Kant’s noumena are forever beyond our reach because we can only access them through our concepts of them, which turns them into phenomena.
This is why it doesn’t really make sense to talk about noumena and pleroma at all! They are not really real, in the sense that they cannot be accessed by us. They have no definable existence: if we cannot access them, they do not impact our lives. This is our criterion of reality: something with an impact. What is real must matter to us, must affect us in some way.
This is the only kind of reality we can ever hope to access as limited living beings. Philosopher Hasok Chang calls it realism for realistic people. No more naïve realism, please! No more pure detached objectivity. These ideas should go the way of phlogiston, and the tooth fairy.
What then, does it mean to get to know our world? One thing is for sure: what we experience are phenomena. And also: we do not simply sit in our armchair and soak those up. We get to know the phenomena around us by exploring them. To know is to act. We build our concepts and make them work for us. We are not passive receivers of information. We go out and construct a reality for ourselves. It’s not mere input-output processing. That’s one of the fundamental insights that computationalists — and machine thinkers in general — do not seem to be able to grok.
Okay, you say: all knowledge is based on experience. I get it. But to experience is not the same as to know. You can go explore and yet not understand anything. Human history is teeming with this kind of illiterate conquistador. So, here is the next crucial point: to know, to explain, to understand — they are all connected somehow with bringing order to our experience of the phenomena we experience. Or, to paraphrase Aristotle: to know the world is to recognize and realise its causal structure.
Now we’ve got ourselves into a proper tangle! We’ll have to explain what we mean precisely by “understanding,” “explaining,” and “knowing.” At least, we’ve already covered Aristotle’s causes and the fact that they’re more about different modes of explaining than about what science considers a cause today. What’s important here is not how all of this is tied together (we’ll come to that) but the basic fact that knowledge requires some sort of structuring of our experiences.
Now let us think a bit more about what kind of structure can be discovered (or constructed) by a limited but intelligent being through its interaction with the world. We can imagine, as William Wimsatt does, that there are different options. For instance, we could not imagine living in a world that has no discernible structure at all. We simply wouldn’t find our way around in such a world. We could not survive in a world that seems completely random. Evolved intelligent life is only possible in worlds that allow for a non-random ordered structure of some kind to be constructed through experience.
To make sense of our experience means to construct an order that empowers us to act in a meaningful and coherent way in a world that is beyond our control, and ultimately beyond our grasp. This is what every limited living being must strive for: the world we bring forth and the way we act must align and coevolve in a coherent manner. Otherwise we cannot survive, or thrive.
But this still leaves open a whole range of questions. A livable world can come in almost any shape, with almost any kind of non-random structure. To explore and characterise what our human world is like is the fundamental task of our science. It creates what Augustine called a nomological order. “Nomos” means “the spirit of law.” The nomological order describes how we relate to a world that is beyond our control but contains law-like regularities that we can recognize and use to help us act in a coherent manner.
On top of this, we need two more orders for a meaningful life. They deal with how we relate to each other and ourselves. An order each for the third, second, and first-person perspective.
Our relationships with each other are the subject of our normative order, from which we derive how to behave ethically, how to become better versions of ourselves, and how to judge the impact of our actions on others.
Our relationship with ourselves is subject to our narrative order, which is the story we tell about ourselves, and how we fit into the larger picture provided by the other two orders.
These two additional orders go way beyond science (and the primary focus of our book). Nevertheless, they are crucial: to do good science requires all three orders to go along and synergise with each other.
The triplicate Augustinian order — narrative, normative, and nomological — has served humanity well for more than 1,500 years. But now it is in crisis. Our three orders are in disarray.
In particular, we have let our narrative order crumble. The machine view of the world is to blame: it causes us to lose sight of ourselves, to lose our plot; and now we are also losing our grip. All three orders are affected. To recognise the true depths of the traumas the mechanistic way of thinking is inflicting on us, we have to briefly dive into each in turn to assess the true extent of the damage.
The good news is: the machine view is not necessary! It’s not an essential part of performing robust and innovative scientific research. To regain true freedom of inquiry, to unleash the full potential of investigation, to re-empower our science, we must therefore move beyond the age of machines.
As a first step towards achieving this, we said, we have to slay the Laplacean demon, once and for all, lest we get trapped in our mechanistic-computational map. This map leads us astray. Worse: it alienates us from the territory — from the large world we live in. And, in a moment of hubris and weakness, we come to mistake its empty promise of predictability and control for an actual feature of the world.
Our current map is outdated and misleading. It’s taking us nowhere. It’s high time we replace it! But what to replace it with? It’s not immediately obvious. We need a thorough rethink, that’s for sure, from the bottom up. We need an upgrade, a better map, or maybe a whole stack of new maps. In other words, we need a better, more rigorous, and more adaptive scientific worldview for the 21st century.
Earlier, we baptised this rethink the Cartesian mediation of our time. Yes, it’s one of these moments in history again, another kairos — even more earth-shaking and potentially civilization-shattering than the one 400 years ago. In Descartes’ spirit, then, we must set out to radically doubt everything, in order to regain our grip, and to restart from the most solid epistemic foundation possible.
What’s really important though is not to repeat Descartes’ mistakes. They were highly consequential. They are what got us into this mess in the first place. For one, we must avoid Descartes’ solipsistic rabbit hole. Also, we shall refuse any kind of dualism. And, it should go without saying, we can no longer depend on faith in God for the foundation of our theory of knowledge.
For these reasons, we won’t start with the cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” but with “I experience, therefore I am.” This statement is something we cannot seriously doubt, no matter how hard we try. Thinking our own non-existence is utterly incoherent. And, thus, to be meaningful, our worldview and our knowledge of the world must be firmly grounded in the undeniable fact of our personal experience.
This experience goes far beyond thinking: not all knowledge manifests itself through thought, and not all thoughts get expressed by words arranged into propositions. It’d be speciesist of us to assume this. All living beings have the capability to experience and to know the world in their own way.
Because of this, no living being is ever truly isolated: we are not trapped inside our heads or bodies! We never have been. Our alienation is a Cartesian illusion. All living beings are directly and deeply embedded in their environments. Therefore, the fact of our personal experience not only implies we exist, it implies we exist in our world. The two always go together. You cannot have one without the other.
So much for Descartes’ doubts about the external world. It’s not a useful way to think about our human condition. And this is great news, really: it frees us from inventing any dualist divisions between our subjective experience and “the world out there.” No bifurcation of nature this time! No res cogitans vs. res extensa. But also no “software” running in our brain that prevents us from perceiving the world directly.
Instead, we must recognize that all knowledge springs from our direct interaction with the world, from our embeddedness within it. Knowledge is neither subjective nor objective: it is transjective. As Francisco Varela put it: every living being brings forth a world. We do not just passively receive information about our surroundings, we co-create our reality through active exploration.
This world we bring forth is not arbitrary, not purely subjective, never “just in our head.” There is no trace of solipsism to it. Neither is it some form of idealism — mind over matter. Our world is not under our control, or the control of our mind. Instead, it arises from our relation to what is not us, to what is beyond us: the other. To get to know the world is to get in touch with that other. And to be in constant and close contact with the other means to have a grip on reality.
Most people, especially most scientists, think of this reality as something objective, “out there,” existing independently of our thoughts, desires, and goals. Does a falling tree make a noise when nobody is there to hear it fall? Did the world exist before humans were there to experience it? Were atoms around before atomism? Our answer to all these questions is an emphatic “yes.” We are realists after all.
But there is a snag: we’ve encountered the naïve realism of the machine thinker before — the kind of realism that promises us automatic and complete access to objective facts through the scientific method. So we have to be careful. What does “out there” mean? What are “objective facts?” What does the “objective” world look like? What is it made of? Does it have a unique causal structure? How can we gain access to this structure? Can we? It’s far from trivial to answer any of these questions.
The reason is simple: limited beings cannot have access to a “God’s eye view” of the world — what we traditionally think of as purely “objective” knowledge. A view from nowhere. This idea is not even coherent. It does not make any sense. By definition, the world has to be perceived from somewhere. Who, otherwise, would be doing the perceiving? And every perceiver is also an idiosyncratic interpreter.
In our case, we see the world from our own, particularly human, point of view. And this view is necessarily shaped by our previous experience (as individuals, cultures, and species with a particular history and evolutionary lineage), by our cognitive and sensory capabilities and limitations (what I don’t see, does not bother me), and by our opinions, biases, motivations, and goals as epistemic agents. To make sense of the world means to explain it to ourselves. Scientific understanding must be human understanding.
And yet, many famous thinkers have postulated a world that is beyond human reach or comprehension. Immanuel Kant, for example, distinguished between noumena and phenomena: the noumenon — das Ding an sich — is forever beyond our grasp, while what we can perceive is the world of phenomena. This is often misinterpreted in a Platonic manner, as true knowledge lying beyond mere appearances. Remember Plato’s cave? To step into the sunlight? But this is not how Kant meant this. Not at all.
Gregory Bateson has a more explicit way to make the same point: he borrows his terms from Carl Jung who borrowed them from the gnostics in turn. Bateson calls the world “out there” the pleroma. It is formless, filled with raw events that are forced by impacts but without distinctions (or differences) between them. In contrast, the world we can perceive is called the creatura. Here, all events are brought about by differences: differences that make a difference — to us. Differences, in fact, that we have attributed to events, conceptualizations that we impose on reality.
The problem, clearly, lies with the idea that the world is independent of us (or our minds). This idea is not properly worked out. In fact, there are two very different ways in which the world can depend on us (and our minds). First, there are events that are outside of our control. We’ve said this before and nobody in their right mind would doubt it. But there’s another way in which the phenomena of the creatura do depend on us (and our minds). It is the way by which we frame our experiences. To think about anything, we must first recognize it in some way as distinct. It must appear different to us.
The problem is: the world “out there” does not come neatly prepackaged like that. As Bateson says: the pleroma is formless. We impute our distinctions on it. And Kant’s noumena are forever beyond our reach because we can only access them through our concepts of them, which turns them into phenomena.
This is why it doesn’t really make sense to talk about noumena and pleroma at all! They are not really real, in the sense that they cannot be accessed by us. They have no definable existence: if we cannot access them, they do not impact our lives. This is our criterion of reality: something with an impact. What is real must matter to us, must affect us in some way.
This is the only kind of reality we can ever hope to access as limited living beings. Philosopher Hasok Chang calls it realism for realistic people. No more naïve realism, please! No more pure detached objectivity. These ideas should go the way of phlogiston, and the tooth fairy.
What then, does it mean to get to know our world? One thing is for sure: what we experience are phenomena. And also: we do not simply sit in our armchair and soak those up. We get to know the phenomena around us by exploring them. To know is to act. We build our concepts and make them work for us. We are not passive receivers of information. We go out and construct a reality for ourselves. It’s not mere input-output processing. That’s one of the fundamental insights that computationalists — and machine thinkers in general — do not seem to be able to grok.
Okay, you say: all knowledge is based on experience. I get it. But to experience is not the same as to know. You can go explore and yet not understand anything. Human history is teeming with this kind of illiterate conquistador. So, here is the next crucial point: to know, to explain, to understand — they are all connected somehow with bringing order to our experience of the phenomena we experience. Or, to paraphrase Aristotle: to know the world is to recognize and realise its causal structure.
Now we’ve got ourselves into a proper tangle! We’ll have to explain what we mean precisely by “understanding,” “explaining,” and “knowing.” At least, we’ve already covered Aristotle’s causes and the fact that they’re more about different modes of explaining than about what science considers a cause today. What’s important here is not how all of this is tied together (we’ll come to that) but the basic fact that knowledge requires some sort of structuring of our experiences.
Now let us think a bit more about what kind of structure can be discovered (or constructed) by a limited but intelligent being through its interaction with the world. We can imagine, as William Wimsatt does, that there are different options. For instance, we could not imagine living in a world that has no discernible structure at all. We simply wouldn’t find our way around in such a world. We could not survive in a world that seems completely random. Evolved intelligent life is only possible in worlds that allow for a non-random ordered structure of some kind to be constructed through experience.
To make sense of our experience means to construct an order that empowers us to act in a meaningful and coherent way in a world that is beyond our control, and ultimately beyond our grasp. This is what every limited living being must strive for: the world we bring forth and the way we act must align and coevolve in a coherent manner. Otherwise we cannot survive, or thrive.
But this still leaves open a whole range of questions. A livable world can come in almost any shape, with almost any kind of non-random structure. To explore and characterise what our human world is like is the fundamental task of our science. It creates what Augustine called a nomological order. “Nomos” means “the spirit of law.” The nomological order describes how we relate to a world that is beyond our control but contains law-like regularities that we can recognize and use to help us act in a coherent manner.
On top of this, we need two more orders for a meaningful life. They deal with how we relate to each other and ourselves. An order each for the third, second, and first-person perspective.
Our relationships with each other are the subject of our normative order, from which we derive how to behave ethically, how to become better versions of ourselves, and how to judge the impact of our actions on others.
Our relationship with ourselves is subject to our narrative order, which is the story we tell about ourselves, and how we fit into the larger picture provided by the other two orders.
These two additional orders go way beyond science (and the primary focus of our book). Nevertheless, they are crucial: to do good science requires all three orders to go along and synergise with each other.
The triplicate Augustinian order — narrative, normative, and nomological — has served humanity well for more than 1,500 years. But now it is in crisis. Our three orders are in disarray.
In particular, we have let our narrative order crumble. The machine view of the world is to blame: it causes us to lose sight of ourselves, to lose our plot; and now we are also losing our grip. All three orders are affected. To recognise the true depths of the traumas the mechanistic way of thinking is inflicting on us, we have to briefly dive into each in turn to assess the true extent of the damage.
Nomological
In our relation with the world, we act as epistemic agents. “Epistemic” simply means that this relation has to do with gaining knowledge. Being an “agent” means that we have volition: we set our own goals, based on our own motivations and drives, and we pursue these goals through the peculiar repertoire of actions available to us. We’ll have a lot more to say about what all this all means, and why it is compatible with a naturalistic scientific worldview. For the time being, we will simply ask you to accept the following premise: an epistemic agent is an autonomous agent in pursuit of knowledge about the world.
The reason we pursue knowledge, and in fact the truth, is to feel more at home and at ease in our world. This is our motivation: we not only strive to survive, but aspire to flourish, to find our way in life with comfort and conviction. This is a basic drive common to all limited living beings. It is the prerequisite for a meaningful existence, and (in our human case) for any sort of proper society or civilization.
Remember, though, that we live in a large world, which contains an indefinite amount of potentially relevant features. Our situation is more than just a little bit bewildering. How can we even begin to make sense of such a world? We never know in advance what will turn out to be important in the end.
Therefore, the very first step in our pursuit of knowledge must be to recognize what we care about. Only if we care about something can we pick out differences that make a difference. Gregory Bateson calls these semantic information: meaningful cues that help an epistemic agent act coherently in a world where such cues are scarce, ambiguous, and often misleading.
To find and identify such meaningful cues, we must frame them. We must somehow recognize them as distinct from the rest of the world. This framing and distinguishing activity is called relevance realisation. It is a process that we engage in every minute of our waking lives. It is, quite literally, what we are.
Remember: the world of phenomena is transjective. Differences that make a difference are not simply “out there,” waiting to be discovered. We create them by interacting with the world in a particular manner — by realising what is relevant. The world we bring forth is a world full of meaning. It is our creative construction, not objective in the traditional sense, but also not purely subjective. It is our very own experienced environment we create. Jakob Johann von Uexküll called this the umwelt of the organism.
Uexküll used the example of a tick to illustrate the idea. Yes, even a tick creates meaning in its life! Though, admittedly, its umwelt is rather simple. It only contains three kinds of relevant cues: First, the odour of sweat (or butyric acid) indicating the presence of a potential mammalian host. Second, the heat emanating from said host being a warm-blooded animal. And, third, the mechanical sensation of being on a hairy surface (the furred skin of the host). The rest of the physical world does not bother the tick, does not influence its behaviour, and therefore has no reality for it.
You may not like the comparison, but what applies to the tick also applies to you, or any other limited living being, for that matter: each of us brings forth our very own experienced environment, with all the peculiar benefits, biases, and boundaries this entails.
Another example, by Denis Walsh, illustrates how different beings experience the same physical medium in different ways. Picture a porpoise and a paramecium moving through water. At the scale of the porpoise, this medium has low viscosity, and so the shape and movements of the animal are dominated by hydrodynamics. The porpoise swims elegantly through water. At the scale of the paramecium, however, water has very high viscosity. The paramecium bores laboriously through a highly viscous medium. Their experience of the same physical substance couldn’t be more different from each other.
One last example is attributed to Carl Sagan. It highlights that even our logic and abstract thinking are influenced by our peculiar nature. Sagan imagined an intelligent race of jellyfish-like aliens floating around the bottomless atmosphere of a gas giant, and wondered what kind of geometry they would develop (if any). Certainly, it would be very different from our own, whose early development crucially depended on the practice of drawing sharp edges (i.e., lines). However, such edges are completely unknown (and unthinkable) to the floating jellyfish geometers, as they never experience any sharp transitions in their peculiar environment. Blobby geometry ensues. A bit like topology, a field of edge-less mathematics we humans only discovered rather late in our history.
The bottom line is: we generate and order our experienced environment for our own purposes and according to our own capabilities and limitations. Every limited being does that. To survive and to thrive means to better orient ourselves in our world. Knowledge of the world is always knowledge from a specific perspective. What would knowledge even be without a knower? It could not be about anything.
And, of course, the world we bring forth is limited by the phenomena we can perceive and the events we can experience. This world may be bounded, but it is not closed or static. During learning and evolution, new things come to light, constantly challenging us to reconsider and adapt. We’ll discuss in due time where this open-endedness of the world originates, and what enables it.
In the meantime, let’s turn our attention back to the problem of relevance: by picking up relevant cues, agents actively delimit their arena, the part of the experienced environment that matters to them — right here, right now. This puts the agent into an extremely dynamic and situated two-way relationship with the world. This agent-arena relationship must be properly aligned, and continuously re-aligned across multiple time scales, if the agent is to continue to survive and thrive.
Traditionally, such alignment has been treated as a one-way process: organisms are the passive targets or sufferers of evolutionary adaptation by natural selection. Variation between individuals is random in Darwinian evolution or, more precisely, the source of variation is independent of the selective process itself. Whether you persist or not is decided by factors beyond your control. It’s not up to you.
But this, while true, is not the whole story. Agents do have intrinsic adaptivity. They are both the object and subject of evolution. They can mould their behaviour to circumstances. The Baldwin effect, for instance, says that learned adaptive behaviour can become genetically fixed in an evolving population.
This is what we have in mind when we talk about coherent action. More often than not, we fail in the pursuit of our goals. Sometimes, however, we succeed and we remember how we succeeded. This is learning through experience. We survive to teach our peers or offspring, or pass on the genes that gave us the ability to learn. In this way, we metabolise our errors on an individual and an evolutionary scale. We grow from them. Every time we fail, we fail a little better (with apologies to Samuel Beckett).
Both individual learning and evolution by natural selection are adaptive processes. They just happen at different time scales, and in different ways. By selectively enriching actions in the repertoire of an agent that succeeded in similar situations in the past, they increase the likelihood of succeeding in the present.
And this is how we generate nomological order, how our knowledge of the world itself evolves and adapts: we explore what works, and what doesn’t. We do this more or less systematically, across many different types of situations. This way, we learn to appreciate what options are open to us, what risks and dangers are attached to each one of them, and what possible outcomes we can expect.
In our particular human case, we also share our experiences with each other. We collectively build up more robust and trustworthy knowledge than anyone on their own could ever achieve. Together, we know more. And the knowledge we gain is not just factual knowledge — not some abstract set of propositions we judge to be true or false.
Instead, it is active knowledge. Truth lies in knowing how to act in a coherent manner. And this is not exclusive to humans. Every living being can do it to a certain degree, some through learning, others through evolutionary adaptation only. To live is to know, as Humberto Maturana once said.
But note: active knowledge has an important tacit dimension. There are at least four different kinds of knowing — all necessary for a meaningful human existence, but only one of them expressed in words.
The first and maybe most obvious aspect of knowing is propositional (or factual) knowledge. Knowing-that. “Epimenides is a Cretan” is a true statement. Therefore, we know that Epimenedes was indeed Cretan. It’s a verifiable fact. You are knowledgeable if you have a large database of such trustworthy facts in your head. Most philosophers and scientists focus excessively (and often entirely) on this kind of knowledge (and how it is supported), but it is only a small part of our nomological order.
The second aspect is procedural knowledge, or the familiar know-how. I can tell you how to ride a bike (because I know how to ride a bike), but you won’t be able to ride a bike just because I told you how to do it. Instead, riding a bike takes practice. There is no way around it. The same applies to cooking a fine meal, skiing down a mountain, flying a plane, being a surgeon, and many other skillful activities. This includes doing science which relies to a large extent on unspoken know-how. You quickly realise this when you try to reproduce someone else’s method in your own laboratory.
The third aspect is perspectival knowledge, which means correctly perceiving the world and your position in it from your specific point of view. This is not the same as factual knowledge: it is about relating the facts to your peculiar context, about judging your current situation — what is sometimes called situational awareness. Reading the room, you know. It includes the ability to realise what is relevant, and also what is feasible given your arena and repertoire of actions. Hubris is a deficiency in this kind of knowledge, but so is feeling like an impostor when you’re really quite able.
The fourth aspect is participatory knowledge: knowing how to act in a given situation, or how to navigate one’s agent-arena relationship. In many ways, this is the most important part of knowing: it really ties the other three together. It relies on them while, at the same time, putting them to work. You have participatory knowledge if you know the right thing to say, if you know which way to go, if you are able to act coherently, if you are in a state of flow. You lack participatory knowledge if you are perplexed and confused, if you do not know what to say, if you lack coherence in your actions.
All these four kinds of knowledge are essential for active knowledge, but proficiency in each of them is not evenly distributed among epistemic agents. Propositional knowledge, for example, is very limited in non-human organisms (as far as we know). It is therefore a very recent phenomenon in evolution.
But even if we focus on humans only: those people who are most knowledgeable propositionally are often deficient in the three other kinds of knowledge. Hence the perennial cliché of the distraught professor: dishevelled, lost in thought, riding her bike into the ditch. Focusing exclusively on propositional knowledge means giving this type of person all the power in the world.
Or sometimes the inverse happens: we put too much emphasis on knowing what to do in a given situation, while not having properly thought about the further-reaching consequences.
In contrast, active knowledge cherishes, nay, requires all four of these aspects of knowledge. At least at the level of a community, or society, we must strive for an even balance between them. In fact, this is what human science should be all about: to facilitate the collective generation of balanced active knowledge.
And, in general, it doesn’t do too badly in this regard. We would argue that it is and remains our best way to generate, adapt, and evolve our knowledge about the world, our best attempt at creating a meaningful nomological order for humanity. By some distance. To be anti-science is to be anti-life.
Unfortunately, there are two issues with science today that disturb our nomological peace. The first is its failure to acknowledge its own limitations. Knowing how to act includes knowing your own boundaries. Science is only about generating nomological order, but not the other two. We’ll talk about this in the following two sections. The second and more immediate issue is that modern science seems to have forgotten what it is actually about. And, you guessed it: machine thinking has a lot to do with that.
Instead of constructing a better nomological order — a deepening understanding of our relation to the world — science is now narrowly focused on optimising our productivity and inventing disruptive technologies. That’s what our society has come to identify with progress. That, and nothing else: “engineer everything!” is the motto of more than just one of our colleagues.
Is this really such a good idea? After all, universal optimization and disruption go two ways: they can indeed increase knowledge and improve living conditions for everyone, but only if properly employed. If this is not the case, they destroy coherence. Once our understanding of what we are doing can no longer keep up with the constant disruption, we are running blindly through dark woods, and it’s only a matter of time until we will crash into a tree and badly hurt ourselves.
The frenzied cult of productivity that is research today is rooted in the belief that applying the scientific method is a formal kind of activity, based exclusively on the rigorous principles of logical inference. It’s like applying an algorithm to solve a problem. If it can be automated, it can be accelerated beyond any human limits. You feed it problems, it solves them; you feed it questions, it produces facts. Feeding it more questions will automatically produce more knowledge. Here we go: more is better! Technological progress will solve everything. The singularity awaits! Heaven made on earth.
There is only one problem: generating knowledge is not at all like that. Not even close. We’re totally missing the point. In our rush, we are disconnecting knowledge from wisdom. We’re building a really rickety nomological order. One that will crumble at the slightest perturbation.
Science is not about generating larger databases, ever faster. It’s not about engineering everything, not about manipulation and control. It’s not about disruptive innovation either. Instead, it’s about knowing our place, helping us decide to do the right thing, in order to feel comfortable in our world. It’s about a better-adapted, more robust, nomological order, which coevolves with us, advancing, adjusting, adapting in a playful and exploratory manner. Such serious play takes time, close attention, and a certain quality of leisure. Rushing it certainly won’t make it any better. Put too much selection on an evolving population, and it simply stops evolving, getting stuck on suboptimal peaks of fitness instead.
One of the most important things we need to relearn today is to slow down, as individuals and as a society. We’re moving too fast. We can’t keep up with ourselves. This leads to a maladaptive and wobbly nomological order. But much worse than that: it leads to societal disruption, the degeneration of our normative order. In our frenzy to get things done, we have forgotten why we do them. What results is a terminal race to the bottom — towards inevitable global breakdown and disaster.
The reason we pursue knowledge, and in fact the truth, is to feel more at home and at ease in our world. This is our motivation: we not only strive to survive, but aspire to flourish, to find our way in life with comfort and conviction. This is a basic drive common to all limited living beings. It is the prerequisite for a meaningful existence, and (in our human case) for any sort of proper society or civilization.
Remember, though, that we live in a large world, which contains an indefinite amount of potentially relevant features. Our situation is more than just a little bit bewildering. How can we even begin to make sense of such a world? We never know in advance what will turn out to be important in the end.
Therefore, the very first step in our pursuit of knowledge must be to recognize what we care about. Only if we care about something can we pick out differences that make a difference. Gregory Bateson calls these semantic information: meaningful cues that help an epistemic agent act coherently in a world where such cues are scarce, ambiguous, and often misleading.
To find and identify such meaningful cues, we must frame them. We must somehow recognize them as distinct from the rest of the world. This framing and distinguishing activity is called relevance realisation. It is a process that we engage in every minute of our waking lives. It is, quite literally, what we are.
Remember: the world of phenomena is transjective. Differences that make a difference are not simply “out there,” waiting to be discovered. We create them by interacting with the world in a particular manner — by realising what is relevant. The world we bring forth is a world full of meaning. It is our creative construction, not objective in the traditional sense, but also not purely subjective. It is our very own experienced environment we create. Jakob Johann von Uexküll called this the umwelt of the organism.
Uexküll used the example of a tick to illustrate the idea. Yes, even a tick creates meaning in its life! Though, admittedly, its umwelt is rather simple. It only contains three kinds of relevant cues: First, the odour of sweat (or butyric acid) indicating the presence of a potential mammalian host. Second, the heat emanating from said host being a warm-blooded animal. And, third, the mechanical sensation of being on a hairy surface (the furred skin of the host). The rest of the physical world does not bother the tick, does not influence its behaviour, and therefore has no reality for it.
You may not like the comparison, but what applies to the tick also applies to you, or any other limited living being, for that matter: each of us brings forth our very own experienced environment, with all the peculiar benefits, biases, and boundaries this entails.
Another example, by Denis Walsh, illustrates how different beings experience the same physical medium in different ways. Picture a porpoise and a paramecium moving through water. At the scale of the porpoise, this medium has low viscosity, and so the shape and movements of the animal are dominated by hydrodynamics. The porpoise swims elegantly through water. At the scale of the paramecium, however, water has very high viscosity. The paramecium bores laboriously through a highly viscous medium. Their experience of the same physical substance couldn’t be more different from each other.
One last example is attributed to Carl Sagan. It highlights that even our logic and abstract thinking are influenced by our peculiar nature. Sagan imagined an intelligent race of jellyfish-like aliens floating around the bottomless atmosphere of a gas giant, and wondered what kind of geometry they would develop (if any). Certainly, it would be very different from our own, whose early development crucially depended on the practice of drawing sharp edges (i.e., lines). However, such edges are completely unknown (and unthinkable) to the floating jellyfish geometers, as they never experience any sharp transitions in their peculiar environment. Blobby geometry ensues. A bit like topology, a field of edge-less mathematics we humans only discovered rather late in our history.
The bottom line is: we generate and order our experienced environment for our own purposes and according to our own capabilities and limitations. Every limited being does that. To survive and to thrive means to better orient ourselves in our world. Knowledge of the world is always knowledge from a specific perspective. What would knowledge even be without a knower? It could not be about anything.
And, of course, the world we bring forth is limited by the phenomena we can perceive and the events we can experience. This world may be bounded, but it is not closed or static. During learning and evolution, new things come to light, constantly challenging us to reconsider and adapt. We’ll discuss in due time where this open-endedness of the world originates, and what enables it.
In the meantime, let’s turn our attention back to the problem of relevance: by picking up relevant cues, agents actively delimit their arena, the part of the experienced environment that matters to them — right here, right now. This puts the agent into an extremely dynamic and situated two-way relationship with the world. This agent-arena relationship must be properly aligned, and continuously re-aligned across multiple time scales, if the agent is to continue to survive and thrive.
Traditionally, such alignment has been treated as a one-way process: organisms are the passive targets or sufferers of evolutionary adaptation by natural selection. Variation between individuals is random in Darwinian evolution or, more precisely, the source of variation is independent of the selective process itself. Whether you persist or not is decided by factors beyond your control. It’s not up to you.
But this, while true, is not the whole story. Agents do have intrinsic adaptivity. They are both the object and subject of evolution. They can mould their behaviour to circumstances. The Baldwin effect, for instance, says that learned adaptive behaviour can become genetically fixed in an evolving population.
This is what we have in mind when we talk about coherent action. More often than not, we fail in the pursuit of our goals. Sometimes, however, we succeed and we remember how we succeeded. This is learning through experience. We survive to teach our peers or offspring, or pass on the genes that gave us the ability to learn. In this way, we metabolise our errors on an individual and an evolutionary scale. We grow from them. Every time we fail, we fail a little better (with apologies to Samuel Beckett).
Both individual learning and evolution by natural selection are adaptive processes. They just happen at different time scales, and in different ways. By selectively enriching actions in the repertoire of an agent that succeeded in similar situations in the past, they increase the likelihood of succeeding in the present.
And this is how we generate nomological order, how our knowledge of the world itself evolves and adapts: we explore what works, and what doesn’t. We do this more or less systematically, across many different types of situations. This way, we learn to appreciate what options are open to us, what risks and dangers are attached to each one of them, and what possible outcomes we can expect.
In our particular human case, we also share our experiences with each other. We collectively build up more robust and trustworthy knowledge than anyone on their own could ever achieve. Together, we know more. And the knowledge we gain is not just factual knowledge — not some abstract set of propositions we judge to be true or false.
Instead, it is active knowledge. Truth lies in knowing how to act in a coherent manner. And this is not exclusive to humans. Every living being can do it to a certain degree, some through learning, others through evolutionary adaptation only. To live is to know, as Humberto Maturana once said.
But note: active knowledge has an important tacit dimension. There are at least four different kinds of knowing — all necessary for a meaningful human existence, but only one of them expressed in words.
The first and maybe most obvious aspect of knowing is propositional (or factual) knowledge. Knowing-that. “Epimenides is a Cretan” is a true statement. Therefore, we know that Epimenedes was indeed Cretan. It’s a verifiable fact. You are knowledgeable if you have a large database of such trustworthy facts in your head. Most philosophers and scientists focus excessively (and often entirely) on this kind of knowledge (and how it is supported), but it is only a small part of our nomological order.
The second aspect is procedural knowledge, or the familiar know-how. I can tell you how to ride a bike (because I know how to ride a bike), but you won’t be able to ride a bike just because I told you how to do it. Instead, riding a bike takes practice. There is no way around it. The same applies to cooking a fine meal, skiing down a mountain, flying a plane, being a surgeon, and many other skillful activities. This includes doing science which relies to a large extent on unspoken know-how. You quickly realise this when you try to reproduce someone else’s method in your own laboratory.
The third aspect is perspectival knowledge, which means correctly perceiving the world and your position in it from your specific point of view. This is not the same as factual knowledge: it is about relating the facts to your peculiar context, about judging your current situation — what is sometimes called situational awareness. Reading the room, you know. It includes the ability to realise what is relevant, and also what is feasible given your arena and repertoire of actions. Hubris is a deficiency in this kind of knowledge, but so is feeling like an impostor when you’re really quite able.
The fourth aspect is participatory knowledge: knowing how to act in a given situation, or how to navigate one’s agent-arena relationship. In many ways, this is the most important part of knowing: it really ties the other three together. It relies on them while, at the same time, putting them to work. You have participatory knowledge if you know the right thing to say, if you know which way to go, if you are able to act coherently, if you are in a state of flow. You lack participatory knowledge if you are perplexed and confused, if you do not know what to say, if you lack coherence in your actions.
All these four kinds of knowledge are essential for active knowledge, but proficiency in each of them is not evenly distributed among epistemic agents. Propositional knowledge, for example, is very limited in non-human organisms (as far as we know). It is therefore a very recent phenomenon in evolution.
But even if we focus on humans only: those people who are most knowledgeable propositionally are often deficient in the three other kinds of knowledge. Hence the perennial cliché of the distraught professor: dishevelled, lost in thought, riding her bike into the ditch. Focusing exclusively on propositional knowledge means giving this type of person all the power in the world.
Or sometimes the inverse happens: we put too much emphasis on knowing what to do in a given situation, while not having properly thought about the further-reaching consequences.
In contrast, active knowledge cherishes, nay, requires all four of these aspects of knowledge. At least at the level of a community, or society, we must strive for an even balance between them. In fact, this is what human science should be all about: to facilitate the collective generation of balanced active knowledge.
And, in general, it doesn’t do too badly in this regard. We would argue that it is and remains our best way to generate, adapt, and evolve our knowledge about the world, our best attempt at creating a meaningful nomological order for humanity. By some distance. To be anti-science is to be anti-life.
Unfortunately, there are two issues with science today that disturb our nomological peace. The first is its failure to acknowledge its own limitations. Knowing how to act includes knowing your own boundaries. Science is only about generating nomological order, but not the other two. We’ll talk about this in the following two sections. The second and more immediate issue is that modern science seems to have forgotten what it is actually about. And, you guessed it: machine thinking has a lot to do with that.
Instead of constructing a better nomological order — a deepening understanding of our relation to the world — science is now narrowly focused on optimising our productivity and inventing disruptive technologies. That’s what our society has come to identify with progress. That, and nothing else: “engineer everything!” is the motto of more than just one of our colleagues.
Is this really such a good idea? After all, universal optimization and disruption go two ways: they can indeed increase knowledge and improve living conditions for everyone, but only if properly employed. If this is not the case, they destroy coherence. Once our understanding of what we are doing can no longer keep up with the constant disruption, we are running blindly through dark woods, and it’s only a matter of time until we will crash into a tree and badly hurt ourselves.
The frenzied cult of productivity that is research today is rooted in the belief that applying the scientific method is a formal kind of activity, based exclusively on the rigorous principles of logical inference. It’s like applying an algorithm to solve a problem. If it can be automated, it can be accelerated beyond any human limits. You feed it problems, it solves them; you feed it questions, it produces facts. Feeding it more questions will automatically produce more knowledge. Here we go: more is better! Technological progress will solve everything. The singularity awaits! Heaven made on earth.
There is only one problem: generating knowledge is not at all like that. Not even close. We’re totally missing the point. In our rush, we are disconnecting knowledge from wisdom. We’re building a really rickety nomological order. One that will crumble at the slightest perturbation.
Science is not about generating larger databases, ever faster. It’s not about engineering everything, not about manipulation and control. It’s not about disruptive innovation either. Instead, it’s about knowing our place, helping us decide to do the right thing, in order to feel comfortable in our world. It’s about a better-adapted, more robust, nomological order, which coevolves with us, advancing, adjusting, adapting in a playful and exploratory manner. Such serious play takes time, close attention, and a certain quality of leisure. Rushing it certainly won’t make it any better. Put too much selection on an evolving population, and it simply stops evolving, getting stuck on suboptimal peaks of fitness instead.
One of the most important things we need to relearn today is to slow down, as individuals and as a society. We’re moving too fast. We can’t keep up with ourselves. This leads to a maladaptive and wobbly nomological order. But much worse than that: it leads to societal disruption, the degeneration of our normative order. In our frenzy to get things done, we have forgotten why we do them. What results is a terminal race to the bottom — towards inevitable global breakdown and disaster.
Normative
In our relation with each other, we act as moral agents. How we behave is subject to our normative order. This order naturally connects to the nomological one if we consider them both as complementary guides for acting coherently and finding our way in a large world, a world beyond our control.
While the nomological order is about knowing, explaining, and understanding our world, the normative order is primarily about how to live a good life and how to relate to others. This requires us to properly judge the consequences of our actions. How does our behaviour affect our environment and those around us? How do we bring forth worlds that do not collide (but synergise) with those of others?
David Hume famously said that “is” does not imply “ought.” This is the basic fact-value distinction in Western philosophy. Unfortunately, it is easy to misinterpret his argument. In its most basic sense, Hume’s statement simply states that normative and nomological orders are distinct. We agree.
What Hume meant is that values don’t follow directly from facts alone. This lack of entailment manifests in various ways. For instance, the more we know about the world, the more moral dilemmas we seem to create. Also, our belief and trust in scientific facts does not immediately yield a specific moral codex that tells us how to behave. And even worse: we can have such a fact-based codex and still act in bad faith. The choice is ours and it goes far beyond our factual knowledge of the world.
But at the same time, “ought” and “is” do depend on each other, in a very profound way. For one, Hume never contested that moral decisions should be informed by factual knowledge. It would be quite absurd to do so. After all, we need factual knowledge to judge the consequences of our actions. This is not exactly controversial, and we will not consider this matter any further here.
Instead, we want to examine a more interesting connection between values and facts, which is rooted in an understanding of what we care about. Remember: we must care about something for any difference to make a difference. To a caring being, the experienced environment is not some objective world “out there,” but is framed by the ability to realise what is relevant. Each distinguishable feature of our world has meaning to us, at least under some circumstances, otherwise we would not bother to distinguish it.
To understand this better, let’s assume that every living organism cares about one thing, and that is survival. There are exceptions even to this rule (such as self-sacrifice for the benefit of relatives) but, in general, life wants to live on. Now, some features of the environment are conducive to survival, while others are not, and some are positively harmful. Accordingly, organisms are driven to seek shelter, nourishment, and mates, while trying to avoid toxins, parasites, and predators.
This implies that our agent-arena relationship not only brings forth facts, but automatically also values that come attached to those facts. Relevant features of our environment can be good or bad for us: they open up opportunities or put obstacles in our way.
Such relevant features are called affordances, and we can now picture the arena of an organism as an affordance landscape. The environment we experience is no neutral canvas. We are surrounded by meaning! We are inundated by it. Temptations and dangers lurk everywhere. We relentlessly assess each affordance with regard to its utility in our particular context. A door, for example, may be an opportunity, a portal to another realm, or an obstacle, in case it is locked and we don’t have the key.
This means that fact and value are intrinsically connected: we can draw a careful distinction between the two, but they occur to us together, inseparably, in our everyday lives. A door is a door, granted, but we only recognise it as such due to its potential use for us. We only pay attention to it if it has any value to us in a given situation. It is something that affords us something. A difference that makes a difference.
One of the main failures of the machine view lies in its attempt to strictly separate fact from value. It considers affordances as subjective, not really real, reducing them to their underlying physical substrate. It creates the illusion of value-free objects and objectivity. But it doesn't really deliver on this point.
We ignore the connection between facts and values at our own peril: value-free facts lose their meaning for us. We disconnect from them, which impairs our ability to act coherently. Nothing matters in a purely material world. This disconnection is also what fuels anti-scientific feelings: when facts are seen as cold and detached, we become alienated from the world. Reality is uncaring and devoid of meaning. Among all the clockwork gears of its mechanism, our sense of order and belonging is paradoxically lost.
To reverse such disenchantment, to reconnect to the world, we have to embrace its value-laden nature. This is what it means to go beyond the view of the world as a machine. What we are advocating here is not some kind of woo, not mere wishful thinking, but a rigorous naturalist moral realism: value is not purely subjective, not just in our heads; but it is not objective or outside ourselves either. Instead, meaning and value emerge from our transjective interactions — our coherent behaviour in the world.
Of course, recognising the value of affordances in our arena does not yet constitute an appropriate normative order in itself. It only provides the ground on which such an order may be built. Consider the “value system” of a bacterium, for example: for such a simple agent, norms are simply what is good or bad for the individual, here and now. Swim up the sugar gradient; avoid the toxin; grow and divide. There is not much more to bacterial flourishing.
For humans, however, the situation is massively more complicated. Simply following our basic drives often has indirect negative repercussions. One reason for this is that humans are famously fickle. Unlike the bacterium, we have many conflicting aims and motivations, all at once, and the goals we pursue are often fleeting and may change from one moment to the other. On top of this, we participate in intricate social dynamics and manipulate our environment in highly nontrivial ways. Is it any wonder then, if we find it exceedingly difficult to figure out the right thing to do in any given situation?
This is the curse that comes with sophistication and, especially, our ability to self-reflect. We don’t only strive to survive, but we desire to flourish — hence our various, often contradictory, goals. Human flourishing can be achieved in an astonishing number of different ways, and there are even more ways to fail. This is why our lives are complicated, precarious, and a proper normative order is needed.
As a human being, to care about something (or someone) is more than just a fleeting desire. Harry Frankfurt defines it as the continued and wholehearted commitment to pursue a certain set of goals. Furthermore, and this is important, he defines human freedom as an absence of contradictions between the various things we care about. Frankfurt calls this wholeheartedness. This kind of freedom is freedom we can actually achieve. It is what enables you to lead a good life and to act in a coherent way.
On the downside, you have to learn to suppress some immediate desires — not to give in to every whim. This is what it means to be civilised, what it means to be mature, even wise, perhaps. Expressed more positively, you have to learn to channel and direct your energies in productive ways. To achieve this is a transformative experience, a matter of patient practice, not just an instant act of will. Wisdom needs to be cultivated through the practice of virtue ethics. In the end, it should be the aim of our normative order to make everybody a better person.
The problem is that there is very little room for this kind of romantic thinking in a machine view of the world, which is focussed on optimisation, not flourishing. The aim of its ethics is external to the person — heavily consequentialist — maximising the measurable productivity of our society.
In this view, happiness is defined negatively, as an absence of suffering. This is obviously not a bad thing in itself, but it can become unnecessarily constraining if it is the only focus of our normative order. It makes us forget who we truly are, and we start treating ourselves as if we were machines.
This is an unforgiving view, ill suited for fallible and imperfect beings like us. Instead of judging our ideas based on their use for our purposes, we come to judge ourselves unfairly. The question “what is my purpose?” becomes strictly instrumentalised in terms of our achievements, as judged by those around us. Again, this is not a bad thing in itself. But it is not enough for a truly satisfying life either!
Our normative order must be more than an instruction manual for how to run a frictionless society. Instead, it must seek to maximise the diversity of wholehearted ways in which we express our freedom — the ways in which we can act coherently. This is what it truly means to maximise human potential.
Note that this is not an overly individualist or even egotistic philosophy, as much of modern libertarianism is. The basis for our individual coherence crucially depends on a specific kind of social cohesion, be it at the level of our family, local community, society, or humanity as a whole. To be maximally free of contradictions is only possible in a conducive context, which can only arise from a harmonious interaction of top-down and bottom-up social dynamics — stable, democratically negotiated norms and authentic, individual growth alike.
Science plays a crucial role in a society based on this kind of wholesome normative order. Its function is and remains to make us more comfortable and safe in our world. There is nothing new here. But our specific focus must change: a better life cannot be achieved by streamlining technology development and medical research alone. Instead, we need to work towards a better understanding of the world and our place in it — the noble pursuit of a particularly human kind of truth, the best worlds we can bring forth together — in search of a better nomological order beyond the machine view of the world. Everything else flows from that.
To sum up, we could say that to repair and restore both our nomological and normative orders, we need to overcome our inner-dimension blindness, our worst current blind spot. For that we need to turn our attention inwards, to the third and last order. This narrative order tells us how to care about ourselves. As we shall see, it is crucial for human flourishing but is in a most lamentable state right now.
While the nomological order is about knowing, explaining, and understanding our world, the normative order is primarily about how to live a good life and how to relate to others. This requires us to properly judge the consequences of our actions. How does our behaviour affect our environment and those around us? How do we bring forth worlds that do not collide (but synergise) with those of others?
David Hume famously said that “is” does not imply “ought.” This is the basic fact-value distinction in Western philosophy. Unfortunately, it is easy to misinterpret his argument. In its most basic sense, Hume’s statement simply states that normative and nomological orders are distinct. We agree.
What Hume meant is that values don’t follow directly from facts alone. This lack of entailment manifests in various ways. For instance, the more we know about the world, the more moral dilemmas we seem to create. Also, our belief and trust in scientific facts does not immediately yield a specific moral codex that tells us how to behave. And even worse: we can have such a fact-based codex and still act in bad faith. The choice is ours and it goes far beyond our factual knowledge of the world.
But at the same time, “ought” and “is” do depend on each other, in a very profound way. For one, Hume never contested that moral decisions should be informed by factual knowledge. It would be quite absurd to do so. After all, we need factual knowledge to judge the consequences of our actions. This is not exactly controversial, and we will not consider this matter any further here.
Instead, we want to examine a more interesting connection between values and facts, which is rooted in an understanding of what we care about. Remember: we must care about something for any difference to make a difference. To a caring being, the experienced environment is not some objective world “out there,” but is framed by the ability to realise what is relevant. Each distinguishable feature of our world has meaning to us, at least under some circumstances, otherwise we would not bother to distinguish it.
To understand this better, let’s assume that every living organism cares about one thing, and that is survival. There are exceptions even to this rule (such as self-sacrifice for the benefit of relatives) but, in general, life wants to live on. Now, some features of the environment are conducive to survival, while others are not, and some are positively harmful. Accordingly, organisms are driven to seek shelter, nourishment, and mates, while trying to avoid toxins, parasites, and predators.
This implies that our agent-arena relationship not only brings forth facts, but automatically also values that come attached to those facts. Relevant features of our environment can be good or bad for us: they open up opportunities or put obstacles in our way.
Such relevant features are called affordances, and we can now picture the arena of an organism as an affordance landscape. The environment we experience is no neutral canvas. We are surrounded by meaning! We are inundated by it. Temptations and dangers lurk everywhere. We relentlessly assess each affordance with regard to its utility in our particular context. A door, for example, may be an opportunity, a portal to another realm, or an obstacle, in case it is locked and we don’t have the key.
This means that fact and value are intrinsically connected: we can draw a careful distinction between the two, but they occur to us together, inseparably, in our everyday lives. A door is a door, granted, but we only recognise it as such due to its potential use for us. We only pay attention to it if it has any value to us in a given situation. It is something that affords us something. A difference that makes a difference.
One of the main failures of the machine view lies in its attempt to strictly separate fact from value. It considers affordances as subjective, not really real, reducing them to their underlying physical substrate. It creates the illusion of value-free objects and objectivity. But it doesn't really deliver on this point.
We ignore the connection between facts and values at our own peril: value-free facts lose their meaning for us. We disconnect from them, which impairs our ability to act coherently. Nothing matters in a purely material world. This disconnection is also what fuels anti-scientific feelings: when facts are seen as cold and detached, we become alienated from the world. Reality is uncaring and devoid of meaning. Among all the clockwork gears of its mechanism, our sense of order and belonging is paradoxically lost.
To reverse such disenchantment, to reconnect to the world, we have to embrace its value-laden nature. This is what it means to go beyond the view of the world as a machine. What we are advocating here is not some kind of woo, not mere wishful thinking, but a rigorous naturalist moral realism: value is not purely subjective, not just in our heads; but it is not objective or outside ourselves either. Instead, meaning and value emerge from our transjective interactions — our coherent behaviour in the world.
Of course, recognising the value of affordances in our arena does not yet constitute an appropriate normative order in itself. It only provides the ground on which such an order may be built. Consider the “value system” of a bacterium, for example: for such a simple agent, norms are simply what is good or bad for the individual, here and now. Swim up the sugar gradient; avoid the toxin; grow and divide. There is not much more to bacterial flourishing.
For humans, however, the situation is massively more complicated. Simply following our basic drives often has indirect negative repercussions. One reason for this is that humans are famously fickle. Unlike the bacterium, we have many conflicting aims and motivations, all at once, and the goals we pursue are often fleeting and may change from one moment to the other. On top of this, we participate in intricate social dynamics and manipulate our environment in highly nontrivial ways. Is it any wonder then, if we find it exceedingly difficult to figure out the right thing to do in any given situation?
This is the curse that comes with sophistication and, especially, our ability to self-reflect. We don’t only strive to survive, but we desire to flourish — hence our various, often contradictory, goals. Human flourishing can be achieved in an astonishing number of different ways, and there are even more ways to fail. This is why our lives are complicated, precarious, and a proper normative order is needed.
As a human being, to care about something (or someone) is more than just a fleeting desire. Harry Frankfurt defines it as the continued and wholehearted commitment to pursue a certain set of goals. Furthermore, and this is important, he defines human freedom as an absence of contradictions between the various things we care about. Frankfurt calls this wholeheartedness. This kind of freedom is freedom we can actually achieve. It is what enables you to lead a good life and to act in a coherent way.
On the downside, you have to learn to suppress some immediate desires — not to give in to every whim. This is what it means to be civilised, what it means to be mature, even wise, perhaps. Expressed more positively, you have to learn to channel and direct your energies in productive ways. To achieve this is a transformative experience, a matter of patient practice, not just an instant act of will. Wisdom needs to be cultivated through the practice of virtue ethics. In the end, it should be the aim of our normative order to make everybody a better person.
The problem is that there is very little room for this kind of romantic thinking in a machine view of the world, which is focussed on optimisation, not flourishing. The aim of its ethics is external to the person — heavily consequentialist — maximising the measurable productivity of our society.
In this view, happiness is defined negatively, as an absence of suffering. This is obviously not a bad thing in itself, but it can become unnecessarily constraining if it is the only focus of our normative order. It makes us forget who we truly are, and we start treating ourselves as if we were machines.
This is an unforgiving view, ill suited for fallible and imperfect beings like us. Instead of judging our ideas based on their use for our purposes, we come to judge ourselves unfairly. The question “what is my purpose?” becomes strictly instrumentalised in terms of our achievements, as judged by those around us. Again, this is not a bad thing in itself. But it is not enough for a truly satisfying life either!
Our normative order must be more than an instruction manual for how to run a frictionless society. Instead, it must seek to maximise the diversity of wholehearted ways in which we express our freedom — the ways in which we can act coherently. This is what it truly means to maximise human potential.
Note that this is not an overly individualist or even egotistic philosophy, as much of modern libertarianism is. The basis for our individual coherence crucially depends on a specific kind of social cohesion, be it at the level of our family, local community, society, or humanity as a whole. To be maximally free of contradictions is only possible in a conducive context, which can only arise from a harmonious interaction of top-down and bottom-up social dynamics — stable, democratically negotiated norms and authentic, individual growth alike.
Science plays a crucial role in a society based on this kind of wholesome normative order. Its function is and remains to make us more comfortable and safe in our world. There is nothing new here. But our specific focus must change: a better life cannot be achieved by streamlining technology development and medical research alone. Instead, we need to work towards a better understanding of the world and our place in it — the noble pursuit of a particularly human kind of truth, the best worlds we can bring forth together — in search of a better nomological order beyond the machine view of the world. Everything else flows from that.
To sum up, we could say that to repair and restore both our nomological and normative orders, we need to overcome our inner-dimension blindness, our worst current blind spot. For that we need to turn our attention inwards, to the third and last order. This narrative order tells us how to care about ourselves. As we shall see, it is crucial for human flourishing but is in a most lamentable state right now.
Narrative
In our relation with ourselves, we act as individuals. Individual living beings (or selves) are not static things. Instead, they are persistent processes or dynamically maintained patterns, in constant exchange with their environments. This means that our identity is fundamentally historical and transient in nature.
Living beings construct themselves and their offspring as they go along. Therefore, we are the result of everything and everyone that came before us in our history and evolutionary lineage! It’s a humbling but also fascinating and comforting thought that the metabolism of your cells has been running non-stop since the last common ancestor of all terrestrial life oozed around the primordial earth.
During this time, a lot of things have happened that are highly contingent, dependent on circumstances that no limited being could have expected or predicted. Accidents happen, all the time, and quite some of them become frozen into our genealogies. Like it or not, but at least to some extent we are creatures of chance. There is also much randomness in our life. But as we have said before: to know and understand the world means bringing order into the messiness of our experience.
Our ability to generate this kind of order rests on two important aspects of our selves: first, there must be some sort of continuity for the individual to persist through all these unpredictable happenstances. We’ll explore later on how this kind of continuity is achieved in terms of biochemistry and biophysics. For now, we only have to acknowledge that such continuity exists, is required, and must be of a causal and constructive nature, because living beings constantly build and maintain themselves.
The second aspect is coherence: the persistent pattern of the self must hold itself together somehow. Again, we’ll talk about how this actually happens later on. For now, let’s just call this property closure: although an organism depends on external sources of materials and energy, the source of its coherence is internal to its organisation. We keep ourselves together, as long as we manage to hold on to our life.
In fact, this coherent continuity is the essence of life, its core, its key characteristic. We could not exist without it. And, in a way, it repeats itself at the level of our self-aware human flow of consciousness. Similar to our metabolism, we need coherent continuity to recognise ourselves as individuals. This kind of continuity calls for some kind of narrative, a story we tell about ourselves.
This explains why humans are so obsessed with storytelling. To make sense of a world that does not always make sense, we need to first understand ourselves. And to understand ourselves we need to organise our self-image into a coherent narrative of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going — our very own narrative order.
Traditionally, this narrative order has expressed itself in our mythology, which can take different forms, depending on the historical stage of a society. In animistic tribes, for example, myths are a performance of the very reality we experience. In antiquity, myths became abstracted and symbolic stories of impersonated virtues and vices. Think of Greek or Hindu mythology. As history progressed, we treated our myths less and less literally as true. Instead, they became imaginative tales that metaphorically expressed all kinds of perennial truths and wisdom.
To our modern minds, however, classical myths — and also traditional religions — have largely lost their meaning. Like it or not, but the “nones” are the fastest-growing denomination in many developed countries. Old myths seem out of place in our current context, a quaint remembrance of things past. They’ve become mere opinions held by the ignorant, known to the properly educated to be incorrect.
Mind you, this is not how our narrative order was lost. It was merely transformed over the course of history. Modernity came to invent its own range of substitute myths, dealing with our humanist self-reliance (e.g., Robinson Crusoe), our scientific hubris (Frankenstein), our fear of the other (War of the Worlds), what it means to live in an increasingly rationalised world (Sherlock Holmes) with the fascist beast within us all (Batman).
But even these modern mythical tales have largely outlived their usefulness by now. We live in a deeply postmodern age, which has deconstructed all of the above. This is what really killed our narrative order.
All that’s left are two quintessentially postmodern myths. They manage to endure in our current post-factual age due to their utterly cynical nature — each in their own, very distinct way.
The first is the myth of the zombie. It is cynical because it retells our present situation very accurately but offers no way out. How many zombie movies do you know that have a happy ending? (Okay, there is Warm Bodies, but we’re not sure that counts.)
Zombies are hopeless creatures, leading an utterly meaningless existence. They aren’t alive but neither do they die (unless you blow their brains out). They are incapable of change or learning, the perfect metaphor for our meaning crisis. Zombies live in herds, but do not communicate. Look around you when commuting to work, and you’ll immediately see what that means. Zombies slavishly and sluggishly follow their urges. That’s us and our postmodern consumerism! Zombies eat brains. They destroy the very thing that is the source of our pleasure and purpose. It’s all not very subtle.
Zombies are not a good myth: they are the story of our time, no doubt, but they do not give us anything to live up to. What we need is a positive narrative, some kind of vision for the future.
And this is where another kind of cynicism comes in. There is a postmodern salvation myth, and people are buying into it in great numbers. You guessed it already: it is a degenerate version of the machine view of the world, telling us technology will solve everything. Let’s call it techno-transcendentalism.
It goes something like this: humanity may have a few problems at the moment, but we’re on the cusp of an unprecedented revolution (sometimes called the technological singularity). The last few decades, the rate of innovation has increased exponentially. If we extrapolate this trend, it’ll soon reach vertical expansion. Everything will suddenly become possible, all at once. Technology will take over, irreversibly.
This kind of mythological tale usually includes us taking our evolution into our own hands through cyborgism and bioengineering, uploading our consciousness into the cloud, and ultimately venturing out to the stars to conquer the galaxy and to live happily ever after.
There is only one problem: all of this is exceedingly unlikely to actually happen. It is completely unrealistic — utterly detached from reality. That’s why it’s so cynical.
The whole construction is based on exactly those philosophical assumptions that we have thoroughly debunked in the first part of the book. First and foremost, it pretends that we live in a small world, where everything is based on controllable and predictable computation. Because of this, it massively overestimates our technological capabilities, and ignores many warning flags that are clearly present.
If we actually care to read the signs, we will quickly see that our exponential technological growth is not approaching any singularity or techno-optimist miracle. Instead, it is headed for a massive wall — imminent self-termination of our entire civilization. Humanity is out of control, like a cancer growing on the face of the earth. We are depleting our resources and destroying our precious ecological niche through climate change and ecological collapse like there is no tomorrow. Our geopolitical and societal order is on the verge of collapse. We are headed towards doom, not salvation and eternal bliss.
Again, here is why this deluded salvation narrative is so cynical: it is likely to increase the risk of human extinction, not to prevent it. We are innovating and consuming ourselves out of existence. Almost every new piece of technological “progress” creates a whole range of new problems, which require ever more rapid innovations to solve. The whole thing is like one big existential Ponzi scheme, or a game of Russian roulette where we put another bullet into the chamber with each new round we are playing.
We buy into the toxic optimism of the techno-transcendentalist salvation narrative because we want to believe, not because it offers an actionable plan for the future. As our situation becomes increasingly desperate over the coming decades, more and more people will follow this path of deliberate denial. The problem is: if you ignore reality long enough, it has a tendency to catch up with you and bite you.
This is the state of our narrative order then: we have a myth that is accurate, but hopelessly pessimistic, and a myth that is hopelessly optimistic and inaccurate. Admittedly, this is not a very good situation.
But why, you ask, do we need a narrative order anyway? Can’t we just stop telling ourselves tales about ourselves? Can’t we just science our way out of this? All we need for a better understanding of our condition is a better scientific account of what it means to be human.
We do not think this will do the job. We do need an order for the first-person perspective, an order providing a scaffold from which we generate meaning for our own identity. This is not what science does. A scientific account of the human being will still be a third-person account of ourselves. We need it to inform our story, just like we needed it for our normative order. But without truly knowing what it means to be you, you cannot define a proper relationship with the world and other beings around you.
If there is one thing modern humanism has taught us, it is that there is no meaning of life, no narrative order provided for us or imposed on us from outside, but rather meaning in life: the order we create. What we’ve outlined in this chapter provides a general scaffold on which we all — each one of us individually — can build their very own meaningful narrative. We can’t do this for you. You must tell your own story, a story that makes sense to you. This story is neither rigid nor fixed. The stories we tell about ourselves grow with us, within us, as we experience the world from our very own perspective.
The self is not an illusion, it is just not a static thing. In fact, acknowledging the reality and validity of your very own perspective is the most important and grounding first step on our journey towards a new kind of science and view of the world. We cannot know the world if we don’t know ourselves.
We will discuss in the second part of the book how we dynamically build all three orders — narrative, normative, and nomological — from our personal experience in the world, from our own perspective. Taking an explicitly self-referential turn, we will then use this epistemic foundation to investigate how intelligent agents are organised in terms of their dynamic physical and chemical structure so that they can actually come to know the world in this way.
Bear with us. In the end, we will arrive back at the place we started, and you will see the world with different eyes — both literally and metaphorically.
Living beings construct themselves and their offspring as they go along. Therefore, we are the result of everything and everyone that came before us in our history and evolutionary lineage! It’s a humbling but also fascinating and comforting thought that the metabolism of your cells has been running non-stop since the last common ancestor of all terrestrial life oozed around the primordial earth.
During this time, a lot of things have happened that are highly contingent, dependent on circumstances that no limited being could have expected or predicted. Accidents happen, all the time, and quite some of them become frozen into our genealogies. Like it or not, but at least to some extent we are creatures of chance. There is also much randomness in our life. But as we have said before: to know and understand the world means bringing order into the messiness of our experience.
Our ability to generate this kind of order rests on two important aspects of our selves: first, there must be some sort of continuity for the individual to persist through all these unpredictable happenstances. We’ll explore later on how this kind of continuity is achieved in terms of biochemistry and biophysics. For now, we only have to acknowledge that such continuity exists, is required, and must be of a causal and constructive nature, because living beings constantly build and maintain themselves.
The second aspect is coherence: the persistent pattern of the self must hold itself together somehow. Again, we’ll talk about how this actually happens later on. For now, let’s just call this property closure: although an organism depends on external sources of materials and energy, the source of its coherence is internal to its organisation. We keep ourselves together, as long as we manage to hold on to our life.
In fact, this coherent continuity is the essence of life, its core, its key characteristic. We could not exist without it. And, in a way, it repeats itself at the level of our self-aware human flow of consciousness. Similar to our metabolism, we need coherent continuity to recognise ourselves as individuals. This kind of continuity calls for some kind of narrative, a story we tell about ourselves.
This explains why humans are so obsessed with storytelling. To make sense of a world that does not always make sense, we need to first understand ourselves. And to understand ourselves we need to organise our self-image into a coherent narrative of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going — our very own narrative order.
Traditionally, this narrative order has expressed itself in our mythology, which can take different forms, depending on the historical stage of a society. In animistic tribes, for example, myths are a performance of the very reality we experience. In antiquity, myths became abstracted and symbolic stories of impersonated virtues and vices. Think of Greek or Hindu mythology. As history progressed, we treated our myths less and less literally as true. Instead, they became imaginative tales that metaphorically expressed all kinds of perennial truths and wisdom.
To our modern minds, however, classical myths — and also traditional religions — have largely lost their meaning. Like it or not, but the “nones” are the fastest-growing denomination in many developed countries. Old myths seem out of place in our current context, a quaint remembrance of things past. They’ve become mere opinions held by the ignorant, known to the properly educated to be incorrect.
Mind you, this is not how our narrative order was lost. It was merely transformed over the course of history. Modernity came to invent its own range of substitute myths, dealing with our humanist self-reliance (e.g., Robinson Crusoe), our scientific hubris (Frankenstein), our fear of the other (War of the Worlds), what it means to live in an increasingly rationalised world (Sherlock Holmes) with the fascist beast within us all (Batman).
But even these modern mythical tales have largely outlived their usefulness by now. We live in a deeply postmodern age, which has deconstructed all of the above. This is what really killed our narrative order.
All that’s left are two quintessentially postmodern myths. They manage to endure in our current post-factual age due to their utterly cynical nature — each in their own, very distinct way.
The first is the myth of the zombie. It is cynical because it retells our present situation very accurately but offers no way out. How many zombie movies do you know that have a happy ending? (Okay, there is Warm Bodies, but we’re not sure that counts.)
Zombies are hopeless creatures, leading an utterly meaningless existence. They aren’t alive but neither do they die (unless you blow their brains out). They are incapable of change or learning, the perfect metaphor for our meaning crisis. Zombies live in herds, but do not communicate. Look around you when commuting to work, and you’ll immediately see what that means. Zombies slavishly and sluggishly follow their urges. That’s us and our postmodern consumerism! Zombies eat brains. They destroy the very thing that is the source of our pleasure and purpose. It’s all not very subtle.
Zombies are not a good myth: they are the story of our time, no doubt, but they do not give us anything to live up to. What we need is a positive narrative, some kind of vision for the future.
And this is where another kind of cynicism comes in. There is a postmodern salvation myth, and people are buying into it in great numbers. You guessed it already: it is a degenerate version of the machine view of the world, telling us technology will solve everything. Let’s call it techno-transcendentalism.
It goes something like this: humanity may have a few problems at the moment, but we’re on the cusp of an unprecedented revolution (sometimes called the technological singularity). The last few decades, the rate of innovation has increased exponentially. If we extrapolate this trend, it’ll soon reach vertical expansion. Everything will suddenly become possible, all at once. Technology will take over, irreversibly.
This kind of mythological tale usually includes us taking our evolution into our own hands through cyborgism and bioengineering, uploading our consciousness into the cloud, and ultimately venturing out to the stars to conquer the galaxy and to live happily ever after.
There is only one problem: all of this is exceedingly unlikely to actually happen. It is completely unrealistic — utterly detached from reality. That’s why it’s so cynical.
The whole construction is based on exactly those philosophical assumptions that we have thoroughly debunked in the first part of the book. First and foremost, it pretends that we live in a small world, where everything is based on controllable and predictable computation. Because of this, it massively overestimates our technological capabilities, and ignores many warning flags that are clearly present.
If we actually care to read the signs, we will quickly see that our exponential technological growth is not approaching any singularity or techno-optimist miracle. Instead, it is headed for a massive wall — imminent self-termination of our entire civilization. Humanity is out of control, like a cancer growing on the face of the earth. We are depleting our resources and destroying our precious ecological niche through climate change and ecological collapse like there is no tomorrow. Our geopolitical and societal order is on the verge of collapse. We are headed towards doom, not salvation and eternal bliss.
Again, here is why this deluded salvation narrative is so cynical: it is likely to increase the risk of human extinction, not to prevent it. We are innovating and consuming ourselves out of existence. Almost every new piece of technological “progress” creates a whole range of new problems, which require ever more rapid innovations to solve. The whole thing is like one big existential Ponzi scheme, or a game of Russian roulette where we put another bullet into the chamber with each new round we are playing.
We buy into the toxic optimism of the techno-transcendentalist salvation narrative because we want to believe, not because it offers an actionable plan for the future. As our situation becomes increasingly desperate over the coming decades, more and more people will follow this path of deliberate denial. The problem is: if you ignore reality long enough, it has a tendency to catch up with you and bite you.
This is the state of our narrative order then: we have a myth that is accurate, but hopelessly pessimistic, and a myth that is hopelessly optimistic and inaccurate. Admittedly, this is not a very good situation.
But why, you ask, do we need a narrative order anyway? Can’t we just stop telling ourselves tales about ourselves? Can’t we just science our way out of this? All we need for a better understanding of our condition is a better scientific account of what it means to be human.
We do not think this will do the job. We do need an order for the first-person perspective, an order providing a scaffold from which we generate meaning for our own identity. This is not what science does. A scientific account of the human being will still be a third-person account of ourselves. We need it to inform our story, just like we needed it for our normative order. But without truly knowing what it means to be you, you cannot define a proper relationship with the world and other beings around you.
If there is one thing modern humanism has taught us, it is that there is no meaning of life, no narrative order provided for us or imposed on us from outside, but rather meaning in life: the order we create. What we’ve outlined in this chapter provides a general scaffold on which we all — each one of us individually — can build their very own meaningful narrative. We can’t do this for you. You must tell your own story, a story that makes sense to you. This story is neither rigid nor fixed. The stories we tell about ourselves grow with us, within us, as we experience the world from our very own perspective.
The self is not an illusion, it is just not a static thing. In fact, acknowledging the reality and validity of your very own perspective is the most important and grounding first step on our journey towards a new kind of science and view of the world. We cannot know the world if we don’t know ourselves.
We will discuss in the second part of the book how we dynamically build all three orders — narrative, normative, and nomological — from our personal experience in the world, from our own perspective. Taking an explicitly self-referential turn, we will then use this epistemic foundation to investigate how intelligent agents are organised in terms of their dynamic physical and chemical structure so that they can actually come to know the world in this way.
Bear with us. In the end, we will arrive back at the place we started, and you will see the world with different eyes — both literally and metaphorically.
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The authors acknowledge funding from the John Templeton Foundation (Project ID: 62581), and would like to thank the co-leader of the project, Prof. Tarja Knuuttila, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna for hosting the project of which this book is a central part.
Disclaimer: everything we write and present here is our own responsibility. All mistakes are ours, and not the funders’ or our hosts’ and collaborators'.
Disclaimer: everything we write and present here is our own responsibility. All mistakes are ours, and not the funders’ or our hosts’ and collaborators'.
