Syncing Worldview and Consciousness

This work aims at preparing the ground for a constructive dialogue between theoretical metamodernism and eastern orthodoxy. As a matter of our opinion, the philosophical conceptual space best suited to host such an interchange is the phenomenology. Within its confines there might be a place where the moral requirements of metamodern ethos are met by a certain kind of Christian theology. The proposed theology has it seeds in the study of human neurophysiological make-up, ecologies of religious practices that correspond to this make-up, and Christian symbolic grammar as a particularly curious spiritual discipline. The first four articles present the core of the argument and the last three delineate its psychotherapeutic, societal, cultural, and epistemological implications.

1. Patterns of Intelligibility (How Mind Sees). It is argued here that we cannot help but perceive the world through a certain precognitive interpretive schema, as Kant posited in his critique. These lenses of our minds through which we see the world are evolutionarily adapted to apply the symbolic topology of categories like nature, culture, and the self, creating the map that determines our feelings and sense-making process, as Jung posited in his extrapolation of Kant. If, as posits John Vervaeke, thinking is a dynamic top-down/bottom-up process that co-adapts mind to its environment and vice versa, and if thinking is a process of relevance realization — ignoring the irrelevant to zero-in on what is relevant, self-constraining of infinite possibility into the finite things — then, our encounter with reality is always mediated through dynamic grasping of those patterns around us that correspond to the engrams that evolved to orient us in the world of an infinite miasma of facts — potential containers of phenomena, designed to fit the most relevant forms of engagement with the world;
2. Constants of Experience (What Mind Sees). Aforementioned categories fit to the invariances of phenomenological experience, otherwise they would not be synchronized with what is relevant in human lives. Being human requires having a symbolic code that accounts for these invariances of experience, most thoroughly articulated in the language of myth and religious cult. In this text we excavate the constants of mythological traditions, expressed in their stories and rituals;
3. Metamodern Stipulation (What We Need to See). John Vervaeke compares relevance realization to love — just as relevance realization self-constrains its infinite potential to focus on the finite things that are relevant, so does love limit itself to what it loves and in this self-limiting affords self-transcendence. This effectively demands love to be put on the top of the value hierarchy, which has a purchase on a new structure of feeling that would demand a language — a symbolic grammar which is able to unequivocally put love — and truth — anthropomorphized in the incarnate life of Jesus from Nazareth, at the top of the value hierarchy;
4. Metamodern Orthodoxy (How to See What We Need to See). In our view, the aforementioned demand can be met by the way of re-embedding ourselves in the tradition we now find ourselves quite astray from. Incorporating the truths of myths before its time and traditions around its constituency in a proto-metamodern synthesis, eastern orthodoxy is able to be a fairway that meets, interacts, and organically distills the novelties and histories of human condition. In the Christian symbolic grammar the complete set of aforementioned constants of experience has found its articulated representation — it contains figures that correspond to the principal constants of phenomenological experience like nature (mother and virgin Mary), culture (god the father), and the self (Jesus Christ). Counterintuitive as it may sound, but with its thoroughly developed symbolism and dogmatic core that connects humanity with God via enactment of the faith that is placed solely in love and truth, Christianity might help to stay adapted to the rapidly changing world. To be truly progressive requires being traditional;
5. Guilt and Victimhood in Christian Psychotherapy. A short essay on the structure of Christian symbolic grammar;
6. What is Metaplay? An attempt at using Programming Language Theory in service of progressive cause;
7. Ukraine as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing. A short essay on metamodernism in Ukrainian context.

1. The Patterns of Intelligibility.

The way Bruno Latour uses his concept of “empirical metaphysics” strikes me as inherently metamodern in its underlying spirit, though Latour never played with the term, and aligns perfectly with what is argued in this work in relation to “orthodox phenomenology”. It is necessary to understand how Latour revised his earlier social constructionist critique by stating that “if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution”. It is an explicit postcritique move from the unbridled deconstruction of postmodernism to the cautious reconstruction of metamodernism. Although an outspoken relativist, Latour provides a real space for the Christian ontology. In Reassembling the Social, Latour introduces “practical metaphysics,” which posits everything that an actor claims to be a source of his motivation for action as real—“so if someone says, “I was inspired by God to be charitable to my neighbours” we are obliged to recognize the “ontological weight” of their claim, rather than attempting to replace their belief in God’s presence with “social stuff”, like class, gender, imperialism, etc…” [Latour 2005]. For him, to talk about metaphysics or ontology—what really is—implies playing close attention to the “various, contradictory institutions and ideas that bring people together and inspire them to act”. The arguments that are being proposed in this work are even less strong than those of Latour. Instead of the strict ontological claims, what is being stipulated here is that the patterns of intelligibility through which we as humans make sense of the world are most thoroughly and adequately accounted for within the confines of great religious traditions. Underneath it lies a pragmatic assumption that in order to navigate in the world constructed by these patterns it is better to acquaint oneself with the canon of their interpretation.

What follows is an introductory piece concerned with a daunting venture of syncing worldview and consciousness—providing contemporary people with an opportunity to hold a worldview that is commensurate with how consciousness operates in the world and how our actual experience lays itself out—that is, a mythological worldview. Nobody is free from this system of storytelling anyway, and it is in any case better to re-embed oneself within it consciously than to wander through its spiralling labyrinths in a half-aware fashion. In order to attain such an aim no less is required than a re-definition of reality in terms of phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience. Instead of reducing everything to a set of propositions—to mere knowledge—we are to be directly mindful of the meaning of the world around us, that is, we are to be present. It will help to show how the phenomenologies of the old mythological traditions outcompete and include the pristine materialism of reductionist naturalism on its own terms (say, Darwin’s adaptive fitness), for, as stories, these myths correspond more thoroughly to the reality of how a human being finds itself in the world of narration. Great myths are able to thoroughly express the invariances of our experience, for instance, they render chaos and order as fundamental constituents of this experience and narratives as the basic means of accounting, articulating, and navigating it [Bruner 2004]. With this framing, great works of literature can be seen as more true than detailed descriptions of scientific facts, inasmuch as they convey the distilled essence of the human condition and crystallise the patterns of permanent interchange between order and chaos. Music does the same thing for us — when the melody is monotonous and repeating we are bored, and when it is chaotic and every note that follows is unexpected we start longing for an ordered pattern, which the truly great music provides by the way of coalescence on the margin of the two extremes and indulging in the game of the unexpected oscillation. Accordingly, the most fundamental reality is embodied in the great works of fiction, stories that narrate most common plots, symbols, characters, and principalities. This reality is intelligible through the forms or gestalts, focal epitomes of meaning, graspable by human mind by means of abstraction (Latin to draw away), metaphor (Greek to carry forward) and analogy (Greek proportionate). Metaphor can be conceptualized as a “carrying forward” device that takes aboard certain segment of reality and pushes it towards time’s linearity. Abstraction, on the other hand, can be seen as a factory where particular segment of reality is put on a more thin and differentiated string between itself and other segments — by abstracting we are offered to look at a situation from a different perspective. And to synchronize with the flow of time one has to move in space, as if avoiding the blows of the wind of time. Instruments of abstraction and metaphor help us keep our maps of meaning adapted to the changing environment. In fact, these are the very instruments that create our languages in the first place (Deutscher 2015). The heterogeneity of the commenced entreprise is expressed in the interdisciplinary framework forged to meet its demands. In this first text we tread on John Vervaeke’s concept of relevance realization in order to make some broader stipulations about the way mind encounters the world. As the mind has been fragmented so have we and our self understanding — modern people hold scientific worldview, but they do not fit in it, since they were not biologically adapted to the worldview bereft of meaning and sacredness. It is the Cognitive Science that, according to John Vervaeke, “gives us instruments to put our minds back together again, and then put it back together again with the world, where, in our times, informational glut seems to be combined with a wisdom famine”.

1.2. Neurophysiology of Chaos and Order.

Neurophysiology studies the relation of brain and nervous system to cognition and behavior. Already at the end of the 19th century, reductionist scientists were confident that consciousness would be described and explained in the course of the coming years. However, it did not happen in the course of the coming years, nor did it happen in the course of any time at all, including ours. What is more, the question of the structure and operation of human consciousness turned out to be so complex that many began to consider its description impossible in principle. The first ones to prove it empirically were scientists involved in the development of the artificial intelligence. They realised the impossibility of not just thinking proper, but even the navigation and perception of the surrounding world by the disembodied computational intelligence. They understood that in order to function adequately in the space and time of the laboratory, a computer must be embodied, must have a body. Even in order to simply see the objects of the surrounding world, the intellect needs itself to be a localised part of the material world, to be one object among other objects; it cannot be a magical subject at the non-spin point of total objectivity, it cannot be god. Additionally, even when the robots with analogues of the nervous system were designed, they were not able to carry out much activity in the world because they lacked the pre-cognitive value hierarchy, which is necessary to impose on the world since there is too much information to perceive — in order to actually focus on one thing among all the other things, a value judgement has to be made. In human beings these judgements are guided by interest, one of those things we cannot control. In other words, in order to act in the world one has to somehow realise the relevance of the things it consists of. As writes Rowan WIlliams, “I live in a world where I don’t simply bump into things, but a world where I bump into signs — that is, things that communicate, that trigger further symbolic communication, that produce further utterance and make a difference at that level. Consciousness is located: within the material world and within the world of language”.

The newer studies of brain structures have discovered the division into right and left hemispheres that seems to lay at the root of human operation. “Because of the bicameral nature of the brain,” writes Rowan Williams, “there are different kinds of awareness operative in us — one cluster of operations dealing with detail, small-scale recognition, the other dealing with constructive and connecting perception.” The left side of the brain is involved when we perform familiar, repetitive acts, when we perform a routine. However, at the moment when something goes wrong, when our actions stop leading to the expected results, the more creative right hemisphere of the brain “turns on”. Using a popular language, when everything was in order, we did not really think about what we were doing, we worked unconsciously and automatically, as skilled craftsmen do, but at the moment when a strange unexpected phenomenon had actualised itself, we found ourselves in the place where our acts do not match wanted outcomes, we found ourselves in the unexplored territory of chaos, which is dealt with by once again becoming conscious of the processes we were unconsciously carrying. Thus we bring the situation back to the state of order — known territory — where what is happening again matches our expectations. Thence, we can talk about the side of ‘chaos’ and the side of ‘order’, the side of unawareness and the side awareness. Separately, both modes of functioning are pathological — when everything sticks to the plan, when all that happens is expected, we become excruciatingly bored since, as Dostoevsky had put it, “we don’t want to be mere mechanical piano keys”. And when everything that happens, happens for the first time, when new phenomena shines forth and blinds us, where the mechanisms of getting what we want do not match the chaotic reality, we go mad because of the overabundance of novelty. The meaning and sustainability is to be found in the oscillation between the two modes, when we are faced with novelty, but are being able to incorporate it into our broader understanding of the world. As in our first example, where the appearance of chaos was dealt with by becoming conscious of one’s actions, the tyranny of stultifying order is dealt with by allowing the space for novelty, by leaving the door open for some chaos. In other words, our brain is adapted to act in two different modes — one is applied when we are “in the explored territory”, where expected things happen and where the consequences of our actions correspond to our exceptions, that is, in the stultifying yet safe domain of culture and order; the second is applied when we are “in the unexplored territory”, where we are faced with ambivalent (threatening yet promising) novelty whose nature is yet to be discerned by becoming conscious of what is happening at present, by paying attention and telling the truth — thence making sense and order out of chaos.

Novelty just appears, it shines forth (which is the etymological meaning of phenomena) in the material reality (Aristotle derived word matter from word forest) that faces human consciousness by disrupting the familiar order of things, by transgressing the boundaries set by culture. All matter and nature is once born (in womb) and once dies (in tomb). All culture and theory is dead yet eternal, it gives protective borders and recipes which tend to become obsolete and thus desperately need permanent upgrading. Sheer potentiality of the forest is pathological, as is the traditional culture of the city. No wonder that the place where the two of them meet each other — the garden — is the image of Paradise, where both modes of reality thrive (unconscious surrender of “walking with god” and presence of the serpent of chaos who demands self-consciousness).

At this point we have encountered five essential constants: (1) protective culture (positive ‘order’), (2) tyrannical culture (negative ‘order’), (3) womb of nature (positive ‘chaos’), and (4) tomb of nature (negative ‘chaos’), and (5) individual that finds herself in encounter with these constants (consciousness).

1.3. Neurophysiology of Religious Belief.

It is important to understand that the dichotomy of chaos and order is not balanced, there is no status quo. McGilchrist demonstrates that in the case of the human brain, consciousness does not have an upper hand when dealing with the unconscious, but the latter does when dealing with the former, that is, consciousness permanently submits to the unconscious, thus proving the point that Carl Jung was at pains of articulating. Erich Neumann, in his turn, brings Jung’s work to a logical conclusion by showing how individual and collective human activities express these patterns in everyday life and history, commencing, in fact, with the very unset of human consciousness, dozens of thousands years ago. He takes evolutionary biology very seriously into his calculations and shows how human societies have tried to address these patterns of conscious engagement in the world by the successive means of ritual, myth, religion, and art. Throughout evolution, people did it more and more consciously, at first embodying these patterns in action and ritualising those actions that led to fine consequences while tabooing actions that led to negative consequences, and only thereafter articulating these patterns with help of mythological and religious narratives. Erich Neumann treats myths and religion not as primitive pre-scientific delusions, but as evidence of fundamental archetypes that describe the basic constants of human experience, true phenomenology, where the wisdom of thousands of human generations is amalgamated and distilled in the language of myth. One does not live in the material world. And one does not live in the world of abstract ideas. One lives on the border between the two, where the collision of these dimensions takes place — one lives in the world of meaning, the world of what is significant. Otherwise, we would not be able to function in the world where an infinite number of things is occurring at once. In order to act one has to possess a simplified map of the world, a pre-cognitive schema that renders phenomena around with meaning by putting it inside a certain story. The problem of contemporary people is that their culturally constructed worldview is set at such odds with the natural engrams of evolutionary experiene that the divergence between the two endangers intragroup conflicts (see identity politics), alienation (precariat), and extinction of care (see suicide epidemics and ecological indifference). We do not only live in the scientific world (matter), we also live in a world of meaning (what matters) — and it is primarily to this world of significance that our bodies and psyches are adapted to. Objective computing of a hierarchy-flattened material reality has nothing to how consciousness operates. Machine metaphors have “a set of particularly complicated associations”, writes Rowan Williams. “A machine exits in order to solve problems; problems that are extraneous to itself. We design mechanical processes in order to produce specified functions. A machine fails if it does not deliver the function we have specified for it, so that an internal combustion engine which fails to drive a car but which very satisfactorily boils eggs is not a good machine. But in what sense can we say that consciousness in general, or the brain in particular, is a ‘machine’ in that sense? Is it something that exists in order to solve problems extraneous to itself? Prima facie the answer has to be no”. The evolution, if the reader will forgive me talking about it as it is a conscious agent, has adapted us to be the meaning-fuelled creatures whose mode of being in the world automatically presupposes a value-laden hierarchy of salience. Without this structure we just cannot exist as humans. It might be stipulated that our worldview has to correspond to the fundamental characteristics of human consciousness and not to the incomplete and reductive scientific framework (which presupposes our ability to regularly look at the world through the eyes of not-existing-god from a non-spin zone of omniscience. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics are pretty clear on that — there is no such zone. At best, it is by no means accessible to humans. In the words of James Surwillo, “not only are there two worlds, one of the metaphysical landscape and one of the rational and concrete, but the metaphysical precedes the rational because of a mystical lens of consciousness that science has not yet deciphered”.) Consciousness is an only possible vessel of human engagement in the world — the ultimate locus of reality in terms of meaning, cognition, and experience par excellence — the only possible interlocutor between phenomena and the human beings who experience it. Thus solely from the perspective of human consciousness it is possible to construct a worldview that will show us reality we actually need to see. As relevance realising beings, we do not live in the world of matter, rather, we live in the world of what matters, where meaning or salience is the fundamental constituent of reality. This symbolic landscape was discovered and partially mapped out in the secular setting by the analytical psychologists. More recently, the task of mapping out the human psyche was continued by Jordan Peterson, who had constructed a holistic schema of archetypal symbols through which the consciousness dynamically engages in the phenomenological reality. In his book Maps of Meaning, he delineates the basic archetypes of human experience. It is thanks to these archetypes that we possess an ability to perceive what we encounter as meaningful (and thus learn). The archetypes — psychic counterparts of inherited instincts — are actualized when phenomena that enters consciousness corresponds as a puzzle to the type of phenomena to which a particular archetype serves as a vessel of perception (whether it be narratological or imagistic). In other words, if phenomena in our environment corresponds to a particular archetype, we find this phenomena interesting and salient. The archetypes may be conceptualised as the pre-cognitive structures that come into action (render something of the perceived phenomena meaningful and worthy of attention) when signals that come from the environment correspond to the engrams of experience shaped by evolution. In other words, archetypes have no content, but themselves are the primordial containers that wait to be filled with an according data from the surrounding world in order to be activated and make a person pay attention to something. If for Jung the main six archetypes are primarily related to the process of individuation in the psyche (ego/self, anima/animus, and shadow/persona), Neumann is addressing more collective nature of archetypes, such as positive/negative chaos (feminine), positive/negative order (masculine), protagonist/antagonist hero (consciousness) where. Due to the ambivalent filling of the archetypes, nature (matter) can bring good news and be a fertile Mother, but can also bring bad news and destroy. And culture (spirit) can take the form of both meritocratic social hierarchy (wise king) and sociopathic tyranny (Joseph Stalin), a system devoid of living morality, one where the individual who strives to update the obsolete culture is faced with nothing but death. But the individual also can play an ambivalent role — either of a hero, Abel, or of an adversary, Cain. In this way, Jordan Peterson’s “Maps of Meaning: the Architecture of Belief” is a scientific explanation of why mythologies not just deserve to be taken seriously, but in fact are the inevitable garments of human make-up. We cannot help but have belief systems to properly function in the world, the question is how well are these systems adjusted to the psyche and its environment. Peterson’s hypothesis is that the traditional religious systems are precisely the ones that are best suited for proper functioning in the world, since they are holistic, non-reductive, allowing for dependence on others and for humility without humiliation, in striking contrast to incomplete, partial, reductive, and arrogant secular ideologies (so-called “isms”, rightly deconstructed by the postmodernists).

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