The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent

Thus, a tree, an animal, a mountain, or a chair each has its own intrinsic nature. In a human being, one's intrinsic nature is continually buffeted by the feelings, emotions, and passions arising from contact with the world. These all combine within the heart-mind to determine one's inner experience and consequent behavior.

Heart-mind

Consistent with the Neo-Confucian understanding, researchers report that, when the PFC regulates emotions in a healthy way, it does so not by repressing or overriding emotional states but by integrating them into appropriate decisions and actions.

Neo confucianism and pfc

“The infant cries all day,” Wang wrote, “without hurting his throat. This is the extreme of harmony.” Harmony emerges not from repressing or transcending sincere emotions but from honoring each of them as they arise.

Wang yang ming. Harmony

to stay connected with one's liang zhi and act in a manner truly consistent with it, a person needed to utilize conceptual faculties such as discernment and self-assessment.

Liangzhi

Conducting one's life with cheng required harmonizing intellectual understanding, ethical engagement, and emotional intelligence into one integrated whole. Someone who could accomplish this was able to feel connected with the integrity of the entire natural universe. Attaining this state was recognized as sagehood—generally viewed as the ultimate intention of anyone interested in fulfilling his destiny as a human being.

Interesting .Harmony.cheng.sagehood.

Ren is not only about optimizing one's own life for the greatest spiritual fulfillment but also about humans in society existing in the most harmonious terms with each other and within the natural world.

Ren

Steven Weinberg, “The more we know of the universe, the more meaningless it appears.”

Wow

by the early twentieth century, when Western colonial powers established their stranglehold over imperial China, many Chinese intellectuals viewed the Neo-Confucian tradition as responsible for the debilitated state of their civilization.

Blame

“Let the human race,” he wrote, “recover that right over Nature which belongs to it by divine bequest.”

But why does china have so uch pollution nowadays and the west is opposite?

As George Lakoff puts it, “Metaphor plays a very significant role in determining what is real for us…. Metaphorical concepts…structure our present reality. New metaphors have the power to create a new reality.”

New metaphors

After creating Adam and Eve, God commands them: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

God as the lawgiver

Eve persuades Adam to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, leading to the Fall and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, at which point humans lose their dominion over nature. The Christian conception of nature, therefore, was based on a belief that man's authority over the natural world had once been absolute, but this condition was lost after the Fall.

The control was absolute

The view of nature as a property to be measured by a divine architect is consistent with the monotheistic presumption that the ultimate source of value in the universe lies not in the natural world but in God's eternal sphere. This conception leads inexorably to the desacralization of nature: it is no longer sacred in its own right, as in earlier hunter-gatherer and agrarian cultures, but merely the constructed artifice of an external creator.

Nature and body as machine

how can you say that Heaven produced them just for him? Mosquitoes and gnats suck his blood; tigers and wolves devour his flesh—but we don't assert that Heaven produced man for the benefit of mosquitoes and gnats, or for tigers and wolves.

Logic

The Song dynasty artists’ portrayal of the natural world in relation to humanity is illuminating. In some paintings, there is no sign of humanity whatsoever, but, usually, the human presence can be found unobtrusively within the landscape, as though it were a natural outcropping.

the meaning behind no human

Similarly, the ancient Chinese presumably had no intention to devastate their forests and exacerbate the flooding of their rivers, but the cumulative impact of their activities caused these effects in spite of their desire to harmonize with nature. Even with these occasional environmental disasters, however, traditional Chinese society remained sustainable. Most forests regrew, ecosystems recuperated, and the human relationship with the natural world stayed within certain parameters.

How true is this

The Mediterranean landscape, loved nowadays for its vines, olive trees, and scented herbs, is in fact the result of the relentless pressure of civilization. Its hillsides were once forested with evergreen trees mixed with oaks, beeches, pines, and cedars, but these were long ago used up for fuel and construction materials.

Mediterranean Landscape

The extensive irrigation that gave rise to Mesopotamia's strong, centralized institutions caused continual waterlogging of the soil, which, after evaporation in the hot sun, left a residue of salt that gradually accumulated to make the land increasingly infertile.

Mesopotamia And white earth. Present day iraq

Gunpowder was first formulated in China in the ninth century by Taoist alchemists looking for the secret of immortality, and the Chinese quickly discovered ways to use it in warfare. But, in spite of gunpowder's fearsome capability, Chinese society remained virtually unaffected by its use. In Europe, however, as soon as gunpowder was incorporated into the military, the effects were profound and immediate.

wow.Gunpowder

The pattern that emerges from these two stories is the propensity of Europeans to use innovative technologies to change the rules of the game and thus gain a power advantage.

The meaning of tech. Western - power. Eastern - equilibrium

Ashoka did not believe in relinquishing power itself but rather in using it to promote an enlightened set of values, an approach that was not unique to him but imbued in his culture. During the reign of his grandfather, a classic of statecraft named the Arthasastra was written, which advises how a ruler should treat nations conquered in battle. “Having acquired new territory,” it declares, “the conqueror shall substitute his virtues for the enemy's vices and where the enemy was good, he shall be twice as good.

Interesting. Arthasastra

“With Fifty Men We Could Subjugate Them All”

Christophor Columbus's letter to the spanish king

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Potosí boasted thirty-six magnificently decorated churches and imported the finest luxury goods from all over the world. Its wealth was legendary: the streets to the cathedral were said to have been resurfaced with silver bars. But this wealth arose from the wholesale exploitation of the indigenous people forcibly seized from across Inca territory and used as slave labor for mining the silver.

How wealthy one is is how poor the other one is

This attitude became so ingrained that even Benjamin Franklin, known for his otherwise tolerant values, gladly justified the slaughter of the Indians, writing of “the design of Providence to extirpate those savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth.”

Lol

Even in the fourteenth century, Marco Polo, who grew up in Venice, one of the most sophisticated European cities of its time, was transfixed when he came across the Chinese capital of Hangzhou, describing it as “without doubt the finest and most splendid city in the world,…anyone seeing such a multitude would believe it a stark impossibility that food could be found to fill so many mouths.”

marco polo and hangzhou

Toby Huff, “The Arab achievement is so impressive that we must ask why the Arabs did not go ‘the last mile’ to the modern scientific revolution.” The Arabs, in Huff's view, “were perched on the forward edge of one of the greatest intellectual revolutions ever made, but they declined to make the grand transition” to the modern scientific conception of the universe. What stopped them?

The blasphemy of reason.faylasuf

If China was indeed heading somewhere other than a scientific revolution, what was their intended destination?

Interesting Question

“I've heard that where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you've lost what was pure and simple; and the loss of the pure and simple leads to restlessness of the spirit. Where there is restlessness of the spirit, the Tao no longer dwells. It's not that I don't know about your machine—I would be ashamed to use it!”

The farmer. The machine heart

This colorful story highlights a deep-rooted mistrust of technology, driven not necessarily by a reactionary fear of change but by a worldview that values, above all else, harmonization with the Tao in all one's activities.

Main

Other systems of thought accepted personal intuition as a valid source of knowledge. A unique characteristic of scientific thought is its rejection of this belief, replacing it with the principle of objectivity: the idea that there are fixed truths about the universe that can be objectively validated.

Science and the rejection of personal intuition

The cognitive structure that visualizes a fixed Truth to be sought through the application of logic and reason can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece. This suggests a hypothesis that the underlying cause of the Scientific Revolution occurring in Europe was cognitive and can be found in the conceptual structures that shaped patterns of thought in the collective European consciousness over thousands of years.

Logic and the reason why Greece root and science

A careful reading of history shows that, rather than the two being implacable foes, science, in fact, belongs to the same cognitive family as Christianity: conceived by the same ancestor, incubated in Christianity's embrace for a millennium, and coming of age as a staunch proponent of its Christian heritage.

Christianity and science have same roots

In the patterns of early Greek thought, we already see the core characteristics of scientific cognition: believing in natural laws, abstracting generalizations from particular findings, and extensively using both logical proofs and empirical methods.

Greek root of scientific revolution

Paul felt there was no place in Christianity for both the reason of the Greek philosophers and faith in God. “The wisdom of the world,” he wrote, “is foolishness to God.” As Paul's writings became more authoritative, they established battle lines between science and religion that remain in place to this day.

Paul

An important focus of the debate was the difference between reasoned conviction and blind faith or pistis. Celsus, following the Platonic tradition, saw reason as the only valid route to understanding the cosmos. Pistis was the state of mind of the ignorant who blindly accepted whatever they were told. And yet, to the astonishment of Celsus and his peers, pistis formed the foundation of the Christian approach.

Reasoned conviction or blind faith (pistis)

The difference, for Origen, was that Plato's ideas could be accessed only by those with a scholarly education: it is as though Plato spiced his dish to please the upper-class palate, whereas Christian preachers, flavoring their sermons with pistis, “[cooked] for the multitude.”

Interesting. Blind faith for the public

“Let us imagine,” he ponders, “that intelligence had resided, not in mankind, but in some vast solitary and isolated jelly-fish, buried deep in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. It would have no experience of individual objects, only with the surrounding water. Motion, temperature and pressure would provide its basic sensory data. In such a pure continuum the discrete would not arise and there would be nothing to count.”

What if there is nothing to count. Michael atiyah

If, instead of being the gateway to “the mind of God,” mathematics is a specific language constructed by the human mind, there may be other constructions of meaning offering alternative truths that are no less valid.

Wow. What if other language produce different truth

Lorenz among them, has forged a new way of understanding nature that has the potential to transform the predominant modern worldview. This approach sees nature as a complex, dynamic web of interconnected systems, which works according to certain principles that can be investigated but never completely controlled. With its contradiction of the Western fixed, mechanical view of nature, the new systems way of thinking has a surprising amount in common with traditional Chinese ideas about the universe.

Lorenz

Aristotle gave an example of a house. One person might describe a house in terms of what it's composed of: stone, bricks, or timber. Another might evaluate it in terms of how it fulfills its purpose: say, to provide shelter. Which of these, Aristotle asked, is the natural scientist? Only the person, he answered, who combines both.

Aristotle

Goethe believed a scientist should approach nature as a participant and that scientific insight arises through not detached observation but an intuitive sense of connection with nature's dynamic flux.

Goethe

Alfred North Whitehead saw continual transformation as a defining principle of the natural world and recognized the impossibility of a completely objective view of the universe. “There is no holding nature still and looking at it,” he wrote. “The real point is that the essential connectedness of things can never be safely omitted.”

Alfred north Whitehead. Another blow to the mechanical worldview

a prominent European philosophical school known as phenomenology raised these ideas to a new level of sophistication. Its underlying basis was the rejection of the notion of scientific objectivity, replacing it with the recognition that humans are embodied in the physical world and that our understanding of the universe arises from how we are situated within it. Philosophers such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger explored the profound implications arising from this.

Phonomenology.

The most complex system that we know of is the human mind, and that was the focus of study for one group of thinkers, who developed what became known as Gestalt psychology. Their fundamental insight was that the mind works by creating a holistic, integrated pattern of meaning from its surroundings, which cannot be reduced into an aggregation of its discrete elements. Its central finding, “The whole is other than the sum of its parts,” has become a hallmark of much systems thinking since then.

Gestalt psychology. Human mind

Another group, led by German biologist Ernst Haeckel, conducted an investigation into the complexity of nature. Creating the science of ecology, they examined the tangled networks of systems that exist among the different organisms that make up an environment and explored the profound and sometimes unexpected effects that changes in one system can have on another with which it is connected.

Science of ecology. Interconnection between different systems

Newton's laws, and the sciences they spawned, had been based on a conceptualization of an idealized universe that truly existed only in the mathematical abstractions they postulated. They worked so well because, in many cases, the messy complications of the real world had relatively little effect.

The limit of science. "with other things being equal"

If you want to speak of clouds, of mountains, of rivers, of lightning, the geometric language of school is inadequate.

Wow.Fratal geometry of nature.mandelbrot

Schrödinger's groundbreaking answer to this age-old question began with the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the universe is undergoing an irreversible process of entropy: an inexorable decline from order to disorder.

Schrodinger. Entropy

However, Schrödinger observed that while the universe as a whole undergoes entropy, life somehow manages to reverse this process. Living organisms, he noted, survive through sucking order out of the entropy around them and organizing it in a way beneficial to them. They do this through the process known in biology as metabolism. Schrödinger called this process negative entropy (or negentropy) and saw it as the defining characteristic of life.

Metabolism. Negative entropy

But how do other systems move into a state of self-organized coherence? There are two indispensable factors. There must be a large number of individual elements interacting with and influencing each other, and the system must be continually interacting with the environment, usually containing smaller systems within it. As the system's complexity reaches a certain critical mass, it achieves a newly coherent state, sometimes dramatically, in a process known as emergence.

Emergence