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"The world has in its shoals all sorts of spiritual beings. It is only a matter of an opportunity to bring them somehow to the right place." -Rudolf Steiner
In a recent article, Dr. Michael Levin asks the question, ‘how best to explain the properties and capabilities of embodied minds?’. The rest of the article explores empirical and highly logical ways of addressing that question, accompanied by illustrations, and concludes that ‘our ignorance about the capabilities of matter together with the patterns that ingress into specific architectures is vast’. He rightly encourages humility on the part of scientists and engineers who tend to reduce mind and life to arrangements of matter, and also on the part of philosophers and spiritualists who tend to dogmatically assert what arrangements of matter can embody the qualities of life and mind. In both cases, the thinkers are reducing the complex dynamics of phenomenal experience to their preferred mental pictures, into rigid frameworks and conclusions, instead of humbly and patiently investigating the experiential relations to attain fresh and ever-expanding insights.
But let’s take a step back to the original question. Most people would feel that the meaning of such a question is already clear - particularly, what it means to ‘best explain’ - and the primary task is to try and answer (not understand) the question. Is it possible, however, that moving directly to answering the question is putting the cart before the horse? Asked another way, are there any hidden presuppositions embedded in our concept of ‘explanation’ that may lead our thinking in a suboptimal direction for answering the question? If we don’t address the question before the question, so to speak, then our initial presuppositions will remain embedded in our subsequent reasoning, steering it in this or that direction, and we remain none the wiser. We can start our exploration with the obvious facts of experience. Whenever we attempt to ‘explain’ some phenomenal experiences and their lawful relations, we utilize our thinking in a certain way.
There are broadly two distinct ways in which we can utilize our thinking to ‘explain’ various phenomenal relations. These are not fundamentally different ways of thinking, but rather they arise from the manner in which we relate to and understand the mental pictures we weave together in the unitary act of thinking, i.e. the memory images, words, mathematical symbols, etc. that we condense and manipulate with our cognitive activity. Whenever we contemplate phenomenal experience, we instinctively steer our cognitive activity through the intuited meaning of that experience and anchor this meaning in our mental images and verbal thoughts (e.g. the ‘inner voice’). That is true regardless of what sort of meaningful experiences we are contemplating, such as the transformation of (quantized) sensory states in natural scientific inquiries or the transformation of our mental states when playing a game of chess. The distinct explanatory approaches emerge from how we understand and relate to the mental pictures thus condensed.
To get a feel for the difference, we can imagine that we decide to slowly count from 1 to 10 in our mind. As we progress from pronouncing "1" to "2" to "3", etc. we have a very clear intuitive sense of how our momentary verbalizations are structured through time. The auditory vibrations of our inner voice, as we pronounce the words of the numbers, do not meet us like a mysterious foreign object, for example, the erratic movements of a fly buzzing around, but as an orderly progression of inner counting states guided by our meaningful intent to count. If we are currently at "5", even though we haven’t yet reached ten, we have a good intuitive sense of where the process is going and what inner state will soon condense at our mental horizon, even though we haven’t yet pronounced the next numbers in our mind. This intuitive sense also gives us orientation for how we have reached our present “5” state through the previously pronounced numbers. We can call this sort of process for ‘explaining’ phenomenal experiences and their lawful relations, the intuitive thinking process.
We always experience this process, but normally we have very little consciousness of that experience and, instead, our cognitive activity feels involved in another process. To better feel the contrast of this other process with the intuitive thinking process, we can imagine that, just when we pronounce "5", we somehow forget that we are intentionally counting. Then we hear in our mind "5", but it sounds like a thought that randomly pops in our mind. We have no intuitive sense of why it appeared or that something else should appear afterward. In this case, we make a mental picture of the sound "5" and then try to complement it with other mental pictures that should 'explain' it, like chemical reactions, neurons, supernatural beings who projected the sound in our mind, and so forth. We feel satisfied with our explanation when these mental pictures are snapped together like puzzle pieces and seem to make intuitive sense, i.e. they feel internally consonant with each other and with other phenomenal facts of experience in a way that we call ‘logical’. Notice, however, how this explanation made of snapping mental images together remains abstract and we don’t know whether our mental puzzle faithfully reflects reality, even though the pieces may fit together very convincingly.
Now we can contrast this standard process with the experience of suddenly remembering our counting activity. This provides us with a completely different kind of ‘explanation’ for “5”. We no longer need to assemble mental puzzles to find an explanation for it, but instead, our intent to count fills the vacuum and makes intuitive sense of why the "5" appeared in our consciousness. The fact that these different explanatory approaches emerge from forgetting or remembering what we are always doing with our cognitive activity illustrates how the difference is simply a matter of perspective on our mental pictures and their lawful relations. When we remember our intent to count, our perspective on the “5” inverts and we feel that our intent becomes the explanation that we were otherwise seeking through abstract arrangements of mental puzzle pieces. It can be metaphorically depicted as the shift in perspective that allows for hidden images to emerge in the flattened pixel patterns of a Magic Eye stereogram.
Those of us familiar with these stereograms probably remember the frustrating experience of trying to stare intensely at the pixels and analyze them in some way until we see the hidden image. We may have tried to isolate certain parts of the pixels and then combine them in ways that could potentially reveal a new image. After learning that this effort leads nowhere, perhaps we loosely gazed at the patterns until the hint of some new image began to take shape. Yet, as soon as that happens, our mind typically latches onto the meaning of that hinted image, like Eve grasping at the apple, and then everything quickly flattens out again. The hidden depth image is always there, but normally our cognitive perspective is conditioned by habits that collapse its realization into the manipulation of flattened pixel patterns analogous to the standard explanatory approach in scientific inquiries. In this case, we don’t even suspect that a new kind of inner effort and perspective is needed before the depth image embedded in the pixel patterns naturally reveals itself in a sustained way.
If we pay careful attention to the flow of experience, most phenomena in our sensory and psychic environment meet us exactly like flattened pixels with little relation to our cognitive agency, like the "5" sound after we have forgotten our intent to count. If we are honest with ourselves, we don't feel like these phenomena, including our impulses, moods, and emotions, are guided along the 'curvature' of our meaningful intents like the counting states. Instead, they are more like the erratic fly buzzing around - we dimly sense there is meaningful activity going on, but the patterns of that activity feel like relatively isolated phenomena without a clear sense of from whence they came and to whence they are going. That is even true for the majority of thoughts that pop into our mind based on various internal triggers and that we passively surrender to throughout the day. A helpful image for this ordinary life situation is a chessboard about 10-15 moves in, if we imagine we just popped into existence at that board state.
Thus we awaken in our cognitive life immersed in complicated transformations of sensory perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and impulses (at the individual and collective scales), which all move in their unique lawful ways, without any lucid awareness of how we got into this particular state. The pathways of experience which resulted in the state were traversed entirely instinctively in childhood and early adolescence. Through our instinctive natural development, we have developed a dim orientation to the complex lawfulness of the transforming currents (analogous to the rules of chess), but if someone were to ask us why the knight is placed on this or that particular square, we could only come up with some post-hoc mental puzzle to explain its position. The modern explanatory intellect is like a person who only studies the limited movements of the pawns (visual sensations and corresponding memory pictures) and tries to extrapolate the lawfulness of the moving rooks, knights, bishops, and queens exclusively in terms of pawn-gestures.
Once again, we can contrast that with the intuitive orientation we would experience if we were playing the game and moving one set of pieces. Now we have a clear sense of the ideas we were working with as white or black, which eventually embodied itself in this particular board position. Our ideas were not static objects but dynamically unfolded across time according to the constraints of the chess rules and our opponent’s ideas. To the extent that we can resonate with the latter ideas, which have continually impressed into our state and nudged our intentional activity in this or that direction, the more coherent our intuitive orientation will be to the present board state. That perceptual state then acts as a rich anchor for our intuition of the dynamic game flow, involving not only our cognitive intents but those of at least one other agency, stabilizing that intuition and providing a basis for us to intuit new possibilities of movement toward the realization of our goal.
When we move from such examples involving strictly human agency to the domain of biophysical configurations, it is typical to revert our perspective from the intuitive thinking process into the standard approach. Thus we observe lawful patterns and cognitive-like properties in the biological and physical spaces and wonder, ‘how best to explain them’, i.e. how best to click together mental puzzle pieces until they feel convincing enough to serve as a sufficient answer for our question. With this approach, even though we may caution for humility, we are necessarily elevating our abstract mental puzzles into the domain of ‘true knowledge’ about the phenomenal experiences we are contemplating. A helpful image for this standard approach is if we imagine taking apples (thoughts) that have fallen off of an apple tree (intuitive thinking process) and, instead of retracing the apples to the source from which they grew and precipitated to the ground, we assemble the apples into the shape of an “apple tree”. Then we habitually confuse our apple-tree model for the living tree from which our apples fell.
The intuitive thinking process, on the other hand, does not forsake precise observation and logical thinking but admits that these, without a ‘Magic Eye’ shift in cognitive perspective, are insufficient to reach the true apple tree, i.e. the ‘Platonic space’ of ideal patterns which are embodied in the psychic and bio-physical spaces that we are always utilizing to ouroborically (recursively) contemplate those spaces. To accomplish that shift, as we saw with the counting and chess examples, it would make the most sense to begin the 'explanation' (or the intuitive exploration that becomes synonymous with explanation) of the properties and capabilities of embodied minds in our embodied mind, i.e. in the intimate domain of our real-time cognitive process where we feel to have lucid clarity of how the metamorphoses of mental states unfold. It is the process by which we survey the meaning of observed cognitive properties, but normally take for granted as something we can ‘just do’ and thus leave cemented and unquestioned. We routinely take our thinking out for ‘test drives’ but rarely examine what kind of combustion processes are going on ‘under the hood’.
When we take this living process for granted, it doesn’t occur to us that there is hidden depth to it that can be explored, which would unsurprisingly lead to the explanations we are always seeking through that process (but not necessarily in the format that we are expecting to find them). We realize that it couldn’t be any other way. If our explanatory mental pictures about the embodied patterns have precipitated from the living thinking process, then isn’t it the most natural thing to seek the deeper reality of those patterns within that same process as it unfolds in real-time? That is something we routinely sense when we think about the products of human culture. For example, if we are contemplating how each town has a courthouse, we instinctively sense that the best way to understand this patterned appearance is to explore the human ideas invested in city planning, architectural design, the ideals of fairness and justice, and so on. Preferably, we explore ideas from recent times rather than from a few centuries ago. It is implicit that the more our thinking has thoroughly probed such domains of meaning, the more we will be able to lucidly ‘explain’ the patterned appearance of courthouses.
The only time we would feel like that it is unnatural or a ‘waste of time’ to investigate the thinking process is when our thinking is conditioned by a dualistic assumption that separates our mental pictures from the objects and processes they reflect upon in the ‘natural world’, treating the former as running along a parallel track that somehow corresponds to the latter. Indeed, that is a ubiquitous assumption that conditions modern thinking, especially in those who imagine they have transcended the assumption simply by adopting a ‘monist’ metaphysic or worldview. Such people are forgetting that the dualism resides, not in the content of one’s thoughts, but in the experience of those thoughts, i.e. the feeling that they exist in an experiential space orthogonal to their contents and merely reflect those contents without participating in them. We need to get under the hood of such an experience before it can be creatively refashioned.
The LIFO (last in, first out) principle in computer programming can be metaphorically instructive here - since the human cognitive process which explores existence through its stream of reflective mental pictures was the last to arrive in World evolution, it should be the 'first out', i.e. the first to be turned inside-out and intuitively understood. We can't undress our socks (the bio-physical spaces) before we first untie our shoes (our human cognitive space). As another metaphor, our real-time cognitive process, by which we try to explain the ideal patterns embodied in the bio-physical space, is where the Platonic space is most 'in-phase' with its embodied perceptual forms, i.e. our intimate stream of mental images, verbal thoughts, symbols, etc. The latter feel like they closely mirror our cognitive intents and activity, and that the very experience of their unfoldment from that activity also explains their embodied cognitive properties.
The biological-physical forms, on the other hand, are initially quite out-of-phase with their corresponding Platonic archetypes. When we intend to move our arm, for example, the perceptions may or may not mirror our cognitive intent depending on the independent state of our body, i.e. whether it is in good health, our arm is sore, our joints are stiff, we are paralyzed, etc. Even when the arm movement feels to faithfully reflect our intent, we have little clarity on the inner biophysical process of the nerves, muscles, cells, etc. that make this movement possible. Here there are mysterious archetypes at work that feel unrelated to our lucid cognitive agency and thus we feel they need to be ‘explained’ by mental puzzles. We sleep through that entire biophysical process, while we feel much more awake in the weaving of thought-images when doing philosophy, math, or simply imaginative exercises like the counting exercise above.
To his credit, Dr. Levin begins to intuit this overlap between the Platonic space and our imaginative space when he explores the dynamic patterns of logical thinking constructs, which he calls ‘obvious denizens of the Platonic space’. In other words, the oscillating binary movements of the intellect can be made the object of intuitive observation, and graphs can even be used to create a metaphorical map of those movements that helps anchor our intuition. Yet logical thinking of this sort is only a fraction of the lawful and archetypally structured human imagination and we can’t forget about storytelling, art, music, creative innovation, and so on. Isn’t it possible that in the movements of a musical symphony, for example, we have a more faithful anchor of our Platonic intuition than in the movements of a computational algorithm? That the aesthetic and moral impulses weaving in our soul when contemplating artistic images evoke the meaning most proximate to the native essence of the Platonic space? For example, we can try to sense the archetypal feeling movements our mental pictures are entrained by the following well-known opening measures:
We can dimly feel that our soul life is participating in the archetypal gestures of these layered movements and articulations, but the experience of these inner movements cannot be clearly defined and computed. This contextual inner structure cannot be formatted into convenient equations and graphs, yet that makes it no less real or important for exploring the Platonic space. If we want a more complete account of this space and its ingressing patterns, then we can’t only focus on the computable meaning of our experiential transformations, but should also account for the deeper life of narrative meaning that speaks to qualities of enthusiasm, heroism, courage, and so on (and, of course, the negative counterparts of such qualities). We can, at the same time, have a reasoned faith that reality is essentially continuous, i.e. that there is no need to believe in an insurmountable experiential gap between the intuitive clarity of our imaginative space, which explains the embodiment of human cultural patterns, and that of the biophysical spaces.
Such a discontinuity can only remain an abstract belief that we choose to blindly accept - it could never be verified because the cognitive act of verification implies intuitive clarity within that domain of experience. Instead, we can humbly and patiently retrace our imaginative states into the deeper psychic and biophysical rhythms which contextualize their unfoldment. When we chose to read this essay and participate in the counting exercise, for example, we were led into the vicinity of that by certain ideas, preferences, sympathies and antipathies, and so on. At the same time, our capacity to count rests on the support of our brain and physical organs working in concert. In that sense, we can approach these deeper scales of experience insofar as we can intuit how their rhythms shape and constrain the flow of our imaginative contents. These intuitions can then be artistically painted with precise descriptive concepts which anyone can test against the facts of experience.
The above image was taken on a sundial at approximately 11:30 AM. By observing the patterns of how such shadows are cast, we can intuit the organic and lawful rhythm of the Earth in its relation to the Sun that contextualizes our daily experience from waking to sleeping. This intuition can then be condensed into concrete mental pictures which naturally reveal a twelvefold pattern, which can be further conducted through the bodily will and embodied in the technological extensions of that will, and thus inventions like the sundial can arise. We then use imaginative and physical space as an artistic map for our intuitive thinking process. It is the same process at work in all of our scientific inquiries as well, which result in various theories, models, and explanatory frameworks that lead to new technologies. They are all originally rooted in our intuition of the rhythmic transformations of the phenomenal spectrum, which are stimulated by the shadows (perceptual patterns) cast from the Platonic archetypes. Indeed, it is well known that our biological rhythms, for example, are closely related to the stellar rhythms.
But what are the shadows most relevant for human progress today? Those are the psychic patterns of thoughts, beliefs, desires, preferences, sympathies, antipathies, temperaments, etc. that comprise our entire sense of personality or ‘self’. Hardly anyone can doubt that the most pressing issues facing humanity - war, environmental imbalances, social conflict, psychic (and even physical) epidemics, political corruption, and so on - are the result of disorderly human passions and insatiable desires for convenience, pleasure, power, status, and so forth. By orienting our perspective properly within the illuminating rays of the Platonic Sunlight, i.e. our intimate cognitive agency and its activity, the shadows cast in our soul life begin to feel like intimate testimonies to the contextual intuitive rhythms that they anchor. Thus we can attain genuine self-knowledge that also translates into the capacity to creatively ‘torque’ the disorderly soul rhythms.
Imagine we are doing the counting exercise again, except this time when the audible state “5” condenses at our mental horizon, we resist allowing the next “6” state to condense. In other words, we are still intending to count to 10, but we don’t allow this intent to condense completely to a visual or auditory state. It is like we are damping and slowing down our inner activity to the stage that pronouncing a mental word feels ‘heavy’ (like we may feel if we are extremely tired and can hardly speak). It still requires full concentration, yet we intentionally damp down the intensity to the degree that the imaginative 'pixels' of the numerical state only 'buzz' but do not take the visual or auditory 'shape' that we intend. It is important to remain vigilant in this exercise and make sure we are not secretly whispering the words from the background. Without a doubt, for someone who has never tried this before, it will feel practically impossible for at least a few iterations. The unchecked condensation of intuited meaning into pictures and words is a highly potent constraint of our imaginative space.
The point of such an exercise is not to fully ‘succeed’ but to become more sensitive to what it means to reach a deeper scale of cognitive agency within the Platonic space. Put another way, the measure of success is precisely the extent to which we become more intuitively conscious of the ordinary constraints on our imaginative space, how these constraints are always subtly shaping, steering, nudging, etc. the flow of mental pictures by which we both construct our mathematical models of reality and navigate our daily existence. That consciousness naturally translates into greater degrees of freedom to torque the ‘rotations’ of the most proximate psychic constraints. Normally we bounce rather chaotically between enthusiasm and apathy, indulgence and temperance, mental lucidity and fogginess, and similar polarities, like a two- or three-arm pendulum. With a deeper scale of effort, however, we can bring these rotations into a more harmonious balance, such that we are not always passively waiting to slide into apathy before we bounce back into enthusiasm for life experience.
In that sense, there are many ethical implications of whether we become more conscious of the intuitive explanatory process we are always engaged in but habitually fail to take notice of. There are serious consequences if we continue to imagine that the Platonic space can only be investigated through the interface of biological or technological embodiments, i.e. by building up mental puzzles and testing them against physical experiments. If we acknowledge the reality of collective intelligences but refuse to explore how such intelligences take shape, first and foremost, in our intimate cognitive process, then our cognitive agency remains as a self-enclosed sphere that can only abstractly speculate about ‘other minds’ which feel orthogonal to our embodied mind. On the other hand, if we start our explanation with the intuitive exploration of the interfering intelligences right within our cognitive space, then we finally begin to close the experiential gap between science and spirituality, between manipulating existing matter and creating new matter, between knowing about reality and becoming a new reality.
