Machines and Mystery

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."
~ Emerson M. Pugh, Ph.D., IBM research engineer

More than 250 years into the Industrial Revolution, the ideology of machines (and now computers) continues to dominate individual and collective consciousness, often without notice. One of the core tenets of this machine ideology is that "mystery" doesn't really exist; rather, what seems mysterious is just a natural phenomenon that hasn't yet been explained, but will be explained in time, once scientists get around to studying it enough. This makes sense in the realm of machines. For instance, if your car isn't working right, there is always a literal, linear explanation for the issue. If the mechanic is competent enough, and spends enough time investigating the situation, he/she will be able to determine the cause of the malfunction, whether it turns out to be a broken part, a loose wire, a faulty engineering design, low fluid levels, or some other identifiable factor that has demonstrably led to the malfunction.

In living systems, however, this does not hold true. There is an element of life that isn't just unexplained (in the sense of not yet explained), but is truly unexplainable. Crucially, as I mentioned above, this "unexplainability" isn't just a matter of not yet knowing enough through scientific study to make analytical sense of something. Rather, this is a matter of the inherently ineffable nature of life, or what may be called true mystery. That is, mystery not as a puzzle to be completed, or a problem to be solved, but as a stand-alone phenomenon or dimension of reality that cannot, in principle, be solved or explained conceptually.

To the modern western materialistic mind, this will sound like nonsense. But that's just because modern western science has become so thoroughly pervaded by a machine ideology that the notion of a truly mysterious element in nature is considered an anachronism, or even an embarrassment to the scientific mind. For some time, as the march of science, industry, and technology progressed at remarkable rates, it's totally understandable that this perspective took hold. Time and again, science provided evidence that explained countless so-called mysteries of life, and technology enabled humans to control and manipulate aspects of nature previously thought beyond the purview of human intervention.

But, in a twist of delicious irony, as the sciences have continued to amass extensive repositories of evidence and analysis of the natural world, it is science itself that has revealed an irreducibly ineffable dimension of reality. At this point in the game, anyone who doesn't believe this -- and clings to the belief that everything in reality can be explained by science (logically, analytically, linearly) -- just hasn't read enough science. In my own experience, the more science I read, the more respect I have for this ineffable, mysterious element of reality.

Emerson Pugh's quote at the beginning of this post says it so succinctly that the profundity of the idea is easy to miss. He's really making a dramatic claim here; ultimately, he's saying that we cannot (fully) understand the human brain/mind. Obviously, we understand some parts of the brain; scientists have published hundreds of thousands of articles and books describing the results from empirical studies of human neurology. But it would be unwise -- and, again ironically, unscientific -- to think that this sort of evidence means that we can straightforwardly or completely understand human cognition/mind. And, this is not because the evidence is merely incomplete at this point, but will become complete if humans have enough time to run enough studies to generate enough data and evidence to "solve" the puzzles and mysteries that attend phenomena like human cognition. Rather, it would be unwise to think we can understand mind/cognition precisely because the best available current evidence suggests this is literally impossible.

In other words, we are at a point in the scientific analysis of nature that the more evidence we generate, the more obvious it is that some phenomena cannot be explained by science. Science has revealed its own limits, and it continues to do so every day.

This is nothing new, in fact. Blaise Pascal -- one of the greatest scientific and mathematical minds of the modern period -- remarked centuries ago that "reason's last step is the recognition that there is an infinity of things which is beyond it." This points to the ineffable dimension of reality: there are phenomena in this universe that simply cannot be touched by conceptual analysis, description, and definition. Emerson Pugh's quote also refers to this, in his own clever way. There is ultimately something "beyond" conceptual analysis and understanding. I won't try to make an argument for this claim, as that would be wholly ironic and completely miss the point (conceptually explain how conceptual explanation can't explain the limits of conceptual explanation? Ha!).

By definition, the only way to experience this ineffable dimension of reality is to directly feel it. I couldn't possibly explain what ineffability is, because the ineffable is just that which cannot be explained! It must be experienced, tangibly. This is why the very best scientists studying and theorizing mind and cognition have come to the same conclusion. John Dewey, for instance, who was a pioneering pragmatic psychologist and one of the first to develop a comprehensive theory of embodied cognition and autopoiesis, offers this disclaimer in his essay on "Qualitative Thought:"

The foregoing remarks are intended to suggest the significance to be attached to the term 'qualitative thought.' But as statements they are propositions and hence symbolic. Their meaning can be apprehended only by going beyond them, by using them as clues to call up qualitative situations. When an experience of the latter is had and they are re-lived, the realities corresponding to the propositions laid down may be had."

While Dewey was one of the very first to develop a theory of autopoietic life-mind, this scientific perspective wasn't formalized until 50 years after Dewey published his version. Two Chilean biologists/neuroscientists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, were the first to formalize and systematize this theory, published as Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. In a later book, they make virtually the same claim as Dewey in describing the nature of what their book is about:

Nothing we are going to say will be understood in a really effective way unless the reader feels personally involved and has a direct experience that goes beyond all mere description."
(The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding)

All our best sciences have confirmed this autopoietic view of life-mind-cognition. It is currently our best scientific understanding of anything referred to by the term "cognition." A mechanistic ideology has no room for this, and cannot accommodate such ineffability. There is nothing ineffable about machines or computers: everything they do, or fail to do, can be explained by reference to the component parts of the system (and/or to the coding/programming of the system). This is not true for living systems. There is an irreducible element of the unknown, and ultimately unknowable. True mystery. To view humans bodies as machines, or brains as computers, is to fundamentally mischaracterize the human phenomenon. As Maturana and Varela explained decades ago: "The popular metaphor of calling the brain an 'information-processing device' is not only ambiguous but patently wrong" (The Tree of Knowledge, 1992, p. 169).

Mind, cognition, and consciousness are abstract, conceptual terms referring to an infinite set of phenomena that are, ultimately, ineffable and unexplainable. Mysterious, at their core. But this doesn't mean we can't have any relationship with, or make use of, such mystery. It pervades reality, after all! To ignore this ineffable element of reality in favor of easily understandable and controllable phenomena (such as machines and computers) is to roundly limit ourselves and our scientific-phenomenological-pragmatic understanding of nature. Living Heart Intelligence (and yin) is a way of learning how to connect with and functionally use this ineffability as it manifests in, through, and as our very own cognitive function, in its myriad, dynamic, multi-dimensional forms.