David Chapman has issued something of a challenge to those of us thinking in the space of what he calls the meta-rational, many people call the post-modern, and I call the holonic. He thinks we can and should be less opaque, more comprehensible, and less inscrutable (specifically less inscrutable to rationalism and rationalists).
Ignorant, irrelevant, and inscrutable
I have changed my mind. It should go without saying that rationality is better than irrationality. But now I realize…meaningness.com
I’ve thought about this issue a lot. My previous blogging project hit a dead end when I reached the point of needing to explain holonic thinking. Around this time I contracted obscurantism and spent several months only sharing my philosophical writing with a few people on Facebook in barely decipherable stream-of-consciousness posts. But during this time I also worked on developing a pedagogy, manifested in a self-help book, that would allow people to follow in my footsteps even if I couldn’t explain my ideas. That project produced three things: an unpublished book draft, one mantra of advice, and a realization that the way can only be walked, not followed. So when I returned to blogging here on Medium my goal was not to be deliberately obscure, but also not to be reliably understood. I had come to terms with the idea that my thoughts might never be fully explicable, but I could at least still write for those without too much dust in their eyes.
The trouble is that holonic thought is necessarily inscrutable without the use of holons, and history shows this makes it very difficult to teach or explain holonic thinking to others. For example, the first wave of post-modernists like Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard applied Heidegger’s phenomenological epistemology to develop complex, multi-faceted understandings of history, literature, and academic culture. Unfortunately they did this in an environment of high modernism where classical rationalism was taken for granted, so they failed to notice they were building off the strengths of modernism even as they derided its weaknesses. Consequently they focused so much on teaching the subjectivity of experience that they forgot to impress that it was subjective experience of an external reality and left their students with an intellectual tradition now widely regarded as useless for anything other than status signaling.
In comparison Buddhist traditions have, to the extent that bodhi is synonymous with meta-rationality and holonic thinking, done a better job of teaching post-modernism than the post-modernists did. Indic philosophical traditions hit upon post-modern ideas at least as early as the Axial Age and they became central to Buddhist philosophy around 200 CE. I’d argue the sutras of Buddhism do no better than the texts of the post-modernists at teaching holon-level thinking, but over the centuries Buddhist schools also developed tantric instruction that created environments in which practitioners were able to play and later work with holons. It appears to me these “esoteric” techniques tapped in to the same developmental psychology operating in personal growth and in doing so created lineages that provide paths to holon-level thinking that people traverse to this day.
I suspect the key differentiator of the experiential learning of personal growth and tantra from the textual learning of academia and sutra is the focus on gnosis over episteme, and this suggests why the meta-rational is inscrutable from rationalism, but I’ll do one better and prove it. To do that it will suffice to show that there exists at least one meta-rational idea that cannot be made scrutable to rationalism. I choose meta-rational epistemology.
Rational/modern/system-relationship epistemology aims to be consistent and complete, meaning it produces a complete ontology. To the extent that there is any disagreement over system-relationship epistemology it is disagreement over how to compute correct ontology. Meta-rational/post-modern/holonic epistemology denies the possibility of a complete ontology via consistent epistemology because epistemology necessarily influences ontology. That is to say, even if some epistemology is consistent, it cannot be complete because it cannot prove its own consistency, thus no consistent epistemology can produce complete ontology. Instead we might have a complete but inconsistent meta-epistemology that chooses between consistent epistemologies in different situations based on telos, like a desire for correspondence to reality or telling an interesting story, but telos asks us to make an axiological evaluation, not an epistemic one, and thus we are forced to admit that even our consistent and complete meta-epistemology needs a free variable, hence cannot actually be complete.
In this way holonic epistemology is necessarily inscrutable to system-relationship epistemology because it explicitly demands the latter do something it explicitly cannot. To be fair, system-relationship epistemology does the same thing to pre-rational/traditional/system epistemology by demanding consistency that the latter cannot tolerate because it would violate its internal completeness, but I think this is infrequently acknowledged because if you grew up in the shadow of the modern world you probably didn’t notice when modernity demanded this of you. And unless you learned to ignore the problem, the modern world constantly gives you opportunities to experience the system-relationship level of complexity and obtain gnosis of it. But obtaining gnosis of the post-modern and holonic seems to require that a great tragedy befall you or that you have enough dedication to tolerate the pain of finding it, so beyond better building the episteme of holons for those few with more than doxa of them, I’m doubtful being less inscrutable will accomplish much of what Chapman seems to hope it will.
Here is my attempt to summarize "what are the meta-rationalists trying to tell to rationalists", as I understood it from the previous discussion, this article, and some articles linked by this article, plus some personal attempts to steelman:
1) Rationalists have a preference for living in far mode, that is studying things instead of experiencing things. They may not endorse this preference explicitly, they may even verbally deny it, but this is what they typically do. It is not a coincidence that so many rationalists complain about akrasia; motivation resides in near mode, which is where rationalists spend very little time. (And the typical reaction of a rationalist facing akrasia is: "I am going to read yet another article or book about 'procrastination equation'; hopefully that will teach me how to become productive!" which is like trying to become fit by reading yet another book on fitness.) At some moment you need to stop learning and start actually doing things, but rationalists usually find yet another excuse for learning a bit more, and there is always something more to learn. They even consider this approach a virtue.
Rationalists are also more likely to listen to people who got their knowledge from studying, as opposed to people who got their knowledge by experience. Incoming information must at least pretend to be scientific, or it will be dismissed without second thought. In theory, one should update on all available evidence (although not equally strongly), and not double-count any. In practice, one article containing numbers or an equation will always beat unlimited amounts of personal experience.
2) Despite admitting verbally that a map is not the territory, rationalists hope that if they take one map, and keep updating it long enough, this map will asymptotically approach the territory. In other words, that in every moment, using one map is the right strategy. Meta-rationalists don't believe in the ability to update one map sufficiently (or perhaps just sufficiently quickly), and intentionally use different maps for different contexts. (Which of course does not prevent them from updating the individual maps.) As a side effect of this strategy, the meta-rationalist is always aware that the currently used map is just a map; one of many possible maps. The rationalist, having invested too much time and energy into updating one map, may find it emotionally too difficult to admit that the map does not fit the territory, when they encounter a new part of territory where the existing map fits poorly. Which means that on the emotional level, rationalists treat their one map as the territory.
Furthermore, meta-rationalists don't really believe that if you take one map and keep updating it long enough, you will necessarily asymptotically approach the territory. First, the incoming information is already interpreted by the map in use; second, the instructions for updating are themselves contained in the map. So it is quite possible that different maps, even after updating on tons of data from the territory, would still converge towards different attractors. And even if, hypothetically, given infinite computing power, they would converge towards the same place, it is still possible that they will not come sufficiently close during one human life, or that a sufficiently advanced map would fit into a human brain. Therefore, using multiple maps may be the optimal approach for a human. (Even if you choose "the current scientific knowledge" as one of your starting maps.)
3) There is an "everything of everythings", exceeding all systems, something like the highest level Tegmark multiverse only much more awesome, which is called "holon", or God, or Buddha. We cannot approach it in far mode, but we can... somehow... fruitfully interact with it in near mode. Rationalists deny it because their preferred far-mode approach is fruitless here. But you can still "get it" without necessarily being able to explain it by words. Maybe it is actually inexplicable by words in principle, because the only sufficiently good explanation for holon/God/Buddha is the holon/God/Buddha itself. If you "get it", you become the Kegan-level-5 meta-rationalist, and everything will start making sense. If you don't "get it", you will probably construct some Kegan-level-4 rationalist verbal argument for why it doesn't make sense at all.
How well did I do here?
Points 1 and 2 are critiques of the rationalist community that are around since the inception of LW (as witnessed by the straw Vulcan / hot iron approaching metaphors), so I question that they usefully distinguish meta- from plain rationalists.
Point 3 is more helpful in this regard, but then if anyone made that claim then I would ask to point to what differences does such a behavior imply... I find very hard to believe in something that is both unscrutable and unnoticeable.