The mainstream Western view of human identity is based on the following ideas:
— Human intelligence makes us fundamentally different from all other living beings
— Nonhuman nature is like a programmed machine, acting without sentience
— Each of us has a mind which is essentially separate from our body
Each of these ideas has been shown by modern science to be false
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Chapter 1. The nameless uncarved wood
There it sits, on top of a chest. A piece of ancient driftwood. I picked it up some years back on the windswept beach of a California seashore. It’s not that big, about the length of my forearm, and it’s shaped a bit like a bone. A femur, perhaps, with a big knobbly end tapering to a narrower point. If you look at the knobbly part from the right direction, you can almost see an animal face. A porpoise, maybe, or the cute bulbous snout of a beagle. Its greyish blond color hints of the eons of sea and sun that have bleached everything else out of it. While smooth to touch, it still boasts a myriad of rippling lines showing its annual growth rings, along with sporadic perfectly round tiny dots of bygone worm holes.
It’s just a piece of wood. But it’s a beautiful piece, sculpted by nature, and it feels to me like the natural world peeking into my office, keeping me company. Above all, for me, it represents the Tao. “Tao everlasting,” declared the ancient sage, “is the nameless uncarved wood. Though small, nothing under heaven can subjugate it.” |
The Tao (pronounced “dao” and often spelled like that) is one of the oldest concepts from antiquity that have survived to the present day. Emerging from the mists of ancient Chinese tradition, it is translated literally as “way” or “path,” and it refers to the mysterious ways in which the forces of nature show up in the world around us. The ancient conception of the inscrutable Tao is about as far away as you can get from the grindingly busy, technology-based civilization that has come to dominate our world. And it’s partly for that reason that it’s a perfect place to begin our journey into the web of meaning.
I first came across the concept of Tao when I was twenty-one years old in—of all places—New York City. I’d landed there from London on the first stage of my quest to leave my country of birth behind and find my way in the world. After months of trying to fit in to the mean streets like a bad imitation of Robert de Niro’s Taxi Driver, I was pondering my next step. A friend gave me a powerful psychedelic, and I found myself wandering around the grimy back streets of Manhattan. Everywhere around me, I saw a frantic hard-heartedness gaudily concealed by a layer of commercial sleaze.
Back in the apartment I shared in the East Village, I told my roommate about my burning desire to find an alternative to the harshness I saw around me. He handed me a book that, he told me, he’d found helpful in such moments. As I opened it, I came face to face with a shimmering magic of words and pictures that seemed to answer my deepest questions. “Know honor, yet keep humility,” it told me. “Ever true and unwavering, return to the infinite.” The mysteriously wise words were accompanied by gorgeous black and white pictures of natural beauty and strangely alluring Chinese script. I didn’t know exactly what these words meant, but they seemed like a font of wisdom I’d never previously imagined existed in the world. This book was the Tao Te Ching, the greatest Taoist classic.
I’m not alone in seeing undying value in the teachings of the Tao Te Ching. In fact, it’s the second most translated book in history after the Bible. What is it about this book that caused it to shine through the ages as an inspiration to countless generations seeking answers to their own searching? What can it possibly offer to the internet-enhanced twenty-first century?
According to legend, the Tao Te Ching was written by a sage called Laozi—a name that literally means “old master.” More likely, it represents the collective wisdom of ancient Chinese folk traditions, compiled over generations. It presents a way of living in the world that feels like a refuge from the bleak glare of modernity—an invitation to come home again, to leave behind the cacophonous discord of a meaningless rat race and find solace in deep universal truths.
But the reason to begin our journey with the Tao is not just because it offers an alternative to modernity. Rather, the early Taoists articulated a profound understanding of the complex relationship between humanity and the natural world, presenting insights that remain as relevant today as they were when they were first conceived. Indeed, the Taoists’ core concepts offer a valuable framework to help decipher some of the most difficult quandaries facing our world today. As we’ll see, their analysis of the human predicament reveals an understanding of distinctive aspects of human cognition that modern neuroscience has only recently come to recognize. Similarly, the Taoist account of how nature reveals itself displays an appreciation of universal principles that correspond to, and illuminate, the findings of modern system scientists.
Excerpt from The Web of Meaning, Chapter 1. Purchase: USA/Canada | UK/Commonwealth
I first came across the concept of Tao when I was twenty-one years old in—of all places—New York City. I’d landed there from London on the first stage of my quest to leave my country of birth behind and find my way in the world. After months of trying to fit in to the mean streets like a bad imitation of Robert de Niro’s Taxi Driver, I was pondering my next step. A friend gave me a powerful psychedelic, and I found myself wandering around the grimy back streets of Manhattan. Everywhere around me, I saw a frantic hard-heartedness gaudily concealed by a layer of commercial sleaze.
Back in the apartment I shared in the East Village, I told my roommate about my burning desire to find an alternative to the harshness I saw around me. He handed me a book that, he told me, he’d found helpful in such moments. As I opened it, I came face to face with a shimmering magic of words and pictures that seemed to answer my deepest questions. “Know honor, yet keep humility,” it told me. “Ever true and unwavering, return to the infinite.” The mysteriously wise words were accompanied by gorgeous black and white pictures of natural beauty and strangely alluring Chinese script. I didn’t know exactly what these words meant, but they seemed like a font of wisdom I’d never previously imagined existed in the world. This book was the Tao Te Ching, the greatest Taoist classic.
I’m not alone in seeing undying value in the teachings of the Tao Te Ching. In fact, it’s the second most translated book in history after the Bible. What is it about this book that caused it to shine through the ages as an inspiration to countless generations seeking answers to their own searching? What can it possibly offer to the internet-enhanced twenty-first century?
According to legend, the Tao Te Ching was written by a sage called Laozi—a name that literally means “old master.” More likely, it represents the collective wisdom of ancient Chinese folk traditions, compiled over generations. It presents a way of living in the world that feels like a refuge from the bleak glare of modernity—an invitation to come home again, to leave behind the cacophonous discord of a meaningless rat race and find solace in deep universal truths.
But the reason to begin our journey with the Tao is not just because it offers an alternative to modernity. Rather, the early Taoists articulated a profound understanding of the complex relationship between humanity and the natural world, presenting insights that remain as relevant today as they were when they were first conceived. Indeed, the Taoists’ core concepts offer a valuable framework to help decipher some of the most difficult quandaries facing our world today. As we’ll see, their analysis of the human predicament reveals an understanding of distinctive aspects of human cognition that modern neuroscience has only recently come to recognize. Similarly, the Taoist account of how nature reveals itself displays an appreciation of universal principles that correspond to, and illuminate, the findings of modern system scientists.
Excerpt from The Web of Meaning, Chapter 1. Purchase: USA/Canada | UK/Commonwealth
Chapter 2. The original ai: animate intelligence
In the early twentieth century, a German horse known as Clever Hans became an international sensation. His owner would ask him to multiply two numbers, such as three and four, and Clever Hans would answer by tapping his hoof twelve times. There seemed to be no end to Hans’s intellectual acumen: he could calculate fractions, tell time, and figure out the date of a given weekday if he knew the date of an earlier day. As his fame spread, with reports of his skills featuring in the New York Times, the German authorities commissioned a psychologist, Oskar Pfungst, to evaluate Clever Hans’s intelligence. Pfungst eventually discovered that Hans could only give the correct answer when the questioner already knew it and Hans could see the questioner. It turned out that Hans was noticing subtle facial and bodily cues in the questioner when he reached the correct number of taps. When the questioner was hidden from Hans’s view, the horse’s mathematical skills suddenly disappeared.
Ever since then, the story of Clever Hans has been rolled out by scientific skeptics whenever they want to pour cold water on reports of intelligence in the nonhuman world. They warn disparagingly of the dangers of anthropomorphism: the tendency to read human intentions, intelligence, and emotions into natural phenomena. However, the true significance of the Clever Hans episode seems to have been lost amid the skeptics’ knowing smirks. In their efforts to ridicule the notion of Hans’s mathematical abilities, they ignored the astonishing perceptiveness Hans demonstrated in reading the unconscious behavior of his questioners. The level of intelligence required for this kind of astute perception goes far deeper than merely being able to multiply three times four. After all, it was over fifty years ago that engineers invented the first electronic calculators that could multiply and divide, but even today, the most advanced AI would have trouble discerning the nuanced signals that Hans picked up from his questioners.
The idea of what constitutes intelligence is deeply embedded in our sense of human identity, and influences how we relate to ourselves and to everything in nature. We’ve seen how European thought led people to view conceptual consciousness as the domain of their reason, their soul—and their intelligence. Following this logic, from the time of Descartes onwards, the myriad nonhuman manifestations of intelligence in nature were seen as nothing other than mere automata. Animals, Descartes wrote, “have no mind at all”—they are no different than a clock that can accurately tell the time but is merely “composed of wheels and weights.” For Descartes and his followers, this circumscribed assessment of nature gave moral license to do anything they wanted to nonhumans. They carried out brutal vivisections on dogs, nailing them up on boards by their paws, and dismissing humanitarian concerns by explaining that the cries were merely a result of springs that had been activated, but the dog itself had no feelings.
The Cartesian denial of cognition to any nonhuman entity has persisted into modern times. While Clever Hans was performing his tricks, an American psychologist, John Watson, was launching a scientific movement known as behaviorism, which interprets all animal behavior as based on nothing but instinctual conditioning, and continues to dominate the scientific study of animals to this day. Richard Dawkins, for example, perhaps the most influential living popularizer of science, professes that “a bat is a machine, whose internal electronics are so wired up that its wing muscles cause it to home in on insects, as an unconscious guided missile homes in on an aeroplane.”
Throughout the European tradition, there have been some who rejected this mechanistic view of nature. As far back as the ancient Greeks, Aristotle disagreed with his teacher, Plato, about a disembodied soul, arguing that the soul was the animating principle of any living body, and that even plants had their own “vegetative” soul. During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, obsessed by nature’s complexity, deduced that the Earth itself was like a living organism with a “vital force of growth.” But once the Scientific Revolution engulfed Europe in the seventeenth century, these views became increasingly inadmissible.
Ever since then, the story of Clever Hans has been rolled out by scientific skeptics whenever they want to pour cold water on reports of intelligence in the nonhuman world. They warn disparagingly of the dangers of anthropomorphism: the tendency to read human intentions, intelligence, and emotions into natural phenomena. However, the true significance of the Clever Hans episode seems to have been lost amid the skeptics’ knowing smirks. In their efforts to ridicule the notion of Hans’s mathematical abilities, they ignored the astonishing perceptiveness Hans demonstrated in reading the unconscious behavior of his questioners. The level of intelligence required for this kind of astute perception goes far deeper than merely being able to multiply three times four. After all, it was over fifty years ago that engineers invented the first electronic calculators that could multiply and divide, but even today, the most advanced AI would have trouble discerning the nuanced signals that Hans picked up from his questioners.
The idea of what constitutes intelligence is deeply embedded in our sense of human identity, and influences how we relate to ourselves and to everything in nature. We’ve seen how European thought led people to view conceptual consciousness as the domain of their reason, their soul—and their intelligence. Following this logic, from the time of Descartes onwards, the myriad nonhuman manifestations of intelligence in nature were seen as nothing other than mere automata. Animals, Descartes wrote, “have no mind at all”—they are no different than a clock that can accurately tell the time but is merely “composed of wheels and weights.” For Descartes and his followers, this circumscribed assessment of nature gave moral license to do anything they wanted to nonhumans. They carried out brutal vivisections on dogs, nailing them up on boards by their paws, and dismissing humanitarian concerns by explaining that the cries were merely a result of springs that had been activated, but the dog itself had no feelings.
The Cartesian denial of cognition to any nonhuman entity has persisted into modern times. While Clever Hans was performing his tricks, an American psychologist, John Watson, was launching a scientific movement known as behaviorism, which interprets all animal behavior as based on nothing but instinctual conditioning, and continues to dominate the scientific study of animals to this day. Richard Dawkins, for example, perhaps the most influential living popularizer of science, professes that “a bat is a machine, whose internal electronics are so wired up that its wing muscles cause it to home in on insects, as an unconscious guided missile homes in on an aeroplane.”
Throughout the European tradition, there have been some who rejected this mechanistic view of nature. As far back as the ancient Greeks, Aristotle disagreed with his teacher, Plato, about a disembodied soul, arguing that the soul was the animating principle of any living body, and that even plants had their own “vegetative” soul. During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, obsessed by nature’s complexity, deduced that the Earth itself was like a living organism with a “vital force of growth.” But once the Scientific Revolution engulfed Europe in the seventeenth century, these views became increasingly inadmissible.
Meanwhile, outside of Europe, the belief in nature’s intrinsic intelligence remained ubiquitous, continuing to this day among Indigenous communities. Australian Aboriginals sing out aloud when they walk in the wild, talking to the rest of the natural world as if they were family. A Peruvian shaman tells anthropologist Jeremy Narby that “a tree has a soul like a human being does.” Native American biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes tribal elders recounting how, “in the old times . . . the trees talked to each other. They’d stand in their own council and craft a plan.” The elders advise youngsters to learn from nature’s wisdom: “You should go among the standing people (the trees),” they say, or “Go spend some time with those Beaver people.”
In this chapter, we’ll discover how the findings of modern scientific research have more than validated these indigenous insights about the intelligence of the natural world. Far from being mindless, automated mechanisms, it turns out that every organism in nature demonstrates stunning intelligence—an animate intelligence that has evolved on Earth over billions of years into a dazzling variety of forms. This realization requires us to reconsider our own human identity in the context of the deep intelligence arrayed around us—and even within us. What actually differentiates us as humans? What do we even mean by intelligence? As we read daily news stories about advances in AI and its implications for humanity, the insights we’ll uncover will offer us a deeper grounding in the original AI—animate intelligence. By recognizing this intelligence pervasive to all life, we can gain a greater sense of who we, as humans, really are—with crucial implications for how we might relate to the living world around us.
Excerpt from The Web of Meaning, Chapter 2. Purchase: USA/Canada | UK/Commonwealth
In this chapter, we’ll discover how the findings of modern scientific research have more than validated these indigenous insights about the intelligence of the natural world. Far from being mindless, automated mechanisms, it turns out that every organism in nature demonstrates stunning intelligence—an animate intelligence that has evolved on Earth over billions of years into a dazzling variety of forms. This realization requires us to reconsider our own human identity in the context of the deep intelligence arrayed around us—and even within us. What actually differentiates us as humans? What do we even mean by intelligence? As we read daily news stories about advances in AI and its implications for humanity, the insights we’ll uncover will offer us a deeper grounding in the original AI—animate intelligence. By recognizing this intelligence pervasive to all life, we can gain a greater sense of who we, as humans, really are—with crucial implications for how we might relate to the living world around us.
Excerpt from The Web of Meaning, Chapter 2. Purchase: USA/Canada | UK/Commonwealth
chapter 3. the most important relationship in your life
You meet an old friend in the grocery store. She’s telling you about her difficult time at a company that she’s finally left.
“I was pushing myself way too hard,” she tells you. “It was wild. I’d accept unrealistic projects from my boss and then hate myself for it. It took a while, but now that I’ve left, I’m beginning to pull myself together again.”
You chat a bit longer, and then continue shopping. You’re glad you had a chance to catch up. But wait a minute! There was only one person you were talking with, and yet your friend was describing herself as though she were split into two. Who was doing the pushing and who was getting pushed? Who hated whom? Who got broken into fragments and needs to be pulled back together—and who’s doing the pulling? Stranger still, you intuitively knew what your friend meant as she was talking with you. Does that mean that you are as split as she is?
“I was pushing myself way too hard,” she tells you. “It was wild. I’d accept unrealistic projects from my boss and then hate myself for it. It took a while, but now that I’ve left, I’m beginning to pull myself together again.”
You chat a bit longer, and then continue shopping. You’re glad you had a chance to catch up. But wait a minute! There was only one person you were talking with, and yet your friend was describing herself as though she were split into two. Who was doing the pushing and who was getting pushed? Who hated whom? Who got broken into fragments and needs to be pulled back together—and who’s doing the pulling? Stranger still, you intuitively knew what your friend meant as she was talking with you. Does that mean that you are as split as she is?
Yes, you are . . . along with the rest of us. It seems that part of the human condition is to experience a kind of split personality, with an “I” engaging in an ongoing relationship with a “self.” We talk about “gaining control of myself” as if there is a battle going on between these two entities. We can view ourselves harshly, as your friend did, pushing ourselves hard or even hating ourselves; and we can equally be kind to ourselves and care for ourselves. In addition to experiencing ourselves as so scattered that we need to “pull ourselves together,” we can also be “beside ourselves” with rage, or at the other extreme, “be at one” with ourselves. We can “let ourselves go” in a dance, and sometimes “find ourselves” in our chosen vocation.
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Linguistic philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson made this remarkable discovery about the inner relationship we all take for granted, and published their findings in 1980 in Metaphors We Live By, which helped catalyze the bourgeoning academic field of cognitive linguistics. They found that this inner split exists not just in Western minds but also in other cultures. A common Japanese expression, for example, is “He lost himself because of too much anger.” It’s a split that seems to pervade all aspects of life from the everyday to the spiritual. In a meditation class, the instructor might tell you to “just sit and observe your thoughts and feelings without judging them.” But who is doing the observing, and who or what is being observed—and might be judged?
Each of one of us has important relationships with others in our lives. Whether they are parents, loved ones, children, bosses, or dear friends, these relationships are some of the most significant aspects of human existence. But there is no relationship more important than the one you have with yourself. It’s a relationship you’re engaged in every day from when you first wake up to when you fall asleep at night, and one that you’ll remain in until your dying breath. How you conduct that relationship will affect the quality of your lived experience more than almost anything else. In this chapter, we’re going to explore this intimate and complex relationship. As we unravel its intricacies, we’ll find that it also reveals some strange assumptions that the dominant Western culture takes for granted about human identity.
Excerpt from The Web of Meaning, Chapter 3. Purchase: USA/Canada | UK/Commonwealth