It makes me so mad to keep reading this (for reasons already stated)! But I have been thinking about a lens of party planning, of designing spaces which allow play -- life, even! -- to emerge, and this next chapter title is so, so tempting, seen through this lens.

Let's do it.

"Preparation without Expectation"

He writes, "I am firmly convinced that the nature and behavior of buildings and other artifacts can only be understood within the context of this structure." And I . . . agree . . . nature and behaviour and everything can only be understood within the context of the structure of what our human brains are capable of recognizing. An incredibly deep pattern recognition is at work in our heads, in our lives, inescapable.

". . efforts to explain it in more mechanical fashion will go on failing, . . ." writes Alexander, but I have seen the demons of pandemonium -- we cannot understand even rudimentary emergent systems in the mechanical details, but we can set the wheels in motion and observe as they perform. I don't see this ever crossing the bridge into "sentience," rather I see it as dissecting a joke, a frog, and killing it . . . It's a sad thing. At one time I thought the mechanistic viewpoint would help me understand the wonderful elements of the world, but I suppose every time it happens it merely takes the wonder out of them! To learn is to demystify . . .

What am I saying?

Basically, I think I am asking what constitutes an "understanding" of how a thing works. If I can write a program that produces a complex output, do I "understand" how it works? If every part of the process has been built by human hands, can we "explain it" in a "mechanical fashion", or has it crossed the veil of complexity? Are better explanations good for us? Not as masters of the universe, but as friends of it.

Is there an antiepistemological perspective which advocates for knowingly closing one's eyes to the truth, and by knowingly I mean embracing what one chooses to know as something other than the truth? "Ignorance is bliss." Is there a healthy way to go about this? Perhaps to ask questions only half of each day. To ask questions only in daylight, or at nighttime. To ask questions only sometimes, and to stop asking the rest of the time.

If only I could.

It's so hard for me to read this book. Do I put myself in the mindset of Alexander and for now allow myself to believe in W, in this objective wholeness he proposes to exist in the world? Do I keep myself out of it and fight it at every turn? Do I stop reading?

"truer perceptually," says Alexander, which again speaks to his perpetual goal, to justify this concept with regard to this mechanistic viewpoint... He claims that seeing the house-garden complex according to the human brain's natural impulses is "truer perceptually," which is either false or unknowable, unless one is willing to define truth itself in an anthropocentric or solipsistic sense...

It is "more accurate functionally" with regards to common human aesthetic appeal, because what Alexander is describing is common human aesthetic appeal itself. This has a deep, immense, profoundly human value, but don't assign truth based on human values. Find human values and apply them to one's choices after making the genuine attempt to see the truth as accurately as possible... The truth is not human, is it? Can it be? I am a human, so in some sense the truths I can admit are always human-touched.

This sure is a struggle. What is truth? Why am I so convinced that what I believe to be the truth is not what Christopher Alexander believes to be the truth? This is an epistemological question that's going to give me hell for a long time. Either I need to grab the Beginning of Infinity out of the library again, or I need to accept some weird form of phenomenal truth.

P. 95
In our conceptual picture of the house, we have things called street, garden, roof, front door, and so on. But the centers or entities which hit my eye when I take it all in as a whole are slightly different. I see the sunny part of the garden where the sun is falling on the lawn as a center --- not the entire "garden." I see the swath of space which unites front steps, front path, and front stoop, . . . I see the roofline and the light and shadow of the eave, . . . The path to the front door, and the steps from the back porch, and the door itself, the door of the house, all work as a unit, as a continuous center about 40 feet long.
. . .
The house-garden complex seen in its wholeness is truer perceptually and more accurate functionally than any analytic vision of the house or lot or garden taken by themselves.

P. 91
All the centers together, explicit ones and hidden ones together, form the wholeness . . . in any given part of the world at any moment.

P. 90, under header "8 / THE FUNDAMENTAL ENTITIES OF WHICH THE WORLD IS MADE"

. . . What exactly . . . is wholeness? . . . It is a structure which . . . we intuitively perceive as the gestalt, the overview, the broad nature of a thing. . . .

   This wholeness gets its strength from the coherent spatial centers of which it is made. If there are roses around a front door of a cotage, that is what you remember; if there is a pair of ducks in the garden, and a fishpond, it is the ducks and fishpond you remember . . . the roses, the ducks, . . . are all centers, and it is these entities or centers which mark something as what it is, which make it memorable, remarkable. . . .

. . . If a building has a skating rink outside, like Rockefeller Plaza in New York, it is the skating and the skaters we remember.
   These are the explicit, obvious centers. And they are not only spatial. Other centers, some hidden, some hardly visible in the space, but latent, or biological, or social, . . .

   The wholeness of any portion of the world is this system of larger and smaller centers

i played a character named richard wingfield in a tabletop game that spanned this entire year - from sometime in january, i think, to december.

i'm sad that the game is over but more than that i'm appreciative and reflective of this entity that existed for a significant portion of my life, and to my friends (some very new friends!) who played in it as well as my great friend who ran the game, and who talked with me about how it was constructed and run.

over the course of the pandemic i lost touch with losing touch with control. i am thinking about the lens of "party planning" because a party is an inherently chaotic affair, suggesting too many people to individually keep track of, and a level of energy and a timeframe that is likewise not possible to completely control.

when cruel world came out, it immediately left my hands. zeigfreid wrote, "Cruel World hasn't fallen apart in the ways droqen expected. I rather think it has settled into a more pleasing shape. This game would be worse if there were not a list of names at each checkpoint. Thank you, BERV, for inscribing your name where you did. You have made the world a richer place. You have given it texture."

it escaped me and i felt as though it was important to reassert control, suggesting that i ever had it in the first place. but you don't throw a great party by adhering to itinerary, to intent, to design.

welcome to the primordial soup of party planning, i may never continue this thread, and it feels incomplete and impossible to quite express, but here i record the birth of this thought, this creature in my mind.

I've recently read Emergence which describes how a whole, an incredibly beautiful whole, can arise from parts. And, like any good 20th century mechanistic viewpoint zealot, I believe it.

Again, what I think Alexander is describing is the way the brain works. It is not, as Alexander claims, that he is describing a way the world works that is more true than the 20th century mechanistic viewpoint, but that it sits better in the mind. And this is extremely powerful. It's really, really valuable to know how the brain likes to think about things, and valuable to value it.

I don't agree with the way Alexander has chosen to value the brain - by taking its natural patterns and claiming that they describe the true nature of the world - but I deeply value his insight on the brain's natural patterns. For me it's not at all just about the mechanical way the brain likes to chop things up and perceive things; it is mainly about the pleasure of using the brain for what it's good at, the humaneness of building a world, a life, out of appealing to what humans are. What we all are. What you are, what I am.

I only ever want to make art for a human. For the appreciator. For the artist. For someone.

P. 86
. . . people believe today that every whole is made of parts. The key aspect of this belief is the idea that the parts come "before" the whole: in short, the parts exist as elements of some kind, which are them brought into relationship with one another . . . and a center is "created" out of these parts and their combinations as a result.
   I believe accurate understanding of wholeness is quite different. When we understand what wholeness is really like as a structure, we see that in most case it is the wholeness which creates its parts.


P. 87
We may see the phenomenon as I believe it to be in the two-dot example [pictured above], where the visible things that look like parts are induced by teh whole. Thus the visible diagonal in the case of two dots is something we might call one of its "parts." But it is not a pre-existing element. It is a part which is induced by the action of the whole. . . . In no sense at all is it an element from which the center is built.

There is an imprecision that I am coming to value, this idea that there is no whole to understand. Here Alexander says "I see the world as whole", and in some ways this is certainly a convenient perspective. The world is rather whole. But it's also completely wrong: the world is just another center. In The Timeless Way of Building, Alexander presents the concept of patterns as things nested within one another, always. It's refreshing, freeing, to think of everything as a center, a center of something, a participant in something larger that exists but which does not necessarily need to be discussed or understood -- and certainly not as a whole. Every center is the center of another, greater, center. Every entity is a participant in another, greater, entity.

Right, I'm getting ahead of myself. From a first-person perspective let us say that anything we perceive to be whole... cannot be understood as an object itself. Oh, no, I finally understand 'everything is connected.' It really is. To the 20th century mechanistic viewpoint which seeks to understand wholes, that's terrifying, overwhelming. But I think the point is to let go, to understand by not understanding. You cannot completely understand an apple by studying the apple, you must study the apple tree too. But you cannot completely understand an apple tree by studying the apple tree, you must study the land from which it grows. But you cannot understand the land... and so on, forever.

You must understand that you can never understand the apple seed.

P. 85
if I call [the kitchen sink] a center . . . it creates a sense, in my mind, of the way the sink is going to work in the kitchen. It makes me aware of the larger pattern of things, and the way this particular element -- the kitchen sink -- fits into that pattern, plays its role in that pattern. It makes the sink feel more like a thing which radiates out, extends beyond its own boundaries, and takes its part in the kitchen as a whole.
. . .
The same is true of all the entities which appear in the world. . . . When I think of them as centers, I become more aware of their relatedness; I see them as focal points in a larger unbroken whole and I see the world as whole.

In the previous quote I cut out Alexander's use of "mathematical", but I think to make my point I need to bring it back in. "There is a mathematical reason for thinking of the coherent entities in the world as centers," is the full first sentence, unedited.

Here is my breakdown of what he's saying about wholes and centers and mathematics.

• There is a mathematical reason for calling things 'centers' and not 'wholes'
• In mathematical theory, to define a 'whole' I must define its boundaries
• Real objects do not have mathematically clear boundaries
• Therefore I will use the mathematically vague term 'center' which does not provoke the theorizing of boundaries

The thing is it seems that Alexander is invoking a semantic trick to get out of mathematics, or I could say, out of the 20th century mechanistic viewpoint. He could just as well say

• Mathematical theory likes boundaries
• Real objects do not have mathematically clear boundaries
• Therefore I will not use mathematical theory

BUT! The precision, and perhaps legitimacy under our modern-day viewpoint, afforded by mathematics and mathematical theory is too great for Alexander to resist. That is not to say or even imply his theories are intentionally crafted to win legitimacy. This is something people do automatically to themselves, within themselves, all the time: justify and rationalize what they know to be true by coming up with a way to explain it that appeals to their values and worldview, which is itself partially impressed upon them by the outside, by society, by the people they know, by the world around them, by their knowledge and learning.

P. 84
There is a . . . reason for thinking of the coherent entities in the world as centers, not as wholes. If I want to be accurate about a whole, it is natural for me to ask where that whole starts and stops. Suppose, for example, I am talking about a fishpond, and want to call it a whole. To be accurate . . . I want to be able to draw a precise boundary around this whole . . . Obviously the water is part of the fishpond. What about the concrete it is made, or the clay under the ground . . . the air which is just above  . . . the pipes bringing in the water? . . . These are uncomfortable questions, and they are not trivial.
. . .
The pond does exist. Our trouble is that we don't know how to define it exactly. . . . When I call the pond a center, the situation changes. I can then recognize the fact that the pond does have existence as a local center of activity: a living system. It is a focused entity. But the fuzziness of its edges becomes less problematic. The reason is that the pond, as an entity, is focused towards its center. It creates a field of centeredness. But, obviously, this effect falls off. The peripheral things play their role in the pond.