The Ways of Worldmaking, Part II
Not to stress upon it too much, but there’s a much older term for ‘world’: ‘samsara,’ which also comes with many traditions of thinking, feeling, meditating…. Can we revisit the concept of samsara with eyes enhanced by technology and design?
What would the Buddha do?
Let’s start with a story. Before the Buddha actually became the Buddha, he took a trip around town, noticed the people dying of poverty and sickness and in what would seem strange to us if it happened today, he left his privileged existence for life in the forest.
It's easy to imagine a sensitive young man shaken to his core by suffering. We can also admire the courage in leaving the luxuries of a princely existence. There's something timeless about these moves. But the third part of the story feels strange to us today: why would the Buddha in waiting head off into the forest and meditate into the origins of suffering? Why not become a doctor, protest on the streets of Kapilavastu, change the taxation policies of the state or start an NGO? Isn't that what we would do today?
Also: where have the forests gone?
Perhaps it's because the Buddha saw something bigger that disease and poverty in the streets of Kapilavastu. Of course you might think there's nothing bigger than disease and poverty, but set that aside for the moment. What the Buddha saw was the impermance inherent in the human condition, that we live our lives under the illusion that we will live happily ever after, but we are structurally prevented from doing so. Death and ruin stalk us at every step.
In short, what we consider to be real and solid is fleeting
One might say that progress - or at least transformation - comes from turning facts into questions. For our purposes, the fact is that of the samsara, aka the world. Every one of us takes the world for granted, for if you didn't and you questioned the world every moment, you wouldn't be able to live. To paraphrase the Buddha in Darwinian clothes: if you're an antelope and you see a lion, you need to figure out which way to run, not whether the lion is real or not.
But there’s a time for everything, and now is the time to question the world, for it has become so complex that we need to ask what it is before we can make it better. We have to question the commonsense of our times.
What would ChatGPT do?
While ‘samsara’ as a concept is thousands of years old and speculative fiction writers have been creating fictional worlds for the last two hundred years, the phrase ‘worldmaking’ itself is much newer. It was coined by the philosopher Nelson Goodman, who wrote a book called “The Ways of Worldmaking.” He starts the book with a paragraph that could well be our motto:
This book does not run a straight course from beginning to end. It hunts; and in the hunting, it sometimes worries the same raccoon in different trees, or different raccoons in the same tree, or even what turns out to be no raccoon in any tree. It finds itself balking more than once at the same barrier and taking off on other trails. It drinks often from the same streams, and stumbles over some cruel country. And it counts not the kill but what is learned of the territory explored.
It’s a slim book - about 150 pages - and we will be weaving its insights into the Messenger. Don’t wait to wait that long? Let’s have AI summarize it for us:
Question: What is Worldmaking?
Answer: As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, "worldmaking" isn't a formally defined term within any particular academic discipline. It's a term that could have different meanings depending on the context. Here are a few possibilities:
1. Philosophy and Aesthetics: "Worldmaking" is a term used in philosophical and aesthetic discussions, derived from the work of philosopher Nelson Goodman. Goodman proposed that we understand worlds not as pre-existing, independent structures but as constructed by our systems of description. That is, through our processes of making sense of the world—through language, perception, scientific models, etc.—we are actually constructing the world.
2. Fiction and Media Studies: In narrative studies, such as literature, film, and game design, "worldmaking" or "world-building" often refers to the process of creating an imaginary or fictional world. This includes designing its geography, history, cultures, societies, and so on.
3. Sociology and Anthropology: These disciplines sometimes use "worldmaking" to refer to the processes through which social and cultural worlds are constructed and reconstructed. This could include a variety of processes, like ritual, narrative, technological innovation, etc.
4. Design and Innovation Studies: Some design theorists talk about "worldmaking" as a way to describe ambitious design projects that aim to bring about new ways of living, working, or playing, rather than merely solving pre-defined problems.
These are just a few examples. The term is flexible and could be used in many other ways. If you could provide a more specific context, I might be able to give a more accurate answer.
Good news: there’s no established field so we have the world to ourselves. Hello first mover advantage! What about Goodman Baba, what did he have to say about this yet to be established field?
Question: Summarize Nelson Goodman’s “Ways of Worldmaking”
Answer: "Ways of Worldmaking" is a seminal work by philosopher Nelson Goodman published in 1978. In it, Goodman challenges the traditional concept of a unique, objective world that is independent of human understanding. Instead, he proposes that humans actively construct many different versions of "worlds" through our cognitive processes and language.
Here's a summary of his main ideas:
1. Many Worlds: Goodman argues that there are many "right" versions of the world, not just one. These worlds are not ready-made or discovered, but rather are the result of our worldmaking processes. He suggests that there's no ultimate reality we're uncovering; instead, we're creating realities.
2. Worldmaking: According to Goodman, worldmaking involves various practices, including composition and decomposition, weighting, ordering, supplementation, and deformation. All of these practices involve taking apart and reassembling aspects of our experiences.
3. Role of Language and Symbols: Goodman emphasizes the essential role of language and other symbolic systems in worldmaking. He suggests that the ways we describe or notate the world fundamentally shape our understanding and experience of it.
4. Understanding through Models: Goodman also posits that understanding is a matter of creating models. Rather than seeking to find a mirror of nature or to replicate reality, we construct useful models to make sense of our experiences.
5. Irreducible Pluralism: Goodman's worldmaking presents a form of irreducible pluralism. He maintains that there isn't a hierarchy of worlds where some are more real or better than others. Different worlds have different values depending on their utility, coherence, and other factors.
In essence, "Ways of Worldmaking" offers a powerful perspective on the nature of understanding and reality, emphasizing the active role of human cognition and symbolic systems in shaping our experiences. Goodman's work has influenced many fields, including philosophy, art theory, linguistics, cognitive science, and more.
Now let’s have GPT channel Goodman via the Buddha.
Question: You are the Buddha. Explain Nelson Goodman’s idea of Worldmaking from your perspective.
Answer: Esteemed friends, I am here today to expound upon a philosophical concept that finds resonance with our dharma's wisdom. The Western philosopher Nelson Goodman proposed the idea of "worldmaking," a concept that affirms a truth we've always known: reality is not just something we passively perceive, but something we actively create.
In the realm of conventional reality, or samvriti-satya, we perceive the world through our senses and our minds. According to Goodman, these perceptions do not just uncover a pre-existing world but actually participate in making it. This aligns with our understanding of dependent origination, or pratityasamutpada. Every phenomenon, including our perception of the world, arises in dependence upon multiple causes and conditions. No phenomenon exists independently; everything is interconnected.
Goodman speaks of many "worlds", born from different systems of description, from the symbols and languages we use. We too, in Buddhism, speak of multiple worlds, across different realms of existence. These worlds, Goodman suggests, are not discovered but made, a notion parallel to our teaching that our personal realities are shaped by our karma—the actions born of our intentions.
What I perceive and what you perceive, though we might share the same space, can be radically different worlds, shaped by our past actions, our thoughts, our desires, and our fears. In essence, Goodman's worldmaking mirrors our teachings of karma and dependent origination, underscoring the participatory nature of perception.
But, dear friends, do not fall into the trap of thinking that this means we can whimsically create any world we wish, unbound by cause and effect. Our worldmaking is guided by our wisdom and our ignorance, our compassion and our aversion, our calmness and our restlessness.
The goal of the Eightfold Path is to cultivate a clear understanding, mindful awareness, and loving-kindness, in order to shape a world free from suffering. Even in Goodman's terms, by refining our systems of description and understanding, we can participate in making a more compassionate, wiser world.
So, let us bring our awareness to the power of our minds in shaping our realities, recognizing that every thought, word, and action contributes to the making of our world. May we all strive to walk the Eightfold Path, with the wisdom of dependent origination guiding us, ultimately contributing to the creation of a world of enlightenment, free from the illusions of separateness, full of boundless compassion and understanding.
We are all worldmakers, not just the writers among us. Put that into your CV right away.
Why Worldmaking?
In last week's essay 👆🏾, we said understanding 'what the world is' comes before 'understanding how to make the world better.' Has someone ever said to you: 'that will never work in the real world'? Perhaps you believe you can get a house constructed without paying a bribe, or the UN will broker a global universal basic income. Nope, not going to work. Not in the real world.
What is the real world?
The real world is the world of commonsense, the way things work and always have. Remember the names:
1. Real
2. Commonsense
Much of what we write about in the Messenger is about the social world, the world of human institutions and social relationships. That world has intuitions about what is real (such as: caste discrimination) and what is common sense (such as: don't criticize your boss even if they encourage criticism). All of us makes sense of that social world continuously, intuitively, and unconsciously. You go to someone's house, and you notice how the parents treat one another: are they equal partners or is it a hierarchical relationship? That is the local reality.
Changing the real world requires understanding the intricate web of power, economic and ecological relationships etc. A simulated world should have enough depth and complexity to capture these nuances.
These social realities aren't cast in stone, but they have a density and historical weight that makes them hard to dislodge. The real world has friction. It has inertia. You change it in one place and it moves in another. Modern societies are complex beasts; try running the Indian Government without economists and statisticians. Decision makers are free to ignore economic advice but decisions to devalue the currency or replace five-year plans with market mechanisms have to be taken with caution, only after getting a sense of their first order and second-order effects. Our insistence on worldmaking is a natural next step: we think the social world is too complex to be run on economic or cultural policies alone.
Why so?
Our favourite reason: those policies ignore the non-human world, and who would disagree today that flows of carbon are as crucial as flows of dollars? And viruses can cause a recession just as well as a stock market crash.
The abstract reason: The social elephant is too big, and grasping it through the economy is to mistake the tail for the beast itself. It's only by understanding the real world of viruses, taxes, castes and clouds that we can prepare ourselves for the future.
Afternote: a technical challenge
Where does our social worldmaking capacity come from?
Some of it is our embodied intelligence, the biological capacities of a bipedal creature. Suppose a friend hands you a cup of coffee. You know they no longer have that cup; after all it's in your hands, not theirs! We take that common sense about the physical world for granted, but that doesn't prevent us from knowing that when the same friend emails a PDF document to you, that they still have a copy of that document.
What's obvious in the real world becomes very hard when designing an artificial world that mimics the real world. The computer doesn't have our common sense. It needs to be explicitly told that cups have a unique location in space, and it can't be in two locations at once. It will take some doing to create simulated worlds that capture our physical intelligence. Gaming companies manage to do it, but they have hundreds of staff members and hundreds of millions in the bank.
How to do it in a low cost fashion?