The Fractal Nature of the Sacred

Renaissance Humans, #63

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

—Carl Sagan.

A working, provisional definition of the sacred: That which is experienced, perceived, or designated as possessing ultimate value, set apart from the ordinary, and often imbued with a sense of awe, reverence, or inviolability. It typically evokes a felt presence or connection to a deeper reality—transcendent, immanent, or both—and serves as a focal point for meaning, orientation, and commitment in human life.

There is a thread, running through how humans try to make sense of reality.

It runs through all the ways we seek to parse out who we are, why we’re here, and how we should conduct ourselves.

It weaves and connects our earliest animist intuitions about the world, to the faith traditions handed down in scripture, and into the halls of hard science experimentation.

According to Brendan Graham Dempsey in his new book, A Universal Learning Process, this thread manifests in the meaning that entities find in the environment, the values that allow them to persist in time, and how well they can learn from the world. Entity is doing a lot of work here—it refers to everything from quarks up to human society.

I recently finished Dempsey’s very pocket-size and readable book. In it, he asserts the acquisition of meaningful information enables entities to maintain states far from equilibrium (AKA “not dying”), suggesting that cosmic complexification (The path from atom to cell to animal to human to society) can be viewed as a one long learning process.

In this framing, every thing is really a process.

To do this, Dempsey leans on the work of Gregg Henriques, specifically his “Tree of Knowledge.” I don’t want to get too in the weeds, so just take a gander at this graphic, the origin story of which is interesting in itself.

I know somewhere I read/listened/watched Henriques describe how this model was given to him (in a vision), and he’s spent his academic career building the support for it. I can can’t find an exact source for this, but it’s out there in the ether.

Selected notes from Dempsey’s book:

• Cosmic complexification is a learning process. Maintaining informational integrity requires successful communication between entity and environment. This is where meaning is created. Each of the 4 levels have a system-environment coupling:

  • Object-Field on the Matter plane (structural learning).

    • Values: Generation vs. Annihilation.

    • Examples: atoms joining into molecules, Progogine’s dissipative structures—a drain whirlpool, or a tornado.

  • Organism-Ecology on the Life plane (genetic learning).

    • Values: Reproduction vs. Death.

    • Examples: Multicellular organisms, genes.

  • Animal-Environment on the Mind plane (neuronal learning).

    • Values: Mating vs. Suffering, Fear, Pain.

    • Examples: Animals.

  • Person-Society on the Culture plane (symbolic learning).

    • Values: Intimacy/Personality vs. Sacrifice/Ritual.

    • Examples: Human morality, and the societies we create.

• The Second Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy) holds nature tends toward equilibrium (equilibrium in this case is bad, meaning dead), and the homogenization of differences in the cosmos. Heat dissipates, gradients, dissolve, and “things fall apart.”

• For anything to exist, it must defy annihilation. Only open systems can do this, that is, ones able to take in energy, information, and resources from somewhere outside itself.

• There is a connection between paying attention to the right information¹ as measured by semantic efficiency (how well meaningful content is conveyed) and being thermodynamically efficient. This shows the universal importance of learning at the levels of matter, life, mind, and culture.

• Teleleogical or goal-directed behavior is evident even in prebiotic entitites (autocatalysis)—The “return” of Aristotle’s final cause (scare quotes because it never left, like Robert DeNiro’s character in the movie Ronin).²

• Azarian’s integrated evolutionary synthesis—processing semantic information (meaningful content—what helps you continue in time) is the basic of knowledge creation at all levels. Biologists call it survival, cyberneticists call it persistence, and physicists call it staying far from thermonuclear equilibrium. For a thing to be entails it has meaning. Information is a form of energy.

• Organisms are embodied meaning. Meaning and value exist not as things in themselves (theological thinking), or just as subjective experiences (modern reductionist thinking) but in dynamic relationship of entity with their contextual field.

Sacred Implications

Per Dempsey, the sacred represents the symbolic repository of a culture’s most proven meanings and values as well as the informing template or ideal by means of which people assess novel information for meaning.

• The sacred is what is deemed most important to the continued viability of a successful human system-environment relationship.

• Without the sacred, the psycho-social superorganism breaks down.

• It is what grounds and orients societies.

• The learning process itself must be sacred—it is actually “meta-sacred”, in that it is the very means that the sacred is updated in the face of the unfolding complexification of reality.

So, what is the takeaway of going on this whirlwind tour of a pocket-sized book?

Back to the thread I mentioned at the beginning: Meaning, Value, and Learning reveal the Sacred at all levels, like a sweet fractal GIF of a coastline.

Once we grok this, we can see that the sacred is “the stuff that allows us to persist in time.” This goes for quarks, molecules, cells, animals, individual humans, and societies.

The implication for me, then, is we have to foreground the sacred—put it above the other things that tend to get in the way. Like exulting the individual, the mercurial demands of the market, and our ambition to gain and conquer.

Dempsey’s work, like Henriques’ and Bobby Azarian’s, points toward a synthesis between science and religion, betwixt reason and faith.

Life—and our lives, are legitimate miracles—part of a long line of the Cosmos knowing itself. That’s a blessing, but it comes with responsibility.

A responsibility to seek the meaning and values that cultivate our persisting in time. To keep learning—individually and as a culture. If we don’t, there lies entropy, decay, and annihilation.

Simple, but not Easy.

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Currere Certamen Tuum — Run Your Race

1. This is Vervaeke’s Relevance Realization.

2. Aristotle put forth four types of causes. Here is a quick definition, using a table as an example. Material – What is it made of? The table is made of wood, which provides the substance for its existence. Efficient – What brings something into being? The carpenter who builds the table is the agent responsible for making it. Formal – What gives something its shape or structure? The design or blueprint of a table (flat surface with legs) makes it a table and not something else. Final Cause – What purpose does it serve? The purpose of the table is to hold objects or provide a surface for activities like eating or working. Most of modern science since the Enlightenment prefers to pretend the last two causes don’t exist, because they are difficult/impossible to discern via the scientific method.