This is thought provoking. There is a lot I could disagree with from a technical perspective, but I fear that may miss the point. Instead I think I’d like to address what I think is the problem the blog adumbrates: there is a whole class of thoughts, concepts and experiences that come under the heading of “transcendent.” We have a bunch of words we move around to point to them, a range of experiences that somehow never quite map to the words we use, and a baffled puzzlement about how to match that gap to the meaning we experience when we contemplate transcendence. I think language drawn from the sciences can get very difficult here as frequently it’s being used analogically, as in the complicated/complex dichotomy. It’s interesting that Zen and Sufism adopt a different approach. They present very simply written stories which contain analogy’s opposite (a confusing contradiction), sometimes expressed as humour, and require us to make sense of this, usually through some shift in scale or perspective. These are all part of meditative practices, and raise the intriguing possibility that, even if we can never quite grasp transcendence semantically, we can procedurally. This is not so odd as it first sounds: mathematicians frequently work with stuff that is literally unimaginable, like the square root of negative 1.
David, thank you. You’ve articulated this beautifully, and I think you’re exactly right.
The difficulty here is not one of technology or intelligence, but of the limits of explanation itself. There are whole classes of experience -transcendence, meaning, presence - that resist being captured semantically, no matter how refined our concepts become. We can point, gesture, circle but not fully contain them in words.
This is why traditions like Zen and Sufism take a different route. Rather than trying to explain transcendence, they invite a procedural encounter with it through paradox, humour, contradiction, and stories that force a shift in perspective rather than offer an answer. As you say, we may never grasp transcendence conceptually, but we can learn to inhabit it.
Ian McGilchrist makes this point with great clarity in The Master and His Emissary (highly recommended). He argues that modern culture has become dominated by a mode of attention that seeks control, abstraction, and explicit explanation (the “Emissary”), while neglecting the broader, relational, embodied way of knowing that apprehends meaning, context, and lived reality (the “Master”). Transcendence belongs to this latter mode: it is known through participation, not dissection.
As the Tao Te Ching puts it: the Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The founder of Sikhism Guru Nanak repeats this in several hymns. Words cant capture it. It has to be experienced.
My next piece will explore this more directly. But thank you for naming the heart of the problem so clearly.
Makes one think.
This is thought provoking. There is a lot I could disagree with from a technical perspective, but I fear that may miss the point. Instead I think I’d like to address what I think is the problem the blog adumbrates: there is a whole class of thoughts, concepts and experiences that come under the heading of “transcendent.” We have a bunch of words we move around to point to them, a range of experiences that somehow never quite map to the words we use, and a baffled puzzlement about how to match that gap to the meaning we experience when we contemplate transcendence. I think language drawn from the sciences can get very difficult here as frequently it’s being used analogically, as in the complicated/complex dichotomy. It’s interesting that Zen and Sufism adopt a different approach. They present very simply written stories which contain analogy’s opposite (a confusing contradiction), sometimes expressed as humour, and require us to make sense of this, usually through some shift in scale or perspective. These are all part of meditative practices, and raise the intriguing possibility that, even if we can never quite grasp transcendence semantically, we can procedurally. This is not so odd as it first sounds: mathematicians frequently work with stuff that is literally unimaginable, like the square root of negative 1.
David, thank you. You’ve articulated this beautifully, and I think you’re exactly right.
The difficulty here is not one of technology or intelligence, but of the limits of explanation itself. There are whole classes of experience -transcendence, meaning, presence - that resist being captured semantically, no matter how refined our concepts become. We can point, gesture, circle but not fully contain them in words.
This is why traditions like Zen and Sufism take a different route. Rather than trying to explain transcendence, they invite a procedural encounter with it through paradox, humour, contradiction, and stories that force a shift in perspective rather than offer an answer. As you say, we may never grasp transcendence conceptually, but we can learn to inhabit it.
Ian McGilchrist makes this point with great clarity in The Master and His Emissary (highly recommended). He argues that modern culture has become dominated by a mode of attention that seeks control, abstraction, and explicit explanation (the “Emissary”), while neglecting the broader, relational, embodied way of knowing that apprehends meaning, context, and lived reality (the “Master”). Transcendence belongs to this latter mode: it is known through participation, not dissection.
As the Tao Te Ching puts it: the Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The founder of Sikhism Guru Nanak repeats this in several hymns. Words cant capture it. It has to be experienced.
My next piece will explore this more directly. But thank you for naming the heart of the problem so clearly.