Sensemaking: Art is pre-paradigmatic Philosophy is pre-paradigmatic Science

the pipeline of collective sensemaking

Art, philosophy, and science. Three isolated domains. Or are they?

I propose we think of them as stages in a pipeline: art captures raw insights, philosophy structures those insights, and science tests and refines them.

But what is this pipeline? It’s the process of collective sensemaking; that is, how groups of humans sync on a unified grasp of reality.

This essay breaks down how the stages feed into one another. By understanding this progression, we not only see the tangible value of each stage but also how they collectively propel whatever humanity wants to do. If you're intrigued by how we, as a society, synthesize our shared reality, read on.

Collective Sensemaking

Let’s say collective sensemaking is a special case of the free-energy principle in action. The free-energy principle (FEP) tells us that organisms try to minimize the surprise between predictions and sensory data, and brains do it by refining models of their environments as they perceive new things. 

e.g. Catching a ball: you predict the ball’s trajectory and adjust your expectations as the wind pushes it off-course. The FEP also helps explain how larger adaptive systems like society work, and we use it to interpret what art, philosophy and science are doing.

We’re trying to reason about the whole world, the whole human-planetary system that just sort of tries to keep existing by adapting to its environment and growing and maybe generating some beauty along the way. Information enters the system through our subjective experience. That information gets propagated up the brain and out to our peers and across nested levels of aggregation and synthesis. Examples of those levels are squads, companies, communities, scenes, cities, nations, etc; each combining signals from its constituents and taking action in the world as a result. That’s the process of collective sensemaking!

Keeping with the organism analogy, I’d say Art, Philosophy, and Science play roles akin to perception, prediction, and refinement respectively.

• Art picks up on subconscious patterns and communicates them;

• Philosophy assembles these patterns into theories that explain how they connect and generalize into predictions about the world;

• Science uses experiments to compare predictions with empirical observations and progressively bring these theories closer and closer to how the world is.

Art turns chaos into insight

At the level of society, art can be likened to the cognitive process where individuals filter mostly irrelevant stimuli and discern what portions of their sensory inputs deserve attention —John Vervaeke calls it 'relevance realization’.

Art pulls patterns from the primordial pools of the unconscious and brings them to collective attention. It not only presents insights but often challenges existing worldviews. This resonance with individuals and society hints at the gaps in our understanding and offers a chance to bridge them.

While it’s hard to argue for unidirectional influence, we can at least highlight the dialog and co-construction of art and philosophical movements:

• Renaissance art’s portrayals of lifelike human form and nature, as well as techniques for realistic perspective and light/shadow were entwined with the shift from theocentric medieval thought to Humanism and its emphasis on individualism and reason;

• Impressionist art moved away from realism and focused on particular moments of experience making it evident that our connection with reality is filtered through individual perception. That must have resonated with late 19th-century phenomenology.

Once art surfaces patterns that percolate in the societal psyche, they beckon a deeper understanding and integration. Hunches become propositional thoughts, which combine into worldviews and systems.

Philosophy turns vibes into structure

As impactful art captures attention, it permeates the collective consciousness. Philosophers often systematize these newfound artistic paradigms, clarifying relationships, and tracing implications. These philosophical models not only guide scholarly thought but also permeate our everyday reasoning (see pop-stoicism, or postmodernism's influence on culture war online). 

Sometimes, philosophers, (I'm thinking of Jung) will bypass the cultural zeitgeist and turn inward, tapping into deeper or even mystical experiences. These introspections, in essence, can be their personal art that later gets distilled into philosophical constructs.

On their own merit, philosophical systems guide our informal reasoning about the world, offering heuristics for action, and framing inquiries for empirical exploration. They give shape to ideas and the most de facto useful ones end up as scaffolding for empirical investigation by framing the concepts, questions, and problems that science explores and refines.

The causal arrow is easier to trace from Philosophy to Science because we so often see scientists setting out to test predictions from philosophy:

• Aristotle’s Physics ideas on motion, causation, continuity of space and time provided null hypotheses to then be falsified and refined by Galileo (fall speeds of heavier objects) and Newton (inertia vs natural motion).

• Descartes’ mind/body dualism spurring the development of cognitive science and the current search for neural correlates of consciousness.

With the frameworks of understanding set by philosophers, a quest begins to test their validity and universal applicability.

Science refines through experiment

The scientific method, in essence, is an evolved form of the brain's natural drive to reduce uncertainty. It critically examines the ideas sparked by art and structured by philosophy, demanding empirical evidence and validation. Through rigorous experimentation, observations, and analyses, science seeks to confirm or refute these structured ideas, grounding them in empirical reality.

Moreover, science doesn't just validate or refute; it iteratively refines. It takes the broad strokes painted by art and the organized blueprints provided by philosophy and sharpens them, adding nuance and details that were previously overlooked. In doing so, it contributes to the collective knowledge reservoir, crystalizing useful but fuzzy information into an empirically grounded lattice that is stable, potentially into deep time.

Conclusion

Through this lens, we realize the functional importance of the roles of artists and philosophers in the face of a status quo that lionizes science and engineering. Artists delve deep, unearthing the raw materials of sensemaking. Philosophers sculpt these insights into actionable frameworks and worldviews. Scientists then refine and ground these ideas in empirical reality, encrusting them into the matrix of our total knowledge.

In permaculture, the concept of 'edge effect' refers to the fertile intersection of two domains. In the same way, we could recognize the importance of the membranes between art, philosophy, and science, and cultivate them. 

By honoring these interfaces, we ensure our turbo-charged science and engineering are anchored in the very essence of human experience. We ensure a line of insight can travel unobstructed from top-level reasoning and decision, down the levels of aggregation of collective sensemaking and ground out in the center of aliveness, of being.

Note: This essay is very much at the Art stage of the pipeline. Would love to read a bunch of books and support the argument with references to historical examples, but that’s for later :)

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