On the Spiritual Essence of the Catch-22 (Part I)

"...With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible." -Matt. 19:26

As applied to the logical intellect, Wikipedia provides the following description:

A catch-22 is a paradoxical situation from which an individual cannot escape because of contradictory rules or limitations… Catch-22s often result from rules, regulations, or procedures that an individual is subject to, but has no control over, because to fight the rule is to accept it. Another example is a situation in which someone is in need of something that can only be had by not being in need of it (e.g. the only way to qualify for a loan is to prove to the bank that you do not need a loan)

The loan example is a good one for our purposes. In the spiritual context, the Catch-22 involves a situation when establishing the conditions for understanding first requires understanding to be established. We need to somehow know what we are seeking to know before we can truly know it. To those who already have this understanding, more understanding will be given, but to those who lack it, the conditions for attaining understanding will only become more difficult to establish.¹ That is because what we are seeking to know is the capacity of ‘knowing’ itself, which is normally utilized to observe the sensory world and accumulate knowledge but is not itself observed or known. The process becomes a recursive paradox - the tool we use to know seeks to know itself but, as it tries to lay hold of itself, its constitution continues to morph and becomes something different.

Moreover, to ‘fight’ against this recursive paradox by turning our concepts back upon the activity that produces them is to also accept the paradox and to exacerbate it even further. The more thinking tries to chase and grasp its own ‘tail’ of activity, the more elusive the prospect of catching it becomes. Many modern philosophers of knowledge have died precisely on this hill, most famously Kant and those who explicitly or implicitly adopted his epistemology (practically everyone). We can better understand why that is the case through the following experiment. Imagine you are using a camera and want to capture yourself using the camera, i.e. to get perceptual feedback on your camera movements so you can better understand what you are doing with the camera. The seemingly logical approach would be to create something like the following setup:

We can see that, when the camera is made to recursively observe itself, every little movement of the camera recedes and propagates infinitely through the nested depths of the feedback image. Indeed, quite aesthetic geometric patterns arise through this recursive feedback process. Yet if we are trying to gain intuitive insight into the nature of the movements, we must admit that we instead only get increasingly convoluted perceptual feedback and can hardly detect the original movements anymore. The aesthetic geometric patterns only serve to enchant our attention. In that sense, the recursive feedback process leads us further and further from our ‘pure’ movements of the camera, i.e. our intuitive understanding of the tool that is making all of the perceptual patterns possible.

That analogy helps us orient to the core predicament in modern times when we have been tasked, by the natural evolutionary course of human history, with knowing how it is that we know. Even when we are awake enough to realize our knowing activity should somehow be accounted for in our observations, our first instinct is to build ever more complicated perceptual models of that activity. Those models then enchant our attention and therefore dig the recursive hole deeper as we lose sight of the original movements. We can see examples of how certain steadily increasing domains of secular science have taken up this recursive task throughout the last century, such as theoretical physics (particularly quantum mechanics), biology (e.g. autopoiesis), psychology, cognitive science, and second-order cybernetics.

Diagram from Stewart Brand's 1976 conversation with Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, noting that they and Norbert Wiener understood themselves as participant observers in contrast to the detached "input-output" approach typical of engineering.

Second-order cybernetics, also known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, is the recursive application of cybernetics to itself and the reflexive practice of cybernetics according to such a critique. It is cybernetics where "the role of the observer is appreciated and acknowledged rather than disguised, as had become traditional in western science".[1] Second-order cybernetics was developed between the late 1960s and mid 1970s[note 1] by Heinz von Foerster and others, with key inspiration coming from Margaret Mead. Foerster referred to it as "the control of control and the communication of communication" and differentiated first-order cybernetics as "the cybernetics of observed systems" and second-order cybernetics as "the cybernetics of observing systems".

Many insightful thinkers have utilized this approach in the 20th and 21st centuries and generated aesthetic conceptual models just like we saw in the camera experiment. To name only a few, there was Carl Jung the depth psychologist who recursively studied imaginative activity through dream analysis. Thomas Kuhn recursively studied scientific thinking through the analysis of scientific history and paradigm shifts. More recently, we have John Vervaeke who recursively studies cognition through the framework of relevance realization. Michael Levin, who recursively studies cognition through scientific research on embodied cognitive agents. Donald Hoffman recursively studies cognition through the mathematical framework of Interface Perception Theory and MUI theory. The insights provided by such thinkers are indeed valuable but Hoffman hits the nail on the head when he often states that the function of a good scientific theory is to reveal its own assumptions and limitations.

These thinkers (and many more) and their conceptual frameworks have bumped up against the threshold of the Catch-22 and have failed to make it across to the other side. The fundamental assumption-limitation of the conceptual approach has been revealed, provided that we are genuinely interested in noticing and heeding the feedback from our theoretical efforts. These recursive approaches to understanding cognitive activity are essentially the same as the recursive camera experiment we saw above. The real-time movements of observation-thinking continue to escape the perceptual feedback of the second-order cybernetic models. We can model the finished perceptual results of our past thinking movements but the present movement that is doing the modeling will never be reflected in the model. That present movement continually escapes our memory pictures of the whole process by which we derive our models.

We shouldn’t try to overcomplicate this principle. What we are discussing here is so simple that, because of its simplicity, it is almost universally ignored in modern intellectual life.² It’s not that it is difficult to notice but rather, if it is noticed, many uncomfortable and undesired implications flow forth that threaten to revolutionize intellectual inquiries across the board. Many research projects would need to be paused while a whole new way of thinking (and feeling) was cultivated before the projects resumed with entirely different research agendas. In the meanwhile, the researchers would surely grow afraid that their colleagues and ‘competitors’ were continuing to advance research into new frontiers without them. Therefore, the whole prospect is instinctively avoided by nearly all philosophers, scientists, and intellectual thinkers in general.

To better appreciate and orient to the nature of our modern Catch-22, we should briefly survey where we are and how we got here. There was a time when humans instinctively felt to be woven into the spiritual fabric of Nature and its rhythms. Practically all our thoughts, emotions, and sensations were concentrically aligned with these rhythms which flowed right through our instinctive activity and structured everything we do from waking to sleeping, from birth to death. There was no cognitive reflection on our thoughts, i.e. individual self-awareness, but rather the thoughts were experienced as something akin to forces of nature that many souls shared and were immediately translated into impulses. We were much like present-day animals in that respect, which is especially easy to notice in insects that have a relatively short life cycle.

Suppose that we observe an animal during the course of a year. We will find that its life follows the cycle of the seasons. Take for example an insect: according to the time of year it will form a chrysalis (pupate), at another season it will emerge and shed its chrysalis-form, at another time lay its eggs, and so on. We can follow the course of nature, follow the stages of such an insect's life, and find a certain connection between them, for the animal organizes its life according to its natural surroundings
…
We may say, therefore, that the insect has a certain direction in its life through spring, summer, autumn and winter. It does not give its development up to chance, placing itself as it does within certain laws in each succeeding phase of its life. Mankind, however, has left behind the age of instinctive co-existence with nature. In his case it was more ensouled than that of the animals, but still instinctive. His life has taken on a newer, more conscious form. Yet we find that man, in spite of his higher soul-life and capacity to think, has given himself over to a more chaotic life. With the dying away of his instincts he has fallen, in a certain way, below the level of the animals. However much one may emphasize man's further steps forward, towering above the animals, one must still concede that he has lost a particular inner direction in his life. ³

What we now call “thinking” was at that time a living supersensible force like instincts or passions that streamed in from the depths and stimulated organic mental pictures. These living images were shared by entire communities and compelled this or that impulse, with movement in one direction or another, to complete this or that task, in strict accordance with natural rhythms. The latter were not experienced as mindless mechanistic processes but, instead, as the organic and intent-driven context of cultural and natural life, just as many of our daily tasks are experienced as flowing forth from and being contextualized by our intents. When we intend to visit the grocery store, for example, all our sensations, emotions, and thoughts experienced along the journey will be ‘tinged’ with this idea of ‘visiting the grocery store’. That is also how the natural rhythms, like the seasonal cycles, were experienced by our ancestors, except the intents that ‘tinged’ their experience were felt as not belonging to them personally, but to the Gods.

It is easy to see that humanity has grown worlds apart from this instinctive synchronization with Nature and its rhythms. Many people sleep during the day and stay up at night, if it suits them. Most people reproduce, not based on propitious times of the year indicated by the stars, but based on personal circumstances and preferences. We can go skiing during Summer and surf the waves during Winter by traveling across the Globe. New festivals and holidays pop up at all times of the year. And so on. All of these possibilities reflect the fact that we have been liberated from natural rhythms in our mental life and that has also influenced many domains of physical life. Yet that does not mean the natural rhythms have disappeared or no longer influence our mental life. Rather those rhythms have receded deep into the subconscious context that modulates our thoughts, feelings, and actions. In that sense, we only have the illusion of being ‘free’ in most aspects of our lives, including our intellectual thinking.

Here is a brief exercise to inwardly sensitize to this process of desynchronization. Imagine that you are immersed in deep contemplation of some ideas while listening to someone lecture about philosophy, mathematics, or some other abstract topic that is engrossing for you. The outer world, including your bodily sensations and also personal desires and emotions, fades far into the background as you are absorbed in the ideal stream of thoughts. You are entirely immersed in and united with this ideal flow of meaning. People are coming in and out of the lecture hall but nothing disturbs your focus; they may as well not exist. Now imagine some irregularity occurs, like slurred speech or an entirely unfamiliar word, that causes you to begin focusing on particular sounds and words. Then you start to ask questions like, “What does this word mean?” or, “Why is he talking about that?”.

Now you have become interested in what the World content you were previously engrossed in personally means to you. You are no longer united with the speaker’s ideas in a seamless flow of shared meaning, but rather you have put distance between your personal sphere of meaning and the speaker’s ideas ‘out there’. The latter has become more enigmatic and fragmented into particular elements. In that sense, we only experience a separate perceptual World when the fully comprehensible flow of meaning gets ‘disturbed’ by personal interests and desires and therefore becomes increasingly incomprehensible. The driving question then becomes, “What does the World content mean to me?” We can also easily re-experience this Fall into decoherence if we concentrate on a mental image or gaze into some aspect of Nature, like the deep blue sky or the lush green of plant life, and notice how long it takes before the inner commentary begins on what we are doing or on particular details.

From this new state of incomprehensibility, new questions can be asked and new intuitions can be developed against the perceptual landscape, which leads to new qualities and capacities of consciousness. Modern humanity has already reached the greatest decoherence of the meaningful flow where the intuitions attained from the sensory spectrum became the polar opposite of holistic spiritual intuition. Put another way, the materialistic depth of the 19th century was the holistic spiritual intuition viewed from the polar opposite perspective. It is interesting to note how materialistic science reached ideas of time invariance, perfect symmetry, the conservation of matter and energy (they are neither created nor destroyed), and similar ones. Are these conceptions not the polar opposite of an eternal and unchanging Divine essence?

The problem is not the decohered perspective itself but our desire to cement that perspective as the only “right” one. That is when the Catch-22, along with all other intellectual paradoxes, took full effect. It is when human consciousness felt its thoughts to become completely independent of the natural rhythms and grew the desire to analyze the latter as a ‘neutral observer’; as a parallel commentator on their happenings. In other words, humanity became comfortable with passively analyzing the World content at a distance, encompassing thoughts about perceptions as ‘private’ entities that only try to approximate the World ‘out there’ as best as possible. The intellect felt like a detached and neutral observer that could keep its same stable constitution while receiving feedback from its thoughts about the experiential flow. That approach led to many technological advances, but these advances also reinforced the desire to remain in a passive and detached state due to their successes.

We entirely lost sight of the living mental images that once flowed through our ancestors. I say we lost sight of them because they did not cease to exist, rather they still flow beneath the surface of waking consciousness and structure our experiential flow, unnoticed. To get a sense of that, consider how we remember past events by calling up mental pictures of them. If we are trying to remember an event where we were particularly active, for example when playing a sport, we will probably swim in the mental pictures without accompanying them with verbal words. We should imagine that this sort of imagistic flow is always present, even when we are verbally thinking about some intellectual topic and don’t notice the mental pictures. The verbal commentary arises as a specific encoding of those mental pictures into more manageable units so we can refine our ideas about experiences. The encoding process, however, also drowns out the experience of the mental images, just as the stellar firmament is drowned out by the daylight.

It is from that decohered and static modern perspective, detached from the living mental images that immerse us in the living rhythms of Nature, that we created all the ‘hard problems’ for ourselves - the problem of how mental operations interact with the bodily organism, the problem of how life can arise from non-life, how mindless material processes can emerge into conscious awareness of themselves, how a unified consciousness can separate into distinct islands of experience, how those distinct islands of experience can recombine into a unified consciousness, and all related problems. These problems are only ‘hard’ if we continue insisting that we are detached neutral observers of processes external to us; whether those processes are conceived as material, psychic, or spiritual makes no difference, since the hard problems reside in our experience and not in our theoretical frameworks.

The only way forward from this conundrum is to squarely confront the Catch-22 in our thinking with faith, hope, and courage. The ideal forces that once animated our ancestors through revelatory insights and impulses have now withdrawn into our capacity for thinking, so thinking must recursively turn upon itself to recover its secrets. Yet to adequately address the Catch-22, we cannot simply build more complicated mental models of the cognitive-perceptual process, which is akin to the cameraperson trying to capture his own movements with the camera and becoming enchanted in the perceptual feedback. In that scenario, our perceptual feedback becomes more and more convoluted and keeps us outside the intimate process that is unfolding to make our thinking movements possible. Instead, we need to make a paradigmatic shift akin to that between geocentrism and heliocentrism.

We need a shift in our underlying perspective on the perceptual feedback we receive from observing our thinking movements, just as the heliocentric model shifts to viewing the planetary orbits from the perspective of the Sun. In terms of predictive calculations, the models are practically equal (and the geocentric model may even fare better in some ways), but the heliocentric perspective streamlines the perceptual feedback so that it becomes easier to notice the harmonic patterns that are involved. From such a shift in perspective, the thoughts that result from our underlying spiritual movements, rather than being arranged in ever more complicated and inelegant ways, begin to order themselves in the concentric archetypal rhythms that our ancestors instinctively experienced. They no longer point to some ‘reality-in-itself’ external to us, but are experienced as continual testimonies to our inner rhythms from varied angles. Our thoughts become like the color palette used by the painter - they become a set of tools to artistically express our intuitive movements.

Our thinking activity then begins to feel like it belongs to reality as much as our physical limbs normally do. With our Sun-centered thinking, we extend our subtle limbs and probe the supersensible landscape of inner activity, gaining flashes of insight into our inner rhythms. Our physical limbs help us experience and orient to spatial life, while our spiritual limbs help us experience and orient to temporal patterns. Through the physical body, we can notice land and homes nested within communities nested within towns and cities, etc., all with characteristic self-similar patterns, and through the subtle body, we can likewise notice characteristic temporal patterns of nested thoughts, emotions, and impulses. Our ideas can once again feel almost as concrete as colors, sounds, the heat from a flame, and so on, and we can thereby attain a great degree of personal certainty in the ideas that are grasped through thinking.

To better orient to this shift in perspective, we should first consider how using the camera experiment as a metaphor at the beginning of this article serves an essentially different function than literally using the recursive setup to capture our movements of the camera. In the latter case, our desires and expectations are still conditioned to accumulating knowledge from the traditional ‘geocentric perspective’, i.e. passively observing the perceptual feedback and analyzing it from a safe distance to create complex models. In the former metaphorical case, when approached with the needed attention and imaginative effort, the recursive process helps us understand the possibilities and constraints of our inner activity. We utilize the recursive image as an anchor for intimately exploring our mental limitations and taking responsibility for them. We enthusiastically accept the possibility that our self-image, our very sense of ‘who I am’ and ‘what reality is’, will also be transformed in the process.

Through such analogical portals, we attain greater and more intimate insight into why our modern thinking meets fundamental Catch-22s whenever it seeks to understand itself (including its material and organic support). The perceptual feedback we receive from analogical thinking becomes an intimate testimony to what we are always doing with our inner activity, in a way that is simply impossible if we are only focused on mental modeling through conceptual frameworks such as second-order cybernetics. The thoughts we normally use to model are experienced as the feedback of intuitive thinking-camera movements, like our thought-life has become the patterns generated in a pot of water when it is stirred in certain ways. In other words, we start to experience ourselves as the second-order cybernetic process through which the observer and the observed come into existence and rhythmically bring coherence to the experiential flow.

This is an entirely different way of knowing that remains unsuspected by mainstream philosophy, science, art, and theology. Notice how, with the modeling approach, we seek to establish a definitive framework that will last and be adopted by many others to gain insights into the nature of cognitive activity and reality at large. That is the opposite aim of the imaginative-analogical approach. With the latter, the ‘success’ comes when people who encounter the images can discard them and resonate with the inner realities they symbolize. They are explicitly aimed at helping others free their imaginative activity from reliance on external authorities and sources of knowledge. Then free souls can generate their own endless stream of images to refine their deeper intuition and to likewise support others in attaining spiritual freedom. In that sense, we not only study the patterns of past paradigm shifts in our thinking but also allow our thinking to become the new paradigm shift in full consciousness.⁴

It is axiomatic that, to explore domains of experience we are unfamiliar with in normal sensory life, we must continually employ our imagination and become receptive to new inspirations and intuitions that feedback on our imaginative activity. Any person who works in a creative field such as the arts or those involving mathematical-scientific innovation knows that the most original ideas don’t come from combining already familiar thoughts in a mechanical way, but rather as flashes of insight from the ‘other direction’ of our normal thinking activity after persistent effort and patient contemplation. That is evident in mathematical thinking, for example, when previously ‘impossible’ problems are solved, perhaps when entirely different problems are being worked on. Sometimes these inspiring insights are characterized as being reached through a ‘flow state’ that draws on the superconscious.

When musicians, athletes, and artists are fully engaged in what they are doing, and barely conscious of their surroundings, they are said to be in a state of flow. The concept of flow, a cornerstone of positive psychology, was discovered by Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian psychologist best known for his work on flow, happiness, and creativity [6]. A prisoner during World War II, he wondered how individuals that experienced pain and suffering were able to find happiness and create a life worth living. By observing people working relentlessly on tasks and not bothered by boredom or fatigue, he found that happiness can be consciously cultivated and maintained through a state of flow [11]. While interviewing athletes, musicians and artists in order to determine how they experienced optimal performance levels, he noticed their work “flowed” out of them, leading them to their best creations and achievements. He also determined that flow requires a high level of dedication and persistence.⁵

For those insights from the ‘flow state’ to extend beyond the realm of artistic life or mathematical theorems to the supersensible structure of our imaginative activity, we should perfect the process of imagination and inspiration as a technique (or rather allow it to be perfected within us). Perfecting a skill always requires moral virtues that subtly transform our inner modes of thinking, feeling, and acting. In other words, the intellect can no longer be the sole arbiter of accumulating knowledge for itself about reality, but rather the whole human being must partake in the effort. Our reverential feelings and moral deeds should become forces of cognition that lift us out beyond ourselves and allow us to experience what we mean to reality; to experience how reality knows us. It is only in this way that we can begin to know what we are seeking to know before we truly know it and thereby transcend the spiritual Catch-22. In the next part, we will further explore how we can experience being known through the coordinated efforts of our whole intuitive being.

1. Matthew 13:12
“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath."

2. Owen Barfield, ‘Worlds Apart’
“The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.”

3. Rudolf Steiner, GA 221 (1)

4. Romans 7:6
“But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.”

5. International Journal for Cross-Disciplinary Subjects in Education (IJCDSE), Volume 12, Issue 1, 2021