I’ve recently become obsessed with the role that design plays in the construction of our
mindware and the construction of our sense of self.
And I remember I was in Cape Town giving a keynote for IBM and this guy that I met called
Mahool, a computer scientist, brilliant guy who was a fan of my web series Shots of Awe
showed up for this talk.
And we ended up connecting and going and hanging out and spending the day walking around the
botanical gardens of Cape Town in the middle of a storm on this bridge that went over the
canopy of trees.
It was a total kind of – you couldn’t ask for a better stage for a sort of cerebral
conversation.
And I was talking to him about my desire to steer awareness.
Again, how do I transcend to what Michael Pollan calls the been theres and done thats
of the adult mind.
How do I elicit a childlike sense of wonder?
How do I control and steer subjectivity?
My obsession.
And so he said, “Oh, that’s easy.
You know we do that all the time with design.
It’s called ontological design.”
I was like, “What?
Onto, what?
Tell me again.
Ontological design.”
And I was like, “What does that mean?”
Well it has to do with the nature of beingness itself, ontology, what it is to be, what it
is to inhabit a mind world, a life world, a worldhood.
And basically the idea of ontological design is very simple.
It basically says that design affects us in a way that is much more pervasive than we’re
normally privy to.
The notion is that whether we’re conscious of it or not everything that we design is
designing us back.
We are being actively designed by that which we have designed.
This, of course, echoes Terrence McKenna’s idea that we become what we behold.
Or Marshall McLuhan’s notion that first we build the tools but then they build us,
you know.
Or Steven Johnson when he says our thoughts shape our spaces, you know.
We build cathedrals, we build architectural dwellings and then those spaces return the
favor.
Those spaces build our thoughts.
Our thoughts build our spaces, the spaces return the favor.
So my friend was talking about this notion that ontological design implies that there’s
this hermeneutic circle in the sense of mind emerges into feedback loops between brains,
tools and environments.
There’s a meaning making circle.
The self emerges like the ouroboros, like the dragon that’s eating its own tail, right.
Or like Escher’s hands where you have the hand that is drawing the hand that is drawing
it.
So it’s like this infinity loop.
And that that’s basically how the way mindware emerges, you know.
Who we are – the feedback loop should be the metaphor of our age, right.
Instead of the DNA molecule it should be the feedback loop.
There was an essay written in Aeon Magazine recently about this notion.
But again it’s not just our genetics that determine who we are, it’s the feedback
loops between self and world.
And this is the notion of ontological design.
And I think the takeaway being is that by harnessing those feedback loops we can build
better mindware.
We can build systems, we can build cities, cityscapes, dwellings, spaces.
Even the words we use to map our reality can be improved recursively because it’ll feedback
and then improve who we are.
Better tools, those tools then interface with us and create better ideas and then we use
those tools to build new tools.
And then those new tools interface with us and so on and so forth until novelty approaches
infinity and realities fly apart as Diana Slattery writes in her book Xenolinguistics.
Yeah, so again it should give us as humans a sense of responsibility for authoring the
mindedness of the future, you know.
The minds of the future can be built.
It’s kind of a social engineering project.
Everything that we design should be thought of as a building block, as new construction
kits for our reality.
You can imagine why my head exploded when I was with this guy over the canopy on a bridge
in the botanical gardens of Cape Town during a storm and the guy starts telling me about
ontological design.
Because I was witnessing ontological design happening in that moment.
That stage, that context in which we were – over the trees in the botanical gardens
was conditioning the nature of my subjective experience as he was telling me about this
idea.
I was witnessing the power of our creative and linguistic choices to author my subjectivity.
Even the words we were using to describe, to map our experience were being fed back
into our experience.
And it’s just a reminder of the sort of dizzying freedom that we have to compose our
lives, to compose our experience.
Timothy Leary used to call this the vertigo of freedom.
It’s a crazy idea, right?
But I find it reassuring.
I find it inspiring that we have – we are the music makers.
We are the dreamers of dreams.
We have the pen.
We get to be reality engineers, reality architects and I love that.
I love that idea.