The Allure of Simplicity

Deconstructing the Simplifying Mechanisms that Serve Survival, yet Distort Reality

During much of recorded history, people have been chasing a transcendent form of simplicity. Even now, the shadows of this project lurk in mathematics, in science, in language. Yet no-one ever seems to find a comfortable box to hide in; every rigid and brittle framework breaks under the pressure of conflicting ideas and new discoveries. What then draws humanity toward this end?

The Perspectival Origins of Narrative

The senses of any given organism inevitably fail to account for the sheer abundance of material in the universe. Even that information which the body does absorb is too much for the conscious mind to process. For evidence of this latter thesis, one need only look to the blur of one’s peripheries and their passive filtering out of sensations like the friction of clothing. Further, it has been observed in cases where vision deteriorates, that other senses become more acute to compensate for the loss. One’s body carries out a continual filtering and balancing process based on its biological limitations.

Once information is gathered and sorted, organisms act upon it to improve their position. Conscious creatures experience layered biological processes as singular essences. The sighting of a predator (itself perceived as a unit), an electric pulse in the body, the activation of the amygdala and the release of adrenaline are all condensed into singular cognitive responses: “fight” or “flight.” In animals, and often in humans, there is no conscious rationale behind each muscular movement once the decision is made, only a cascade of unconscious processes. These compressions of complexity into comprehensible inputs lay the groundwork for narrative: a medium which can only exist because of this ability to experience multiplicities as unitary concepts.

Human-constructed narratives select for significant events, ignoring the reality that all occurrences are part of a continuous strain. One unconsciously filters the “arbitrary” (that which is too small and quiet) and emphasises the “significant” (that which is obvious, and loud), allowing the mind to interrogate patterns, in spite of the world’s complexity.

Take, for example, the failure to react in time, resulting in a car crash. One may learn the lesson that they must be more vigilant, as a matter of principle. However, they are likely to ignore the seemingly arbitrary effects of having slept slightly less time than usual, or a familiar smell which made them nostalgic and drew their attention from the road. These are too specific, subtle and above all, non-agential. One puts their focus instead on the failure to look left, and their excessive speeding; identifying those causes which are obvious and rectifiable in future instances. Pragmatic, but far from a full or universal accounting of reality.

The Limits of Rationality

It is only with the luxury of prolonged safety, that one can begin to address more demanding challenges; those which do not require quick reflexes, nor vigilance. Time affords the mind an opportunity to reflect on trends which have thus far aided its survival and distil them into blueprints and schematics. This process of distillation one calls “rationality” and marks it out as one of the governors of human action.

Rationality, like any drive in the body, attempts to dominate the others. Given the material and sociological conditions of civilisations, which have benefited from many rich harvests of intellectually-derived inventions, it is no wonder that rationality has gained ascendancy. Generation after generation have castigated those whose dominant drives are bestial, and praised those who act within the bounds of rational discourse. As with a society that has known nothing but tyranny, the hegemony established around the rational drive eventually appears as the default. Its apologists and advocates, who are beneficiaries of this state of affairs, eventually argue for a transcendent, divine order as a post-hoc justification. A legitimisation of power. By making rationality separate in essence from the other drives, they must thereby disassociate it from the body to avoid complications; this is the basis for a system such as Cartesian dualism.

The first misconception that arises under this system, is that rationality is capable of discovering objective, non-perspectival truths. This fails on any concrete basis because the mind cannot account for everything on the infinitely large and infinitely small spectrum of resolution; neither a comprehensive charting of the universe nor of atoms. Even if science could totally remedy this shortcoming on the level of sense perception, through devices, the human mechanism of emphasising only certain causes in a chain (given in the car crash example) demonstrates that one would still be forced to value specific data points more highly than others.

The second misconception is in assuming that complexity, from which rationality is itself a product, has an intrinsic value: a puzzle piece may have many slots, yet on this account find no coherence with the whole.

The Antidote to Complexity

From the standpoint of the human perspective, as knowledge of a thing increases, it becomes more complex. Such a claim is counter-intuitive, yet anyone who has engaged, even superficially, with scientific discourses, will recognize this phenomena. A tree, at a glance, is a solid object which emerges from the ground. A tree, observed through the scientific lens, is a network of cells, enabling a series of life-preserving reactions and processes to sustain themselves. Or, going deeper, a series of atoms, compressed together in different arrangements.

A particularly astute reader might also notice that by mere description of a tree’s construction, one is forced to contend with language and definitions. In this case, there is the assertion of “life-preservation” as a function of a tree. Pedantic as it may be, this concept itself requires a working definition of “life.” So, speaking empirically, an object which is unknown is simple, and any attempt to describe the object imbues it with additional known complexity.

The Dunning Kruger effect is in some ways the expected result of this relationship with objects. The theory suggests that the less one knows about something, the more they believe they know of it. Whilst the specialists observe exponentially expanding complexity of phenomena (the tree analysed scientifically), and attempt to navigate it, the laymen oscillate between total unawareness and intuitive speculation. This allows the latter group to stop at the surface and therefore at the most simplistic view. It should be noted here, that a specialist is a laymen in every field outside of their study. Specialisation then is not necessarily a reflection of courage in the face of complexity and can easily become a useful tool for justifying one’s more intuitive, straightforward beliefs.

An Escape From Analysis

Religions once acted as an antidote to the intellectual, scientific and logical approach to solving life, standing against the specialised study of knowledge. They imbued objects with sufficient explanations and descriptions to discourage deep investigations through empirical study. One took for granted that the lightning strike was delivered by Thor, and the tides brought in by Poseidon, expressing no great interest in their naturalistic explanations. Thereby the intellectual exercise could be directed entirely on that which served survival, such as crafting and technology.

The irony is that some religions eventually destroyed their own primary function. They allowed the intellect to struggle with the mechanisms underneath divine actions, and formulated methodologies to more accurately understand the natural world. In doing so, they produced the very fields of study which would undermine them. Anthropology, psychology and astronomy would reveal the artificial and erroneous aspects of belief, leading to a decrease in faith. Left with a void where once was assumed knowledge, it became necessary to replace these explanations. In Western canon, science stole away the task of imbuing information into objects. The information replaced was more actionable, able to be distilled into strict and unchanging “laws.”

However, science was not concerned with softening the world to satisfy narrative sensibilities, but the presumption that truth would set humanity free. It tried to remove any idea that did not adhere to strict logic and data, and transplant its own truths into the body. Scientists, of all people, should have known the risk of such a procedure…

The Communal Need for Archetypes

As Carl Jung identified, replacing beliefs is not a simple matter. Just as a body rejects foreign organs, the psyche rejects foreign ideas. For proper integration, one needs both practical explanation and psychological cohesion. He proposed that archetypes, symbolic motifs taken from the deepest wells of the psyche, are integral to human orientation. By superimposing the archetypes onto one’s narrative representation of the world, one transmutes the cold inhumanity of nature, which science brings front and centre, into the warmth of meaning.

“The psyche produces ideas which are not derived from external sources. It creates symbols that reflect not the external world, but the inner one. The God-image is one such symbol—it arises from the collective unconscious and serves to bind the psyche to meaning.”

— Psychology and Religion (1940)

One can perhaps account for the superficial skins and imagistic similarities amongst archetypes by comparison to the communal function of living creatures. Bird calls are first and foremost evolved as a means of identification. It is only in primates and some rare species that one sees the origins of complex informational exchange, culminating at the current apex in humans (at least as far as has been observed). Seen as communal mechanisms, archetypes enforce the weight of collective narratives and universalise one’s experiences. One becomes better equipped to assure their community of the Truth, since they are able to dress information within the proper codes and symbols. Every idea then, finds itself at the behest of aesthetics, being accepted only if it resonates sufficiently with the receiver’s worldview. Even now, with all systematising and science, a medley of erroneous ideas find purchase through rhetoric alone. Why? Because the most universal argument is the most convincing, yet reality resists all universalisation.

Sublimating Reality to Transcendence

The ambition to force actual complexity into a stable and simplified representation is at first in service of pragmatism, aiming to reduce an overwhelming number of options to only the most useful. Evidently, when one is choosing between career paths, it serves them to narrow the options by personal aptitude and interest. However, this process of simplification is eventually transmuted through human thought from a series of operations to a single object of desire.

Many philosophers have fashioned themselves the unveilers of true forms, and thought knowledge and rationality the best tools for this inquiry. Instead, they discovered the crudest, most unwieldy forms, hidden from the senses and bound up in the clumsiness, and verbosity of the intellect. Namely: perfect forms, numbers, things in themselves.

To understand the allure of these formulations, one can look to aesthetics. When a great many faces are super imposed, they produce a more or less universally pleasing subject. So too, the perfect form of a circle takes all of the things that resemble circles (again, these only exist by result of grouping unequal things), and places all of their conceivable averages into a concept. It was likely Plato’s inheritance of language, and captivation with the beauty of its constructs, that seduced him to make the concept more real and important than the crude instance.

Much of the philosophical canon has been an exercise in harmonising the empirical, pragmatic, teleological and ontological into singular concepts. Free Will, The Transcendent, The Good… these are mere chimeras and reifications of what is merely useful. They serve to make behavioural prescriptions align with “objectivity” and, in turn, motivate desirable behaviours. Under this style of philosophy, moralising inevitably becomes unnuanced and prone to pathologizing.

Conclusion

It is only by a return to the dangers of nature and physicality, or through an overly reductive worldview that one regains the psychological comfort of simplicity in itself. Since both of these approaches are at least nominally undesirable, one must instead accept that they will never account for the full spectrum of complexity. In practical terms, this means arguing for one’s position on its own merits, without recourse to totalising concepts or transcendental values. It means recognising the context-dependency of language. It means losing the blind reverence for pure rationality and “dispassionate” science as if they are able to answer all of life’s question. The challenge has been set.