Critiquing The Mystique of Simplicity in Science, Art, and Life

In our culture many of us have adopted the value of simplicity. We value it in science, in art, in mathematics, and in our lives. A popular acronym is KISS "keep it simple, stupid". In science especially, we laud Occam's razor ("The principle of preferring the simplest of competing theories" according to Wiktionary). Is our world necessarily and inherently simple? Doesn't complexity better characterize our world than simplicity? Is our preference for simplicity misplaced? Are there other more important criteria for good science, good art, good mathematics, and living a good life? If not simplicity, what is it that we should really value in science, art, mathematics, and life?

This group conversation will primarily explore Jan Zwicky's critique of simplicity which is a major topic in her (optional) video presentation "The Experience of meaning" (http://y2u.be/je1ZN907HzQ). Zwicky argues that the resonance of gestalts, which she calls "the experience of meaning" is more fundamental and more important than simplicity. Zwicky argues that clutter that antagonizes resonance in our experience of meaning is the real concern we should care about, not simplicity. She suggests that by focusing on simplicity we miss the more important, and more impactful issue of meaning in our science, in our arts, in our mathematics, and in our lives.

Zwicky's powerful presentation (http://y2u.be/je1ZN907HzQ) was delivered during the 2013 conference "Simplicity: Ideals of Practice in Mathematics & the Arts". The papers of the conference were published in the 2017 book "Simplicity: Ideals of Practice in Mathematics and the Arts". Pennsylvania residents can get electronic access to the book through Temple University's PA Borrower's program. Message me with your e-mail address and I can send you a copy. Zwicky published a book "The Experience of Meaning" in 2019 which significantly expands and restructures her essay to make its points in a book length format.

Zwicky reports that the prospectus for the 2013 conference on simplicity raised the question: "Why is the idea of simplicity so important in scientific practice?"

Zwicky warns, "Many truths are complex, and they are simplified at the cost of distortion, at the cost of ceasing to be truths. Why then do we valorize quantitative simplicity?"

She gives the profound example of Kepler's laws of motion that belie the simplicity in Copernicus' model of the solar system with the Sun at the center: "Attempts to explain apparent planetary motion with one focus—the centre of a circle—generated clutter; attempts to explain it with two foci precipitated an experience of meaning so powerful that it changed the intellectual life of Europe."

Zwicky argues that meaning, not simplicity, is what scientists, artists, mathematicians, and citizens really value. Meaning is what gets us out of bed in the morning. It is what takes our breath away and gives us a new outlook on our lives. Her thinking about the value of the ethereal and often ineffable qualities of meaning is grounded in gestalt or wholistic thinking.

Zwicky's critique of the mystique of simplicity is not alone, in their 2012 book, "The Design Way", Harold G. Nelson and Erik Stolterman write, "Acknowledging that complexity is the natural order of things is something too many people try to avoid and have even been trained to avoid in their educational backgrounds."

Zwicky reminds us, "The view of Harakleitos, then, the riddler, who saw change and unity and dynamic interdefinition as the fundamental features of the cosmos" may be a more correct view of the natural order.

Does the idea of simplicity run against nature?

Is the meaning of our experience and our experience of meaning so complex and so ineffable that simplicity causes us to focus on the wrong things and overlook the real nature of being, which for Zwicky is the resonance of gestalts?

Here is my condensed summary of Zwicky's argument:

The Gestalt school whose leading exponents were Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka maintained that "wholes are different than the sums of their parts; and we perceive wholes first. Wholes, they argued, are both logically and epistemologically prior to their parts".

Zwicky says, "A Gestalt itself ... may be defined as a structure all of whose aspects are in dynamic interrelation with each other and with the whole."

Zwicky argues that melody provides a striking example: "Melodies are aural shapes, and we perceive these shapes, not their constituents, spontaneously."

Facial recognition is another example. We may recognize hundreds of faces, but we cannot draw nor describe them (from memory, I assume). Laboratory experiments show that subjects who are asked to identify or think about the parts of the faces they attempt to recognize do more poorly than subjects just asked to recognize faces.

Zwicky argues that the experience of meaning, the experience of gestalts, come in two forms: "we move from a chaotic situation ... to a situation in which we discern pattern or structure" (she calls this "gestalt crystallization") and "we see a given thing or image as something else" (she calls this "gestalt shifts"). In both cases we perceive structure. In the first it is structure manifesting out of chaos and in the second it is a metaphorical shift.

She distinguishes the two types using the language of poetry. Gestalt crystallization is "like haiku: single images through which the resonance of something much larger sounds. Whereas, gestalt shifts are like "metaphor: x is not y; and yet it is".

In her 2019 expansion of her 2013 presentation, Zwicky provides a list of other names for gestalt insight: "Wittgenstein called it Sehen als [seeing as], Gerard Manley Hopkins called it the sensation of inscape, Plato described it as κατ' εἶδοζ λελόμενον [kat' eidos legomenon, understanding according to a form that collects particulars into a unity], the old Taoists called it awareness of zìrán [self-evidencing]".

Zwicky argues that the structure of a gestalt experience is comprised of "resonant internal relations" so that "the aspects of a gestalt are interdefined".

Zwicky gives three images to further clarify the experience of meaning: a visual proof of the Pythagorean theorem, a visual puzzle, and the Necker cube.

Can you think of situations in which your breath has been taken away or your vision has been altered? Do these examples corroborate Zwicky's argument? If not, what is the difference between your experience and the gestalt experience?

Zwicky argues that reductionist prejudice, a focus on the aggregative synthesis of parts, obscures our gestalt experiences of meaning and makes it harder to discuss. Do you agree with her? What is the value and relative importance between gestalt thinking and synthetic/analytical thinking? Which form of thinking is to be preferred? In which situations? Why?

Zwicky argues that "We frequently use the vocabulary of recognition to describe our experiences of insight". Does this make sense? Why is re-cognition involved?

Zwicky points out that even though "insight" and "recognition" (the language of gestalt experience) imply a sense of truth, in fact, gestalt experiences may not be veridical, may not be true, may not truly represent reality. She gives the example of the phi phenomenon (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_phenomenon) which is universally (hence objectively) perceived as a moving light when in fact it is just two flashing lights. She also refers to Kepler's insight that planetary motion is connected to the five perfect solids (the tetrahedron, octahedron, hexahedron or cube, icosahedron, and dodecahedron).

Zwicky writes, "the experience of meaning is not always an experience of truth."

Zwicky summarizes her characterization of the experience of meaning: "to experience meaning—to have a gestalt crystallize out of chaos, or to sense the internal relations between one gestalt and another".

She gives this further description and illustration: "the whole is experienced through the particular, which is an aspect of it. This is possible only if every part is internally related to every other part: if it is the nature of the whole that determines both what and that any part is."

Zwicky infers Leo Tolstoy's insight in "War and Peace": "Paring life to its basics allows one to experience its ontological core, which is that the natural world—in all its magnificent complexity—is a resonant whole. One becomes able to perceive this resonance in individual beings and this perception brings joy."

She continues, "Visualize a geodesic sphere. Because its nodes are dimensionless points, each exists only as a set of angles. Now imagine the sphere's lines are threaded with elastic, so that any or all of the nodes can move. If any one of them does move, this will affect the angles that define it: some will contract, some will expand. As will the constituting angles of every other node. Now, put the whole thing in motion. Each node will be in interdefined dynamic relation with every other node; and each will, necessarily, reflect the state of the whole at every moment."

Does this explain how the "resonant internal relations" of a gestalt experience work? Does this example show how simplicity is misplaced whereas the resonance of gestalts can remain dynamically powerful even when a detailed analysis of angles would be complex? Or would you argue that gestalts integrate these dynamics and reveal the simplicity in what from an angular measuring point of view would be incomprehensibly complex?

She also cites as examples, the protagonist in Tolstoy's "War and Peace", Pierre Bezukhov, and a passage from Arthur Koestler.

Zwicky writes, "At the core of the Gestalt theory of learning is the view that to understand something just is to perceive its relevant structural similarity to some other thing or situation. The perception of telling similarity is the litmus that understanding has occurred."

Zwicky concludes, "we experience meaning as resonant interior attunement". She cites Ludwig Wittgenstein as corroborating the view that "internal relations [are] at the centre of his theory of meaning" in "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus".

Zwicky argues that instead of simplicity, we should value a lack of clutter in our understandings of science, the arts, and our lives?

She cites Arne Næss's distinction between complicated and complex: "What is complicated is disunified, chaotic… What is complex, by contrast, may be intricate, but it is not chaotic; it has a unifying gestalt—Næss's example, of course, is an ecosystem. By definition, a complex thing cannot be simple in the sense of having no parts or divisions. It will have multiple aspects, and there are often many different relations among these aspects. But complexity is uncluttered. Everything fits. Clutter, then, may be defined as that which does not belong to a gestalt, that which has no internal relation to other aspects of an array. … Clutter is anything that damps down or muffles this resonance."

To explain how clutter fits into her schema for the being and understanding of the world as gestalts, Zwicky observes than "anything we see or understand as a thing—each has shape, is a whole whose own aspects are internally related.… The world, in other words, is an immense complex of subordinate and superordinate gestalts. To paraphrase the homespun philosopher, it's gestalts all the way down. And up, too.…"

Then she fits clutter into this ontology (nature of reality), "Clutter consists of what we might call con- or peri-ordinate gestalts—things that don't fit; facts we say we don't understand, but wish we did; recalcitrant data. It consists of gestalts that don't seem to belong to a superordinate gestalt; or, to put it another way, of gestalts that don't seem to have internal relations to other subordinate gestalts. Their perception therefore does not precipitate an experience of meaning. This failure to precipitate an experience of meaning is the hallmark of conordinate gestalts."

She cites Arne Næss for the terms con- and peri-ordinate gestalts which she doesn't define. We might interpolate their meanings by observing in Wiktionary that "ordinate" can mean "disposed or arranged in an orderly or regular fashion" while the prefix "con-" means "with, together, or joint" and "peri-" means "near". In both cases suggesting that clutter is next to or associated with the gestalt, but not quite part of it, not fully resonant with the gestalt we have focused on.

Does this argument show why simplicity oversimplifies and why the point of our epistemic understandings are resonant gestalts? Something like simplicity is retained by Zwicky in her epistemic virtue that resonant meaning lacks clutter (conordinate gestalts). But, she emphasizes, it has nothing to do with a simplicity of parts.

Zwicky explores the claim that "gestalt comprehension and language-use are somehow at odds. She reports on Wertheimer's interview of Albert Einstein who said, "I very rarely think in words at all". She discusses the work of Jonathan Schooler on "verbal overshadowing". She quotes Schooler saying, "verbal processing has been assumed to be the 'deepest' and most memorable form of processing". The quote goes on to suggest that language can interfere with gestalt experiences.

Zwicky concludes, "[we want] the revelation of meaning. We want to experience gestalts so powerful they make us change our lives. I do not know why we want this. One possibility is that that's what being itself is: the resonance of gestalts."

In considering Zwicky's presentation, how should we think about our learning and our understanding? How should we think of the role of meaning in our understanding? What is meaning? How do we experience understanding and meaning? Why is the experience of meaning important to our understanding?

Should this understanding of meaning replace the distorting value imposed by our mystique of simplicity with a gestalt approach of meaning? Should we view the nature of clutter as conordinate gestalts as a more incisive, than simplicity, way to think about our science, our arts, our mathematics, and our lives?