Finding meaning in The Nature of Order

Old Christopher Alexander fan and cog.sci sceptic, and I can't really summarize him, but I thought he was an antithesis for post-modern subjectivity, and a modern philosophical advocate for the value of techne over episteme. I thought he was approaching an implied question of whether a critical theory or ideology of Order and Nature could produce beauty reliably. It was based on some axioms that reduced to beauty = truth = the real, and where the uncanny dissonance (ugliness) intrinsic to shallow representations might be refined out of the things we make, if we could only make them with a deeper understanding of each other. Hence his divergence into these secular but still essentially spiritual cog.sci ideas.

The basic flow from that is, we understand each other more, produce things based on this understanding that is, in effect, a love, and then the things we make from that are the tools and artifacts in a human story that evolves with that intent, and organic growth from that forms a substrate for our experience made of this Real and Beauty he's talking about, instead of just a bunch of noisy representations of other sentiments that pile up as garbage. In a comment, that's what I read in him anyway.

Looking for tools to make sense of reality (which includes human experience obviously) in the last few weeks has led me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_realism_(philosophy_o....

I didn't study anything of the sort and am just a layperson but it's interesting that CR attempts to tackle such issues head on.

The problem with dualism is that you have endless rewrite rules. Monism is difficult to communicate, but a threefold perspective such as the classical pathos, logos and ethos lets you easily define an interface with your fellow entities.

Love Christopher Alexander, excited to watch the lecture!