On Incoherency
If concepts are lenses, there sometimes come along those concepts that grow into compelling touchstones we return to and use to make sense of all we encounter. We get something out of passing the flowing world through their lenses. Principles of symmetry. Evolution. Narrative. Embodiment. Rare and worth investigating are those that straddle the domains of technical research and our personal experience—returning to these touchstones can be as much part of an automatised ideology as a conscious practice. This piece presents investigating incoherency and coherency as such a practice.
We are all intuitively familiar with experiences of incoherency and incoherent states-of-affairs. Someone professes to believe something, but their actions do not match up. A body in a governing federation or union pursuing an alternative agenda. Someone encouraging you to be kinder towards yourself, but sensing they rarely talk to themselves that way. A CEO cutting corners putting immense pressure on employees while dedicating their money to philanthropy. Carbon offsetting. An unempathetic empathy researcher. Faking data in studies on honesty. Passive aggressive messages from someone with a progressive social media profile. Perhaps more innocuously, a “charming foible” in someone’s character. A mutation that upsets an animal’s circadian rhythm, throwing their internal inertia out of alignment with the cycle of day and night, is also an example of incoherency. And of course, when someone intends to communicate something but their speech does not ‘make sense.’ Granted, these are disparate examples. Exactly how general an idea is incoherency?
Perhaps we are thinking of related concepts like musical and social harmony. Cognitive dissonance. Alienation from the fruits of our labour. Integrity. However, so far I have not sought to identify or equate incoherency with any particular experience or existing concept. One definition that encapsulates the above examples is that to be coherent is to act in a way that aligns with intentions, whether as individuals or collectively.1 Incoherency therefore simply denotes a discrepancy between the intentions and actions of a system. Thus, we are not talking of linguistic, logical or aesthetic inconsistencies or contradictions since these are typically investigated as static or abstract structures. This notion of (in)coherency invokes a dynamically evolving system. Moreover, something that is ‘logically inconsistent’ can still make unobjectionable sense in context (or if we do not adhere to that system of logic), while a so-called ‘valid argument’ could argue for something completely incoherent. Neither is coherency about homogenisation or synchronisation between aspects or elements comprising a system. Everyone being or doing different things does not imply incoherency. Coherency is not everyone having the same opinion or agreeing to co-exist. Attempting to quantify incoherency is not our purpose here, as there is no one thing we must be coherent with respect to, new needs are ever arising and falling away. It is a multiple-objective optimisation problem where the variables are constantly shifting in and out.
~
At an interpersonal level, we are constantly guessing—trying to reverse infer—the beliefs of others from their present and historical actions.2 Perhaps the level of trust we have for someone, a movement or company, and consequently our orientation towards them, includes how incoherent we feel they are. We needn’t perceive the intents and actions of someone as ‘good’ to see them as coherent. We could find them entirely disagreeable, but if we sense we understand their motivations, at least we feel we can predict how they will behave. Those we can never understand because we struggle to get a sense of what (if any) values they have, either because of lack of familiarity or obfuscation on the part of the actor, we handle with a question mark, and possibly even cautionary distance. Uncertainty may prevent complete or confident action. We put more effort into vigilance, entertaining various scenarios, which can be exhausting. The causes for perceived incoherency, when someone or something doesn’t or isn’t making sense [to us], are variegated. Moreover, a dear friend may appear coherent to us but not to someone else. People can ‘make sense’ in some aspects but not others. We are slagged or pulled up for doing something out of character. However, questions like “is X an incoherent person?” or “in what ways is Y incoherent and coherent?” are somewhat fraught. We are not formulating a universal metric for incoherency here. Coherency is not about normativity. To behave ‘chaotically’ or ‘inconsistently’ relative to some other or others in how we go about our day has nothing to do with being (in)coherent. There is no external God’s eye perspective, and there is no singular way to ‘be coherent.’ Coherency is an internal relation between what we want and what we do, between our desires and what actually happens. And we know alignment when we feel it. Things feel clear and comprehensible. But to aspire towards coherency does not mean we must accomplish everything (whatever that means). This is impossible. The world expresses itself endlessly, our minds never stop bubbling forth.
~
At a basic physiological level, all organisms must continually act in accordance with their needs for water, nutrients, and rest in ever-shifting environments. Maintaining coherency means ensuring the system ‘makes sense.’ Within cells, proteins, the most diverse class of a cell’s LEGO pieces, can be composed of many different subunits. Say for a particular series of biochemical jobs we need a protein made of 8 subunits. If only 7 subunits are transcribed and translated from DNA, the protein is not ‘coherent,’ either it does not assemble, or forms something else with a different function. In other words, it either makes ‘no sense’ or it takes on a ‘new sense’ that for the system as a whole may not be desirable. In some cases, a previously coherent system can be undermined by a single new ingredient in the mix (switch to a religious organisation supposedly dedicated to promoting coherence and practices of cohering being warped by an abuse of power and having no ethics policy or complaint procedure. Or to Buddhist monks who break their precepts and perpetuate violence). An out of place element or failure to comprehend the results of ones actions in context suddenly makes a rich system of coherence the most ironically incoherent system. Any autoimmune disease. Most severely, we only see those organisms that successfully developed. Many miscarriages due to genomic abnormalities are aborted by the body without noticing. In sum, only certain expressions of life make sense.
However, typically if something is incoherent we take it to mean a phrase is incomprehensible. Why then talk of these systems being coherent or incoherent? What does it mean for them to “make sense” or not make sense? If am equating pathologies and diseases with a system ‘not making sense’ and health with ‘making sense,’ why not stick to terms like ‘homeostasis’ and ‘pathology’?3 I find it instructive to keep the full linguistic connotations in naturalistic contexts, not merely to imply that these states are a form of sense, but to stake a certain equivalence between health and sense, and disease and misunderstanding.4 After all, as argued above, we have an intuition for when certain behaviours are incoherent, and colloquially remark that they ‘does not make sense.’ Thinking of coherence in the so called ‘natural world’ extends beyond organisms. Floods and hailing balls of ice the size of one’s fist a few kilometres up the coast from ranging wildfires seems ‘incoherent.’ Or we may argue that this is simply weather, it is neither coherent or incoherent since ‘nature’ has no intentions, ‘it just is.’ But the biosphere too is also a kind of living system. Ascribing singular agency and goals to ‘it’ might feel odd, but we don’t have to commit to an atomistic, individualistic soul-like conception of what it means for a system to be alive to understand it as living. Just as we are host to more bacteria than our own cells, so too are we integrated within a living system. There are many states a planet can exist in, but only a tiny fraction are realised. Only certain possible worlds [lit.] make sense.
~
Based off all this discussion, one might think that something like complex systems theory, an attempt to make more precise our ancient though degrading intuitions for the universe as a densely interconnected, interdependent system with computational modelling of agents, feedback cycles and emergent phenomena, would be a prime language in which we might couch our exploration of coherency. But this is not so. Henry Kissinger often spoke of the importance of understanding the world holistically as a complex system, an understanding he often used as US Secretary of State to immensely destructive consequences that have persisted long into the 21st Century. For all the seemingly ‘nice’ sensibilities of holistic approaches, there is just as easily an evil complex systems theory, or evil holism, where an understanding the world as a complex interdependent system, with whatever added layers of nuance it affords, just as easily affords greater prediction and control over the system by and for the benefit of a minority at the expense of many, than it does promoting harmony. The modelling of Exxon scientists adequately predicted climate change curves five decades ago.5 So complex systems theory and holistic approaches are not enough, they have no inherent built-in tendency to favour coherency, but let us explore why it is that they are ‘not enough,’ why is it we added an ‘evil’ to ‘evil complex systems theory.’
There is a feeling that ‘evil holism’ falls short. That if one really understood the world as a complex system, one would not actually act in such a way. Consider an example from the physicist David Bohm, from whom I have borrowed the conception of incoherency as a relation between intention and action: had our intention all along had been to degrade ecosystems across the planet and make extinct entire lineages of life, our behaviour could be considered perfectly coherent. There would be no confusion. A for-profit company running a greenwashing campaign is not confused. It is a perfectly coherent system. Its actions and intentions align just fine. Now, it may feel off having cases where actions and intentions align but that produce harmful results qualifying as ‘coherent.’ Perhaps we want to play No True Scotsman, and claim that these are not truly coherent systems. We might imagine that individuals who live a fabulous life and who happen to feel at home in the world (or perhaps just in their home) oblivious to the incoherent state of affairs they presumably directly or indirectly perpetuate, do not ultimately feel at home in the world. There must somewhere be a feeling of dissatisfaction. That the borders erected, physical fences or internalised narratives based on meritocracy or denial or whatever, are permeable. Discomfort inevitably seeps in.
Perhaps this is the case, but we don’t have to hold to the strictures that incoherency is something that must always be felt within a specific place or person. Maybe someone can indeed feel completely at home in the world while doing damage. We all think we’re doing good. Investigating incoherency in this manner is not about deciding whether a subsystem or individual is incoherent. There is no right level of adjudication. Coherency can exist within a domain, cell, or organisation, and yet an incoherent state of affairs might only become apparent when we zoom out. Investigating incoherency is useful because it cuts across ‘one bad apple’ stereotypes of ‘intrinsic evil.’ Again, systems can ‘make sense’ in some aspects but not others. To investigate incoherency is to move vertically between levels and laterally between perspectives and times, to shrink and expand, and to determine the relations at work.
Here is where the practice of assessing incoherency beings to unfurl, for its use lies in being applied recursively. We can step outside the system we are analysing and examine it with respect to a larger system in which it is embedded: the greenwashing company might not be incoherent at the level of the company, though it is with respect to the planet, or everyone who is not a shareholder. Along with expanding the scope of the system we are analysing, we can also fragment the system under analysis into subsystems. The entire anthropos is not equally responsible for the so-called anthropocene. Taken as a whole, we’re producing results we evidently did not intend and do not want. We do not ‘make sense.’ Similarly, an empire could never hope to be a coherent system, no matter how efficient its decision-making and bureaucratic apparatuses at a certain level, because it is founded on the exploitation and silence of ‘others.’ Incoherency is also something that can develop and unfold in time, and may only materialise when viewed temporally: The things we desire and implicitly or explicitly long for can be the very obstacles to human flourishing.6 But incoherency is something we must come to be intimately familiar with. If we are to practise working with this touchstone, we must also apply it to ourselves.
~
At a personal level, investigating our own incoherencies can be destabilising and includes all the places we don’t want to go. It requires honesty, bravery, and humility. Do I behave coherently? Certainly we can convince ourselves that we do. One hallmark of incoherency at a personal level is a certain Janus-faced slipperiness we barely catch the coattails of. I’ll illustrate with a detour. Twenty years ago, Latour described what he perceived as a problematic motif at the heart of critical theory.7 The motif goes as follows. First, as a critic, we “decry the very objects of belief—gods, fashion, poetry, sport, desire…to which naive believers cling with so much intensity.” Second, we explain people’s behaviour using ‘matters of fact,’ borrowing “whichever pet facts the social scientists fancy to work with, taking them from economic infrastructure, fields of discourse, social domination…maybe throwing in some neurobiology, evolutionary psychology…” There is a subtle bait and switch, or double standard employed and enjoyed by the critic. You can explode a state-of-affairs into a seemingly finalistic ‘explanation’ or astute redescription, as long the tools one uses to deconstruct are implicitly taken as given and kept solid. However, these themselves can then be ‘explained,’ provided we have yet another standpoint to work from. I am interested here not in assessing whether Latour’s analysis (which worried that our critical tools were becoming outdated for dealing with the realities of the 21st Century) was or remains fair within areas of the academy, but how we use a manifestation of this incoherent motif in our personal lives. For example, say after reading this piece we decided “incoherency bad, coherency good” or “incoherency inevitable and a creative force to be enacted and embodied, coherency boring” and we then proceeded to go around applying it selectively whenever it suited us, performing insightfulness, but never staying with the concept all the way through and applying it to ourselves.
What is the mechanism at play here? We have acquired the ability to undermine any position and explain any behaviour we encounter. This allows us to course along the ever-evolving surface of rectitude. To always be right in every circumstance. This is understandably appealing (it’s certainly part of how conspiracy theories survive in a population), and neoliberalism rewards chameleonic shapeshifting.8 But is this the skill we went to university to acquire and deploy with such panache? Is this the end to which we put all the materials we have engaged with, all our situated knowledges? Is this part of how we consume social and news media—the maximisation of all available information for personal advancement? And do we move from situation to situation, doing our best to appear reasonable, maintain agreeability and favour by moving flexibly from whichever position maximises one’s standing most from one moment to the next, undermining whatever we believed in last month or yesterday? This is not about being able to change our minds or whether reality is ultimately groundless. It is about whether or not we’re interested in the blind-spots between our intentions and how we actually behave.
But investigating incoherency is not a process of fault-finding. Not following through would itself be incoherent. However, investigating our own incoherencies can only go so far if approached as an intellectual endeavour. It can also be experiential. There is a koan—‘Zuigan Calls his Own Master’—from The Gateless Gate that I often return to. Here is an excerpt that serves about as concise a demonstration of ‘confusion’ as language permits:
Zuigan called out to himself every day: “Master.”
Then he answered himself: “Yes, sir.”
And after that he added: “Become sober.”
Again he answered: “Yes, sir.”
“And after that,” he continued, “do not be deceived by others.”
“Yes, sir; yes, sir,” he answered.
Mumon’s Comment: Old Zuigan sells out and buys himself. He is opening a puppet show. He uses one mask to call “Master” and another that answers the master. Another mask says “Sober up” and another, “Don’t be cheated by others.” If anyone clings to any of his masks, he is mistaken, yet if he imitates Zuigan, he will make himself fox-like.
(trans. Senzaki & Reps)
‘The point’ is not to claim we have intellectually understood the koan as saying “oh, people are two-faced” or as representing how many of our days go by. Such thoughts arise in our minds, leave the impression of us having understood, and then we later act the contrary. Rather it serves a direct introduction to our delusion, showing our minds the inconsistencies of our minds. Our narrative trips up over itself. We may even wish to stop reading. When critical mechanisms collapse under their own weight, what is the knowledge, or knowing, that remains? The mind, if left to settle, undoes its incoherencies naturally.
~
Although I have been trying to shrug off imperatives and reserve value judgements, it does seem that in certain contexts a tendency towards coherency is desirable or natural. It is something some of us organise around and that we want to fight for. Incoherency is something to be unearthed, understood, and addressed. We want to challenge perceiving the world as coherent and turning a blind eye to experiences of incoherency. We want to sit with our own incoherencies and understand them. But grandiose and finalistic pronouncements to the effect that incoherency is some inescapable feature of the universe or life, that our experiences do not have to ‘make sense’—are uninteresting. Incoherency as presented here is not a universal worldview concerned about accurately representing states-of-affairs or the dynamics of complex systems and human relationships, but rather a means of inquiry. Investigating incoherency is a way of opening things. A lens for the technical and personal, subjective and intersubjective, molecular and planetary. Try it, and see what you find.
This piece was first written in November 2022. I am grateful for discussions at the 2022 RYI Buddhist Studies summer course (Austria), and with Sophia Finucane, Freya Coogan and Phelim Ó Laoghaire throughout the year, and to the SFI-Complexity-GAINS 2023 summer school (Cambridge) for prompting me to revise it. It is part of a broader project, more of which I hope to share here.
Tamir, D. I., & Thornton, M. A. (2018). Modeling the predictive social mind. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(3), 201–212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.12.005
Or Allostasis, for that matter: see Sterling, P. (2020). What is Health: Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design. MIT Press.
If you think this is just Grice’s concept of natural meaning, tell me!
Supran, G., Rahmstorf, S., & Oreskes, N. (2023). Assessing ExxonMobil's global warming projections. Science (New York, N.Y.), 379(6628), eabk0063. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abk0063
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press.
Latour, B. (2004). Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry, 30 (2):225-248.
Samol, P. (2019). Narcissism as Norm. (E-J. Russel trans.). https://curedquail.com/Narcissism-as-Norm