the evidence continues to mount that science is marching on, in denial not only that it could be missing something as essential as the left quadrants but that there is a need for eros or at least one of its signs, what jantsch called 'self-transcendence in self-organization' in order to explain evolution.

with regard to the predominant theory of evolution essentially based on natural selection and chance i wonder if many others might not be like i once was, not at all sure about this theory, but accepting it simply because they don't feel they know enough to adequately judge, so it's best to leave it to the experts who presumably have looked more thoroughly into this.

it was only when i heard from others who questioned this theory that i came to question my easy acceptance of the prevailing theory. and it was tricky, because even though i read teilhard de chardin's 'the phenomenon of man', i rationalized that being a catholic, he had been unable to look at this objectively, so i went on accepting for another decade or so.

Ken Wilber and others have done an admirable job of exposing the shortcomings in this sort of 'scientific' thinking'. i guess i shouldn't be surprised that, at the same time, they have been so widely misunderstood, even by Frank Visser, who's website, Integral World, posted an essay by Lane that prompted Alexaner Aitin's letter to kw.

the only way i can explain these sort of things to myself is to conclude that Visser doesn't have a very integral understanding of "Integral". of course, Lane's views don't necessarily reflect Visser's, but they're apparently decidedly anti-integral, something he needs to screen out or subject to adequate criticism, if his aim is an 'integral world'. i confess that i no longer visit his site, so i'm extrapolating from past experience in this case, and i'd be glad to hear that Lane's essay was, in fact, subjected to adequate criiticism, although Astin's action suggests it wasn't.

of course, a theory of natural selection and chance becomes much, much more difficult to test by current methods if self-organization, say, is added as an additional principle. the scientist's typical IOU that kw refers to in SES can be passed onto those who question the absence of something like self-organization. but why not face this inadequacy now, since, in fact, it is readily apparent to many, and begin developing tests: experiments that take into account self-organization, for example, in order to ascertain better whether or not it is a principle we need to take into account?

the answer, i'm afraid, is that it is easier to remain stuck in a right quadrants, materialistic view of the kosmos (universe?). that requires only the ability to take a third perspective, i.e. an orange altitude!

---

 

while inside they are dying of thirst and starvation for depth and meaning

 

hi fairyfaye,

it's good to hear from you again--it's been awhile since we've crossed paths.

i agree with you in the sense that what they're missing seems so obvious, i guess, to you and me. and i guess 'they' might say the same of us, although to the extent we're being integral about this, we include, within limits, the same things they do--we're just pointing out that there are some very important things they're leaving out.

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good to cross paths again with u too ralph .. i love it when u are here

i confess i had spontaneously responded to your post without first checking out the emails on kenwilber.com (which i have now read) and the commentary on frank visser's site (which i have not yet read)

i guess i may have been kinda harsh calling them thirsty and hungry for depth and meaning .. bad fairy!

flatlanders have SOME depth and meaning .. yes ??

 

 

 

fairyfaye:

flatlanders have SOME depth and meaning .. yes ??

with the qualification SOME, i'd agree. kw, i think, has said we have two Selves, the Real Self and a Unique Self. some Unique Selves have more depth than others, couldn't we say?

but it's not at all easy to judge, it seems to me. i've been raving lately about 'infidel', by ayaan hirsi ali, because even though she seems to think of herself now as an atheist, and even though she doesn't appear to me to have yet opened up to anything beyond orange, it's an amazingly spiritual orange, imo.

---

incidentally, ~c4chaos has picked up this kw blog in his blogspace in the latest holons newsletter, and gotten a good discussion going. unfortunately, in my view, the person defending kw for the most part allows that spirituality needs to be kept separate from science.

the implication is that as soon as we dare to mention eros we are being horribly unscientific, a lamebrain position, imo. if we dare not ever mention eros, what kind of science can we possibly get other than the flatland version? this charade of 'frisky dirt'?

yes! 'frisky dirt' is a metaphor, as is two winged critters having a drink together!

---

it seems that many who call themselves atheists are simply vehemently turning away from the mythic god 

damn it can be frustating how the mythic god has taken a monopoly of the word god

but surely every human being has some form of experience of god whether they use that particular word or not

 

hi fairyfaye,

i somehow missed your last message, but coming upon it now, i agree completely. part of the difficulty, i think, certainly for me at least, is that we easily misinterpret our spiritual experiences, construing them according to the prevailing wisdom of whatever collectives we inhabit, some of the more pervasive ones being in almost complete denial of Spirit. isn't it ironic that so many spiritual experiences are interpreted in a way that would exclude Spirit? (of course, there are also the silly, New Age interpretations at the other extreme, and these two opposing interpretations just feed on each other.)

so, what can we do? i was just listening to some advice from kw in part 3 of the myriades interview. if we just listen to what they're saying, intuit where they're coming from, then maybe we can acknowledge the positive aspect, e.g. that they've gotten beyond mythic amber, and begin to suggest how they might go further, or at least question where they're at. for example, even if they're atheist, don't they believe in something? what is it that they believe in? only in dirt? i.e. material, only the right quadrants?

---

continuing with the previous message, george lakoff, who's a professor of cognitive science at UC berkeley, and mark johnson, who's a philosophy professor at the university of oregon, have co-authored at least two books: 'METAPHORS we live by' (1980) and 'philosophy in the flesh' (1999). i read the second one last summer, but i only checked it out from the portland libraries--i didn't want to buy it--so i'll have to go on my imperfect memory and understanding of it, which is that the philosophy they develop in the second book builds on the first book, in particular, on their notion of 'metaphor'.

as i remember it, it's their term for what minds, i.e. human minds, do. in other words, all thinking is metaphorical. in a way this is completely obvious: when we think about a tree, or trees in general, say, we're in fact working with our concept of trees, not the actual tree or trees, so that concept is just a metaphor for the object of our attention.

i don't remember the details, but my impression is that they use this concept of 'metaphor' as a bridge between the UR and the UL, between exterior and interior, material and idea. but it's not a two way bridge. thinking builds ideas upon a material foundation. this is a materialist philosophy: you've got to have the material first upon which to build ideas. they don't co-arise. sort of a marxism of the upper quadrants: brains determine minds and consciousness. they seem to be oblivious to Spirit. you show them a thought, and they say, well, obviously that thought came from some brain. they don't THINK to ask where that brain came from, ultimately, that is. the answer 'evolution', for instance, only begs the question.

lakoff, in particular, really seems to think he's on to something big, a philosophy for our age. he's written several books lately, taking that philosophy into politics, and they appear to be quite popular here in portland. evidently there's alot of interest in cognitive science and neuroscience. people seem to feel they will be able to answer some of the important questions of our time. they don't appear to be in the least concerned that all they are getting from these sciences is an IOU for those answers, and not actual answers you can take to the bank.

kw's notion of integral methodological pluralism (IMP) gives a remarkably clear picture of what's going on here. neuroscience is just a zone 6 methodology, which only has to do with exteriors. when you ask what about interiors, scientists can now say, a la lakoff and johnson, that's where cognitive science comes in and explains interiors as a manifestation of exteriors. but as kw warns us, all this really explains is the interior of exteriors, i.e. cognitive science is a zone 5 methodology, a science of a basic aspect, it's true, of exteriors, but only of exteriors, and not interiors as such. for the latter we need methodologies from zones 1-4, e.g. phenomenology. for, in basing themselves materialisitcally on what comes from exteriors, they've completely missed interiors as such, which are essentially distinct from the interiors (or insides) of exteriors. any child could tell them that, if they would only listen. yes! the emperor has no clothes, but you can't tell them that. they believe in all their errant hearts that they have captured interiors, when all they've discovered is only the interiors of exteriors, a mere shadow of the friskiness of dirt.

so how can we talk to these guys who believe that zones 5 and 6 together give them everything, both interiors and exteriors, when, in fact, they're trapped in exteriors? how do we get them to see the naked truth of an emperor without real clothes? it's not going to be easy.

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how can we talk to them ? that's such an important question

maybe asking them about the meaning in their own lives .. what makes life worth living for them personally ?

answers like my wife's loving embrace .. or the way my child says daddy .. or being swept away by an undescribable sunset

and ask them whether these things are real and how they fit into science

Ralph,

I think you might be misinterpreting what Ken means. Self-organization is every bit the right-quadrant, materialistic and scientific paradigm that natural selection is. It's just a different theory, much like Einstein's relativity changed our understanding of classic Newtonian physics.

Mainstream scientists are slow to accept it, but that's probably because it was propsed as a theory several hundred years ago, and shown to be false. Newer versions of it are much more solid and based in real science, but it's still flatland, orange-altitude science.

Regards,
Mike

hi ff and mike,

i may be slow but you can usually count on me to eventually catch sight of your messages and respond .

fairyfaye, i think we're all more or less in the same boat: we're exclusivist, if not absolutist in many ways. enlightenment, with a small 'e', i guess, is realizing this bit by bit and, gradually, becoming more and more integral. the thing about materialism and its view of science is that it is absolutist in a BIG way--it's wanting to junk the left quadrants, half the kosmos--to gut all interiors, and this actually appeals to many people today, e.g. in its scathing attacks on Islam.

mike, i'm glad to see you posting again, even if it's only a short note, on these forums. i don't know exactly what your credentials are--degrees in philosophy?--but clearly you are well informed, and your messages are always well thought out.

i associate the notion of 'self-organization' with erich jantsch, specifically his work 'the self-organizing universe'. i went through that book, although rather quickly, but easily noting nonetheless that it's all right-quadrant, materialistic science. the diagrams of his that kw reproduced in SES are all about matter, be it the physiosphere, the biosphere or the noosphere, hence the self-organizing universe, and not the self-organizing Kosmos, of which it is only the exterior aspect. indeed, self-organization, as i've interpreted kw to use it, is just an exterior aspect of eros. as you point out, it's just as materialistic as the notion of natural selection.

i'm not sure what you have in mind in saying it was earlier shown to be false: do you mean 'vitalism'? the evidence that jantsch mustered was, i believe, essentially new and very good science to boot, except, as kw pointed out, its failure to understand holarchy: that it's not just about getting bigger and bigger.

the irony as i understand it is that most scientists, neo-darwinists in particular, don't yet accept the notion of self-organization. this includes physicists: the unified field theories they work so untiringly on don't include, to my knowledge, the notion of self-organization. ask them how atoms and molecules, etc. etc. came to be and they will say that the universe was originally too hot for them to form: it just needed to cool down sufficiently for them to form (of course, as always, they are partly right, but absolutist about that part).

this includes biologists. i worked in molecular biophysics myself as well as studying the life sciences and medicine extensively, and have seen how these modern fields of biology have come to be from the application of physics and chemistry to biology, which we see, for example, in conventional medicine where we can be treated as if we were just chemical machines. ask them how life came to be, and they will no doubt tell you about the special conditions that existed on the earth some four billion years ago, as if they alone gave rise to life. and how did these conditions come to be? ask them that and they will begin to split hairs between the strong and the weak anthropic principles and such ilk.

ask them about evolution and they will no doubt tell you about natural selection and genetic mutation: the role of chance, i.e. they are likely to accept neo-darwinian theories--most of them don't yet see the need for introducing the concept of self-organization. they will be insulted if you are no longer willing to accept their old IOUs.

ask them about human evolution and they will say evolution, meaning biological evolution, stops with humans. if we were to encounter an original Cro-Magnon, say preserved in ice so we could resuscitate him, we could teach him english and began having a fruitful discussion with him. ha ha. what did john locke call it? the tabula rasa?

so the value of self-organization, i believe, is that, when added to present science, it will at least give us a much more adequate, even if materialistic, theory of evolution.

best new year's wishes to you both,

ralph

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Hi Ralph,

The only formal credential I have is in computer science, which in my experience, is rarely useful in these discussions :)

When I say that earlier incarnations of self-organization were shown to be false, I was actually referring to rational morphologists, who looked for unchanging principles that governed what they thought were fixed, unevolving species. The rationality of the biological world was meant to mirror the supposed rationality of the human mind, the Catholic hierarchy and God, and we know now that this doesn't work. Self-organization as proposed by Jansch and Stuart Kauffman is a whole other story, and not really presented as an alternative to natural selection, but I think the history of the idea explains mainstream scientific resistance, rather than it being because science is materialistic or reductionist, which is what self-organization is anyway.

I think there's a tendency to misunderstand why scientists are materialistic, that it's because they are nihilists, kind of spiritual killjoys. In reality, they are defending the idea that anyone should be able to verify knowledge for themselves, and not have to depend on religious authority or sacred texts.

Best,
Mike

hi mike,

your short message has provided much food for thought. i was unaware of rational morphology--thanks for the quick run down.

it sounds like you follow new developments in science more closely than i do. i've found i can rely on kw for a general sense of what's occurring. i was introduced, very briefly, to the idea of self-organization as a grad student at berkeley in the 70's, but once i left there i didn't hear anything more about it until i read SES four or five years ago. could it be that more postconventional scientists are willing to entertain this notion, but the more conventional refuse, perhaps because conventional science is already as much as they can handle? reductionism, as a way to keep things as simple as possible? (actually, simpler than is possible!) along these lines, isn't it often nonscientists, who don't even understand neo-darwinism that well, who use it to bang on kw? i'm constantly running into people in everyday life who are reductionistic. if they're unable to take a fourth perspective, say, then, of course, they will be reducing everything to, at best, a third perspective.

i think the rationale you suggest for scientific materialism makes good sense, but doesn't it also suggest that these scientists are unable or unwilling to go beyond a third perspective, and therefore cannot include a dissonant second perspective, since that would require taking a fourth perspective? so they cannot help but be reductionistic, if that's where the crowd leads them.

happy new year,

ralph

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I think I'm months behind on this discussion - new to the site and Integral theory, in general - but there's something really missing here.

The best explanation of Self-Organization in the context of evolution, IMO, comes from Stuart Kauffman - read At Home In The Universe.

Here's the gist - self-organization is a grand physical phenomenon.  Like evolution, whenever the conditions are right, it happens - similar to how a cloud forms when the humidity and temperature are just right.  Self-organization has the effect of transforming an array of constituents into something completely unrecognizable in terms of those constituents.  (A cloud looks like a cloud - not a bunch of drops of water.) 

Kauffman argues that self-organization is the missing piece of the puzzle in examining the living history of the earth.  It explains punctuated equilibrium, which was Stephen Jay Gould's primary argument against gradual descent with modification, thus bridging the Dawkins/Gould divide that has long been used by anti-evolution folks to discredit the entire line of thinking.

Here's a post on my blog where I provide a sample of how self-organization can help us get from the primordial soup to sentient beings.

http://www.enlightenedcaveman.com/cavemanblog/2005/01/evolution_versus_creationism_p_3.html

Now here's the cool part -

If we use cognitive neuroscience to describe the physical framework of the human mind (UR), we can get to the stuff of UL by calling upon self-organization.  You see - while the perceptive infrastructure of UL is very likely to be a "metaphor" of what's actually happening in the UR, as you climb higher in sophistication, you eventually get to the point where what is being experienced is completely beyond what could ever be explained in some UR reductionist fashion.   This is the notion of "qualia" - the very personal UL experience of some UR phenomenon.  My experience of red is uniquely mine - even if we can agree that some physical object is red from both of our perspectives.

Self-organization theory - a la Kauffman - allows us to say that the metaphorical perceptions of the UR world combined with our own awareness of our UL state(s) can eventually get so complex that the UL mind "self-organizes" into a conscious awareness that bears very little resemblance to a set of neurally-based representations of the physical world.

I have long believed that the solution to the mind/body problem is related in some way to self-organization.

BTW - Kauffman has recently released a book where he puts his money where his mouth - he laments the decline in spirituality that has come as rationality has over-reached.  Check it out - Reinventing The Sacred.  (Be warned - Kauffman can be tough to keep up with at times.)