MISGUIDED INNER AUTHORITY
Remediation of Misconceptions & Self-Delusions in the Search for Self
by Iona Miller, 2013
It is common for very infantile people to have a mystical, religious feeling, they enjoy this atmosphere in which they can admire their beautiful feelings, but they are simply indulging their auto-eroticism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 11 - Jan 1935, Pages 171.
"If the collective unconscious answers to spiritual questions based on unitive thinking, then they have metaphorical and phenomenal value. But if mystical moments lead to ontological claims independent of scientific evidence or logical reason, then they open themselves up to being judged based on wish fulfillment, emotional prejudice, or subjective intuition imbued with idiosyncratic meaning "
http://www.processpsychology.com/new-articles2/Jung.pdf
by Iona Miller, 2013
It is common for very infantile people to have a mystical, religious feeling, they enjoy this atmosphere in which they can admire their beautiful feelings, but they are simply indulging their auto-eroticism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 11 - Jan 1935, Pages 171.
"If the collective unconscious answers to spiritual questions based on unitive thinking, then they have metaphorical and phenomenal value. But if mystical moments lead to ontological claims independent of scientific evidence or logical reason, then they open themselves up to being judged based on wish fulfillment, emotional prejudice, or subjective intuition imbued with idiosyncratic meaning "
http://www.processpsychology.com/new-articles2/Jung.pdf
The Self is the center of the psychic labyrinth where we battle with ourselves for the treasure hard to attain.
The labyrinth is a powerful central symbol of the subconscious.
Soul-loss (being lost in life) is analogous to what Jung referred to as ‘losing the Ariadne thread.'
“There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the “thorn in the flesh” is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent.” ~ C. G. Jung, CW, Vol. 12, para. 208
The labyrinth is a powerful central symbol of the subconscious.
Soul-loss (being lost in life) is analogous to what Jung referred to as ‘losing the Ariadne thread.'
“There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the “thorn in the flesh” is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent.” ~ C. G. Jung, CW, Vol. 12, para. 208
"DAATH: The God of the Gap"
Self-Delusion, Misguided Inner Authority & Obsessions
Premature claims to Knowledge and Enlightenment
ABSTRACT: Grave distortions and fraudulent claims to power characterize the spiritual path in our times. Discernment can be aided by a taxonomy of periodic risers in the stabilization of spiritual states of consciousness -- the milestones of transformation -- and learning the dynamics of self-delusion and misguided inner authority. Ready access to disinformation in beliefs and ideas created by others magnifies the problem. Emotionally appealing truths are sandwiched into idiosyncratic notions ranging from the speculative to the fantastical, and trap many individuals like flypaper, because our minds love a good story. The brain feeds on stories, but the wrong stories just lead us down the garden path into ancient worlds that never happened, and mythic scenarios that were never meant to be taken literally.
Accepting the generalized commentary of so-called internet or media experts without critical thinking can derail the dynamic process of self transformation, by leading us down the garden path of false beliefs. Accepting such beliefs uncritically is precisely the opposite of what Jung recommended as individuation. Such false beliefs tend to cluster around an individual's personal issues, but are mistaken for and confounded with historical, philosophical and scientific 'reality'. Much of the "self-delusion" can be linked to exposure to memes functioning as emotional strange attractors or cultural artifacts or fallout,, as well as pre- and pseudo-scientific notions of by-gone centuries, and lack of understanding of standards and discernment. It's a truism that mediocrity (gaps and gaffs in awareness) boasts the loudest.
Through hysteria, lack of critical judgment, and naive enthusiasm, a false idea can be hyped by the mainstream media to the point of not only looking entirely plausible, but even certain.
Keywords: literalization, concretization, epistemology, metaphysics, self-delusion, misconceptions, pseudo-science, emperor's new clothes, role-boundedness, trickster phenomena, adaptive changes, species survival, transcendental models, symbolic abstraction, critical thinking, disinformation, misinformation, conscience, social communication, neuraloscillation
Self-Delusion, Misguided Inner Authority & Obsessions
Premature claims to Knowledge and Enlightenment
ABSTRACT: Grave distortions and fraudulent claims to power characterize the spiritual path in our times. Discernment can be aided by a taxonomy of periodic risers in the stabilization of spiritual states of consciousness -- the milestones of transformation -- and learning the dynamics of self-delusion and misguided inner authority. Ready access to disinformation in beliefs and ideas created by others magnifies the problem. Emotionally appealing truths are sandwiched into idiosyncratic notions ranging from the speculative to the fantastical, and trap many individuals like flypaper, because our minds love a good story. The brain feeds on stories, but the wrong stories just lead us down the garden path into ancient worlds that never happened, and mythic scenarios that were never meant to be taken literally.
Accepting the generalized commentary of so-called internet or media experts without critical thinking can derail the dynamic process of self transformation, by leading us down the garden path of false beliefs. Accepting such beliefs uncritically is precisely the opposite of what Jung recommended as individuation. Such false beliefs tend to cluster around an individual's personal issues, but are mistaken for and confounded with historical, philosophical and scientific 'reality'. Much of the "self-delusion" can be linked to exposure to memes functioning as emotional strange attractors or cultural artifacts or fallout,, as well as pre- and pseudo-scientific notions of by-gone centuries, and lack of understanding of standards and discernment. It's a truism that mediocrity (gaps and gaffs in awareness) boasts the loudest.
Through hysteria, lack of critical judgment, and naive enthusiasm, a false idea can be hyped by the mainstream media to the point of not only looking entirely plausible, but even certain.
Keywords: literalization, concretization, epistemology, metaphysics, self-delusion, misconceptions, pseudo-science, emperor's new clothes, role-boundedness, trickster phenomena, adaptive changes, species survival, transcendental models, symbolic abstraction, critical thinking, disinformation, misinformation, conscience, social communication, neuraloscillation
Things here are but signs that show to the wise how
the Supreme God is known; the enlightened sage
reading the sign may enter the holy place and make
the vision real. This Term, attained only by those
that have over-passed all, is the All-Transcending.
There is thus a converse in virtue of which the
essential man outgrows Being, becomes identical
with the Transcendent of Being. He that knows
himself to be one with This, has in himself
the likeness of the Supreme; if from that
heightened self he can pass higher still--
image to archetype— he has won
the term of all his journeying.
-Plotinus, The Enneads :: "The Flight of the Alone."
the Supreme God is known; the enlightened sage
reading the sign may enter the holy place and make
the vision real. This Term, attained only by those
that have over-passed all, is the All-Transcending.
There is thus a converse in virtue of which the
essential man outgrows Being, becomes identical
with the Transcendent of Being. He that knows
himself to be one with This, has in himself
the likeness of the Supreme; if from that
heightened self he can pass higher still--
image to archetype— he has won
the term of all his journeying.
-Plotinus, The Enneads :: "The Flight of the Alone."
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth--more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. --Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction
We all desire by our nature to know. The chief cultural factors which influence us include: hunger, sex, self-defense, power, possession, fear, unseen powers, law, custom, hope, self-respect, position, achievement, need for fun, companionship, concern for other, need for children, exercise of skills, appropriate degree of social, political, and individual freedom, appropriate degree of tradition, knowing where one stands with respect to each of the above, role and goal of man. Our needs are expressed through environmental, bodily needs, political, religious, legal, social, human relations, gambling, ideals, identity, knowing the system. Physical and non-physical (or psychic) merge in the human mind
We imagine we know a lot, much more than in the past. But there is no unified theory in physics. Furthermore, there is certainly no unified theory in psychology. Sometimes we fall into the experiential and imaginal cracks in reality. We seems to retain some of our ancient hardwiring. No clear epistemological framework sets the stage for defining the disciplines and coherently unifying the major paradigms in the field.
To construct or own worldviews we are still confronted with the old formula - the cosmological creative and destructive cycles of time. Cosmology is the study of the origin and nature of the universe. Ontology studies the nature of being as being and existence. We have to fit the pieces together from epistemologies and psychodynamics into some sort of cumulative understanding. Some basic epistemological agreement about the phenomena under examination is needed. Metaphysics abstracts universal conceptions. Some of these grand narratives are more fanciful than others.
We can be sincerely convinced of the utterly wrong. Why do we continue to accommodate the irrelevant and easily falsifiable? Are we conscientious about our own self-delusions or simply unconsciously immersed in them due to a delusional perspective on our own misguided "gnosis" and obsessions with misguided theoretical perspectives? Even conscience is no ineffable guide to inner authority. There is no shortage of new myths to capture our attention. Dreams tell us who we are, collectively and individually.
If Inner Authority is linked to authentic power and wisdom, we need to examine our personal interaction with inner wisdom figures (archetypes) and values in order to create lives of positive action that arise from deep inner wisdom. Most of us shirk such important inner work, substituting a fantasy of transformation and mindfulness. Delusional self-improvement projects are aimed at adorning the ego.
People claim to hear messages that ring in their hearts as truth, or 'resonate' with material that confirms their own tacit or recognized beliefs, but most it originates in cultural conditioning and memetic patterning. All we hold is a piece of the Mystery. Buzzwords such as True Nature, intentionality, and mis-identified integrity compound the situation. Premature spiritual fixation can just as readily be a form of transcendental escapism.
Both the strategies of "transcendence" and "reduction" are expressions of bad faith — i.e., forms of self-deception and escapism that seek to deny the realities of the human existential situation. Self-delusion may be self-evident but few give themselves a reality check on it and doing so is compounded by our own psychological blindspots. This is a form of escapism or neo-mythology.
Metaphysical Assumptions
Utopian dreams of Vernor Vinge's numinous 'Singularity', grand cosmic narratives, free-will, intentionality, and resonance have been coopted, mis-applied, and mis-attributed to delusional biopsychosocial processes. But, some suggest magic may be a fundamental property of the human mind, embraced at whatever level by otherwise completely rational people.
We can harbor a subconscious belief in the supernatural. For example, Einstein read alchemy for relaxation. The interface of our inner and outer worlds appears in the paranormal, as well as our beliefs about phenomena and principles. Is continually catching ourselves in the reflexive act of self-delusions the most we can hope for?
“Culture is wired in the brain,” Smail writes, and “cultural practices can have profound neurophysiological consequences.”
Subbotsky reports, "Research also shows how engagement in magical thinking can enhance cognitive functioning, such as creative thinking, perception and memory. Further, this paper suggests that certain forms of social compliance and obedience to authority historically evolved from magical practices of mind control and are still powered by the implicit belief in magic."
He concludes, "Unlike magical thinking, which remains a conscious practice throughout the life span, the belief in magic in adult educated individuals becomes mostly subconscious. This view links together phenomena that thus far have been studied separately from one another: magical beliefs in ancient and medieval cultures and modern developing and developed cultures, magical thinking in mentally disturbed patients, children’s magic, superstitions in adults, religious beliefs, indirect suggestion and persuasion effects in politics and commerce, military and political terror, and the use of magical effects in the entertainment industry."
Describing Transcendental Pragmatism, Evans says, "Careful thinking about our existential situation reveals the following initial convictions: 1) Good evidence for metaphysical beliefs (e.g. the existence and nature of God) need not consist of a deductive, absolute proof, but sufficient evidence to satisfy a rational person; 2) An argument for a comprehensive life philosophy should be a cumulative case, i.e. it should consist of evidence from all areas of human life and experience; 3) Metaphysical propositions are not “guilty until proven innocent”; no special burden of proof lies on the religious believer, since atheists are committed to equally risky worldviews; and 4) Evidence for living problems cannot be mechanically interpreted by experts, but must be interpreted by every individual with sensitivity, since each of us is responsible for the consequences of our beliefs (Evans 53)."
Pragmatism, according to William James, is “first, a method; and second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth” (Pragmatism 33). As a method, Pragmatism locates truth by finding the most expedient/useful belief(s). As a genetic theory of truth, Pragmatism is the explanation that all knowledge is in the process of becoming. Truth is always being made (not discovered), always in flux, always being reformed, always plastic, always tentative, always relative. The truth is “only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in our way of behaving” (James, Pragmatism 100). The process of the development of truth is a kind of dialectical progression in which an old truth is reformed into a new truth as people come into contact with new experiences that challenge old truth.
Pragmatic “truth” is not truth as traditionally understood; it has no necessity (it is plastic) and no universality (truth is a way of thinking relative to every individual). Pragmatism does focus attention on human needs, but cannot support happiness because of its naive grasp of human psychology. It is impossible to live effectively with the view that everything one believes and upon which one makes major life decisions is just a plastic idea.
INTRODUCTION
In Jungian psychology the labyrinth is one of the most powerful symbols of the subconscious. In his book ‘Man and His Symbols’, Jung explains its meaning:
“The maze of strange passages, chambers, and unlocked exits in the cellar recalls the old Egyptian representation of the underworld, which is a well-known symbol of the unconscious with its abilities. It also shows how one is “open” to other influences in one’s unconscious shadow side and how uncanny and alien elements can break in.”
TOXIC NARCISSISM: When Pathological Ignorance meets Intellectual Malpractice and the Marketplace
The Lords of Disinformation are now worshiped in the shrine of alternative media with utter lack of discernment. The Shadow hijacks the authority of the wisdom Self and the trickster/pretender emerges with the Flapdoodle Effect - much ado about nothing, as if saying it louder and with more inflection makes the utterly incredulous believable.
Levels of Cognitive Awareness
Personality Work
Grounding & Centering
Eliminating Misconceptions
The Self
Self-Actualization or sterile self-absorption in idiosyncratic fantasy
We all desire by our nature to know. The chief cultural factors which influence us include: hunger, sex, self-defense, power, possession, fear, unseen powers, law, custom, hope, self-respect, position, achievement, need for fun, companionship, concern for other, need for children, exercise of skills, appropriate degree of social, political, and individual freedom, appropriate degree of tradition, knowing where one stands with respect to each of the above, role and goal of man. Our needs are expressed through environmental, bodily needs, political, religious, legal, social, human relations, gambling, ideals, identity, knowing the system. Physical and non-physical (or psychic) merge in the human mind
We imagine we know a lot, much more than in the past. But there is no unified theory in physics. Furthermore, there is certainly no unified theory in psychology. Sometimes we fall into the experiential and imaginal cracks in reality. We seems to retain some of our ancient hardwiring. No clear epistemological framework sets the stage for defining the disciplines and coherently unifying the major paradigms in the field.
To construct or own worldviews we are still confronted with the old formula - the cosmological creative and destructive cycles of time. Cosmology is the study of the origin and nature of the universe. Ontology studies the nature of being as being and existence. We have to fit the pieces together from epistemologies and psychodynamics into some sort of cumulative understanding. Some basic epistemological agreement about the phenomena under examination is needed. Metaphysics abstracts universal conceptions. Some of these grand narratives are more fanciful than others.
We can be sincerely convinced of the utterly wrong. Why do we continue to accommodate the irrelevant and easily falsifiable? Are we conscientious about our own self-delusions or simply unconsciously immersed in them due to a delusional perspective on our own misguided "gnosis" and obsessions with misguided theoretical perspectives? Even conscience is no ineffable guide to inner authority. There is no shortage of new myths to capture our attention. Dreams tell us who we are, collectively and individually.
If Inner Authority is linked to authentic power and wisdom, we need to examine our personal interaction with inner wisdom figures (archetypes) and values in order to create lives of positive action that arise from deep inner wisdom. Most of us shirk such important inner work, substituting a fantasy of transformation and mindfulness. Delusional self-improvement projects are aimed at adorning the ego.
People claim to hear messages that ring in their hearts as truth, or 'resonate' with material that confirms their own tacit or recognized beliefs, but most it originates in cultural conditioning and memetic patterning. All we hold is a piece of the Mystery. Buzzwords such as True Nature, intentionality, and mis-identified integrity compound the situation. Premature spiritual fixation can just as readily be a form of transcendental escapism.
Both the strategies of "transcendence" and "reduction" are expressions of bad faith — i.e., forms of self-deception and escapism that seek to deny the realities of the human existential situation. Self-delusion may be self-evident but few give themselves a reality check on it and doing so is compounded by our own psychological blindspots. This is a form of escapism or neo-mythology.
Metaphysical Assumptions
Utopian dreams of Vernor Vinge's numinous 'Singularity', grand cosmic narratives, free-will, intentionality, and resonance have been coopted, mis-applied, and mis-attributed to delusional biopsychosocial processes. But, some suggest magic may be a fundamental property of the human mind, embraced at whatever level by otherwise completely rational people.
We can harbor a subconscious belief in the supernatural. For example, Einstein read alchemy for relaxation. The interface of our inner and outer worlds appears in the paranormal, as well as our beliefs about phenomena and principles. Is continually catching ourselves in the reflexive act of self-delusions the most we can hope for?
“Culture is wired in the brain,” Smail writes, and “cultural practices can have profound neurophysiological consequences.”
Subbotsky reports, "Research also shows how engagement in magical thinking can enhance cognitive functioning, such as creative thinking, perception and memory. Further, this paper suggests that certain forms of social compliance and obedience to authority historically evolved from magical practices of mind control and are still powered by the implicit belief in magic."
He concludes, "Unlike magical thinking, which remains a conscious practice throughout the life span, the belief in magic in adult educated individuals becomes mostly subconscious. This view links together phenomena that thus far have been studied separately from one another: magical beliefs in ancient and medieval cultures and modern developing and developed cultures, magical thinking in mentally disturbed patients, children’s magic, superstitions in adults, religious beliefs, indirect suggestion and persuasion effects in politics and commerce, military and political terror, and the use of magical effects in the entertainment industry."
Describing Transcendental Pragmatism, Evans says, "Careful thinking about our existential situation reveals the following initial convictions: 1) Good evidence for metaphysical beliefs (e.g. the existence and nature of God) need not consist of a deductive, absolute proof, but sufficient evidence to satisfy a rational person; 2) An argument for a comprehensive life philosophy should be a cumulative case, i.e. it should consist of evidence from all areas of human life and experience; 3) Metaphysical propositions are not “guilty until proven innocent”; no special burden of proof lies on the religious believer, since atheists are committed to equally risky worldviews; and 4) Evidence for living problems cannot be mechanically interpreted by experts, but must be interpreted by every individual with sensitivity, since each of us is responsible for the consequences of our beliefs (Evans 53)."
Pragmatism, according to William James, is “first, a method; and second, a genetic theory of what is meant by truth” (Pragmatism 33). As a method, Pragmatism locates truth by finding the most expedient/useful belief(s). As a genetic theory of truth, Pragmatism is the explanation that all knowledge is in the process of becoming. Truth is always being made (not discovered), always in flux, always being reformed, always plastic, always tentative, always relative. The truth is “only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in our way of behaving” (James, Pragmatism 100). The process of the development of truth is a kind of dialectical progression in which an old truth is reformed into a new truth as people come into contact with new experiences that challenge old truth.
Pragmatic “truth” is not truth as traditionally understood; it has no necessity (it is plastic) and no universality (truth is a way of thinking relative to every individual). Pragmatism does focus attention on human needs, but cannot support happiness because of its naive grasp of human psychology. It is impossible to live effectively with the view that everything one believes and upon which one makes major life decisions is just a plastic idea.
INTRODUCTION
In Jungian psychology the labyrinth is one of the most powerful symbols of the subconscious. In his book ‘Man and His Symbols’, Jung explains its meaning:
“The maze of strange passages, chambers, and unlocked exits in the cellar recalls the old Egyptian representation of the underworld, which is a well-known symbol of the unconscious with its abilities. It also shows how one is “open” to other influences in one’s unconscious shadow side and how uncanny and alien elements can break in.”
TOXIC NARCISSISM: When Pathological Ignorance meets Intellectual Malpractice and the Marketplace
The Lords of Disinformation are now worshiped in the shrine of alternative media with utter lack of discernment. The Shadow hijacks the authority of the wisdom Self and the trickster/pretender emerges with the Flapdoodle Effect - much ado about nothing, as if saying it louder and with more inflection makes the utterly incredulous believable.
Levels of Cognitive Awareness
Personality Work
Grounding & Centering
Eliminating Misconceptions
The Self
Self-Actualization or sterile self-absorption in idiosyncratic fantasy
CONCEPTUAL CHANGE
Critical Thinking vs. Delusions of Grandeur
Personality Disorders
Narcissism & Self Delusion
Confounded & Conflated Archetypes
Persona & Self
Shadow & Self
Anima/Animus & Self
Critical Thinking vs. Delusions of Grandeur
Personality Disorders
Narcissism & Self Delusion
Confounded & Conflated Archetypes
Persona & Self
Shadow & Self
Anima/Animus & Self
SELF ACTUALIZATION & Self Intervention
Leading post- and trans-humanist, Ray Kurzweil revises the customary conception of God to accommodate the possibility that humans are taking part in a process by which post-human beings (creatures, according to traditional theism) will attain powers equivalent to those usually attributed to God. Some may construe post-humanism as an appalling instance of hubris, in which individuals propose taking enormous risks both with themselves and with the human species, in order to pursue an impossible goal. Others, however may construe post-humanism as calling for alignment of personal energy with a cosmic evolutionary imperative: to preserve self-conscious organic life—currently threatened by anthropogenic environmental disaster—long enough to transfer it to a more enduring substrate needed to support an evolutionary process that culminates when the entire universe is made conscious. If this astonishing goal ever begins to bear fruit, future theologians would presumably rethink traditional conceptions of cosmos and history, humankind and God.
INTENTIONALITY:
The Psi Buzzword
Iona Miller
Intentionality is Philosophy, Not Physics or Neurology
We May Think We Are Directing Ourselves, but Free Will Is a Meme, a Neurological Myth
Can or Should the Ego Invade the Self-Organizing Psyche with Control Fantasies?
Most of our decisions are made before we think about them, about 10 seconds before we become aware of them.
“We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions,
not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life.”
― C.G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader's Edition
The Introspection Illusion
In some sense, 'intentionality' is a misperception, a misplaced philosophy, even a hubris that mind can control matter, nature or the future, despite autonomous unconscious forces.
The philosophies of the determinists and libertarians existed long before neuroimaging was possible. Neuroscience sheds light on the question of free will: a person’s brain has already made decisions before the person actually becomes aware of having made them. You probably think that your brain has made the decision maybe a half or one second before you become aware of it, but a 2008 study predicted that people choose approximately 10 seconds before they become aware of it.
Humans have made a wrong connection between being aware of a choice and what it causes – or more clearly put, we have confused correlation with causation. Introspection illusions are the notion that people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origin of their mental states. This means that in some situations, people are confident in making false explanations of their own behavior. The illusion of introspection is often mistaken for true self-knowledge. For instance, people often think they are less biased and less conformist than the rest of a group. Even when people learn about other people’s introspections, they are regarded as unreliable (while they treat their own introspections as reliable).
The Psi Buzzword
Iona Miller
Intentionality is Philosophy, Not Physics or Neurology
We May Think We Are Directing Ourselves, but Free Will Is a Meme, a Neurological Myth
Can or Should the Ego Invade the Self-Organizing Psyche with Control Fantasies?
Most of our decisions are made before we think about them, about 10 seconds before we become aware of them.
“We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions,
not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life.”
― C.G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader's Edition
The Introspection Illusion
In some sense, 'intentionality' is a misperception, a misplaced philosophy, even a hubris that mind can control matter, nature or the future, despite autonomous unconscious forces.
The philosophies of the determinists and libertarians existed long before neuroimaging was possible. Neuroscience sheds light on the question of free will: a person’s brain has already made decisions before the person actually becomes aware of having made them. You probably think that your brain has made the decision maybe a half or one second before you become aware of it, but a 2008 study predicted that people choose approximately 10 seconds before they become aware of it.
Humans have made a wrong connection between being aware of a choice and what it causes – or more clearly put, we have confused correlation with causation. Introspection illusions are the notion that people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origin of their mental states. This means that in some situations, people are confident in making false explanations of their own behavior. The illusion of introspection is often mistaken for true self-knowledge. For instance, people often think they are less biased and less conformist than the rest of a group. Even when people learn about other people’s introspections, they are regarded as unreliable (while they treat their own introspections as reliable).
"I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they've been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm, and charge will perhaps appear on their list. But aboutness surely won't; intentionality simply doesn't go that deep...If the semantic and the intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with (or maybe of their supervenience on?) properties that are themselves neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else." (Fodor 1987, 97)
Doctrine of Intentionality
Jung (1961) said, "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly; all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse.”
There are several subcultures whose worldviews embrace psi phenomena as Reality, or react as if they do. They range through governments to tribal people to new agers and neo-pagans to leading-edge researchers. Even the most skeptical scientist can be compartmentalized or even superstitious in his or her subjective thinking at times.
Vision Bored
To conduct sound research, we must catch ourselves in the act of trying to verify our own preconceptions, a “perception Lab.” This is an intrinsic problem of armchair scientists who are long on theory and short on experimentation. We have to pierce beyond the perceptual artifact to solid postulates, testable hypotheses, rigorous protocols, and accurate statistical analysis.
But psi may prove to be more than just an artifact of primitive belief. Meta-narratives emerge as mythologizing, literature, psychology, sociology, religion or philosophy and cutting-edge science theories. The philosophy of science describes the dynamics of the scientific method. The issue of intentionality is riddled with philosophical problems. Moreso, remote mental intention. Is a brain state the template for action?
The loose use of the term intentionality as a buzzword is an import into pop culture from philosophy. As a collective belief, it has boomeranged back into the public and new age thought from psi research meta-analysis, justified by the research of Radin, Emoto, Schlitz, Targ, Taggert and others.
"Psi intentionality" is a term lifted from remote viewing and other distance intentionality practices and psi energetic theories. It has been confounded with physics notion of nonlocality, entanglement, resonance and "spooky action at a distance", peculiar to particular theories of quantum mechanics, and holism or holographic models. It is shorthand for what might be called quantum psychokinesis (PK). In psi theory, the transmission of information from a sender to receiver is less problematical than physical influence.
Intentionality bears on ontological and metaphysical questions about the fundamental nature of mental states: perceiving, remembering, expectancy, believing, desiring, hoping, knowing, intending, feeling, experiencing, and so on. What is it to have such mental states? How does the mental relate to the physical, i.e., how are mental states related to an individual's body, to states of his or her brain and to his or her behavior?
Intentionality is a pervasive feature of many different mental states: beliefs, hopes, judgments, intentions, love and hatred all exhibit intentionality. In an ideal world we can mentally wish things into and out of existence. It can seem that consciousness and intentionality pervade mental life. Perhaps one or both somehow constitute what it is to have a mind.
But achieving an articulate general understanding of either consciousness or intentionality presents an enormous challenge, part of which lies in figuring out how the two are related. In plain talk, we consider a behavior intentional when it appears purposeful or done intentionally -- that is, based on reasons (beliefs, desires) and performed with skill and awareness.
Just because the subject of psi remains objectively problematical doesn’t mean we should stop systematic investigation, both scientifically and metaphysically. Babies don’t know how the world works so they constantly keep testing their environment, over and over. Are we just cosmic babies, feeling our way along, blindly? We are when it comes to proofs of mind over matter. Perhaps intentionality is a permissible metaphor until we have a better shorthand for the effect. But we really need a bigger and better metaphor already without trotting out the well-worn notion of paradigm shift - another buzzword.
Quantum Chaos
We must be willing to question our own beliefs, comprehending the nature of subjectivity, experimenter bias, and memes or groupthink. The mind deploys them as explanations for unknown agency, the blindspots of our consciousness. As ever, any postulate and hypothesis we can make depends on "which" physics it is based in, since there are several competing models: Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Transactional, M-Theory, Plenum Physics, hyperspace, etc.
This simple fact makes quantum physics a domain of self-contained, mutually exclusive belief systems with their own presumed truths about the primordial nature of Reality. New Agers and armchair philosophers often confound them together into half-baked theories, sometimes compounded by theories of “ascension”, aliens, and evolution.
Philosophically, what does it mean that man's intention now substitutes for the exiled Demiurge, or divine "maker"? We've put ourselves in place of God or nature to augment healing, muddle about in global politics, and presumably perturb our evolutionary arc. We have to question how much more effective realworld pro-active behavior might be, considering that "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride." There is no end to the places the human ego would like to meddle in structure, meaning and labeling.
Ordinary intentionality means being directed toward some goal. It comes down to a control issue; who's got it and who wants it. Perhaps the most compelling results come from the realms of mindbody healing by deploring human beliefs and activating the mysterious placebo effect for shorter or longer periods of time. But this in no way means that this is a quantum process, since the mechanisms may be largely molecular and biochemical. We know that both psychosomatics and psychosemantics are influential.
“Fill in the blank” explanations can be outlandish, possible, plausible, probable, or match reality. The distinction between "true believers" and skeptics comes at the point of interpretation of phenomena, attributions of the source of events or perceptions, whether one's model is psibernetics, "magical thinking", external agents, nested hierarchies, holistic mysticism, or physicalism.
A theist will tend to attribute positive expectations of “agency” to God, a pagan to nature, a humanist to self, and an atheist to complex dynamics, or randomness,. A debunker is dismissive. A true skeptic remains open-minded, at home in the ambiguity. And the loose use of the buzzword ‘intentionality’ leaves its agent or means totally ambiguous, meaning not mechanism.
Is anomalous intentionality a catalyst? It came into the psi lexicon from consciousness studies and a few psi experiments that showed some promise suggesting mind/matter interaction. The protocols of all these experiments are questionable in terms of rigour even though the field polices itself. Replication for these studies is far from exhaustive. So, maybe it isn't outlandish, and perhaps it is possible, and maybe its plausible. But in no way is it probable. And we don't really know the deepest nature of reality to know whether it matches or we are simply deluding ourselves with a romantic notion.
My Karma Ran Over My Dogma
This fashionable term for mind/matter interaction, "intentionality", fails as a shorthand to explain anything. "Free will" has been dismissed as an agent by most consciousness researchers, though evolutionary intentionality is connected with the dynamic behavior of systems. You may as well call it karma, luck, or True Will, like the magicians do. Karma, whether you believe in it or not, at its root just means natural consequences of behavior.
Does it really work to claim an intention to be intentional? Doesn’t intentionality always imply future tense rather than concrete results? If the paradoxical implication is that the intentional result is acausal, isn’t that a pretzel-twist in logic? Jung tried to account for an acausal factor with his notion of synchronicity, but it is hardly testable, though most of us notice meaningful coicidences all the time. But then human beings have an inclination to look for "signs". Why this is so is another avenue of sociological investigation.
Even in clinical research, to name psi expression intentionality doesn't make it so. In actual fact, most of us can’t form enough intentionality to drink the amount of water the body needs each day or eat healthy. The unresolved New Year’s resolution is a truism.
What makes us think we can be more consistently intentional in the extradimensional? It is a ‘fantasy of intentionality,’ a subjective hypothesis that human intervention at some subtle level perturbs outcomes in some desirable manner. It might express our insecurity in an uncertain, uncontrollable world more than a physics process.
People often mystify their experiences unnecessarily when they don't have a more plausible explanation. It is endlessly interesting to speculate on, but the notion that the all-knowing nonlocal field identity exerts some influence over environment and personality may simply be mythopoesis, myth-making.
In mythopoesis many cultural forms meet and form an organic fusion. Does the contemporary revival of myth with focus on our creative potential point to the possibility of a unified world, a neo-Utopian variant where we wish and make it so? If collective intentionality could create a better world, why didn't we do it long ago?
The real question is why do all cultures engage in mythopoeisis? Mythopoesis means change, re-mythologizing in times of cultural chaos. What I mean here is not a mis-spelling, but an amalgamation of mythopoesis or story-making and the autopoeitic self-organization of chaos theory; self-maintaining unity.
Autopoiesis describes the way living systems address and engage domains in which they operate. What human need do these mythically patterned meta-theories fill? Identification with the field body may just be another way of being attached to a belief to explain the Unknowable, to push the agent beyond the threshold of observability.
The Emperor’s New Intentionality
The notion "we create our own reality" is a relative truth. From a Jungian point of view, any "intentionality" we could exert would be subject to the competing agendas of autonomous archetyal forces and dynamics that don't give a fig about your personality needs. Existentially, we are moved by more than a single metaphor, a single role, a singlular self-image. Whatever you choose to call them, we harbor nested competing agendas, conscious and unconscious.
Even in chaos theory, many forget there are strange repellors as well as strange attractors. Resonance is another buzzword rapidly equalling the old standby of spiritualism, “vibrations”, which has found vindication in quantum and vacuum fluctuation But somehow, both in our lives and quantum mechanics, these extradimensional entanglements are unobservable, beyond physics, and therefore strictly speaking, metaphysical.
The ancients conceived of magic working through focus and will. Now a diffuse holistic awareness is preferred, perturbing the quantum flow. Whether we think we are changing reality through a focused act of will or even by "broad-beam" self-transformation the whole scenario may be a self-delusion cast in perennial truths and pseudo-scientific terms.
If it bothers or offends you to think otherwise, this is more likely true. There is emotional attachment there, not clarity. If you think you can do it by "aligning" yourself rather than manifestation, why are you harboring fantasies of misalignment? It makes little sense that the particle "intends" and the field "corresponds". In Nature, the reverse leads to manifestion.
Is this notion harboring a demiurgic God-complex, a control fantasy in an otherwise uncontrollable world? If we believe in God, why do we presume to interfere with that fiat by introjecting our small agendas? Does it conceal a spiritual hubris to be co-equal or co-creator with divinity? Or, more to the point, why would we look to the divine as an agent of psychophysical dynamics?
Nonlocal Intentions
Intentions may or may not exert a nonlocal organizing effect. They do when they mobilize effective action. Often the 'butterfly effect' of chaos theory is invoked for pumping holistic mental effects up to macro- proportions. But chaos theory doesn't organize through intentionality; just the opposite, by criticality.
Correlation is not identity. There is appearance being and process being, which correlate with particle/wave. We are both particle and field, and they are both complex, and may be analogous or metaphorically connected to the hypothesis of intentionality - but that doesn't make it real: it makes it a belief, an operational worldview. The ego somehow facilitating the holistic self to manifest is solipsistic, because the field self is in no way diminished even by negative thinking by personality.
If you think distant intentionality works for you, that is an interpretation, an arbitrary allocation of a cause to a perceived effect, which may be largely unrelated and/or statistically irrelevant. Once the narrative is "set", that becomes the story and the person zealously sticks to it, right or wrong. This is human nature and the nature of emotional investment. It may be the eternal human yen to create order from the fear and chaos of our lives and cleave to faith in the Great Beyond, whatever one thinks resides there.
A myriad of "brandable" new age technologies are based on non-scientific interpretations and confabulations of scientific theory. Though having its own organic root in metaphysics, new age tech has hijacked and romanticized the philosophical territory of psi research with its own prosaic interpretations. Because it makes a romantically appealing metaphor doesn't mean it matches up with naked Reality. Often incompatible physics theories are confounded together for the so-called explanations.
Psi and Intentionality
Four models of psi intentionality are drawn from relativity theory and two from quantum mechanics. First is the energetic transmission model, which presumes the effects of conscious intention are mediated by an as-yet-unknown energy signal. Second is the model of path facilitation. According to general relativity, gravity "warps" space–time, easing certain pathways of movement, so may acts of consciousness have warping and facilitating effects on the fabric of the surrounding world.
Nonlocal entanglement is drawn from quantum mechanics, suggesting people, like particles, can become entangled so they behave as one system with instantaneous and unmediated correlations across a distance. Actualization of potentials reflects the act of measurement in quantum mechanics collapsing a probabilistic wave function into a single outcome. This notion of observer effect relates only to the standard Copenhagen interpretation of QM. Researrchers claim conscious healing intention and alignment may actualize one of a series of possibilities; for example, recovery from a potentially lethal tumor.
Psi researchers must be careful to see these explanatory buzzwords like 'alignment' and 'intentionality' for what they are, smoke and mirrors explaining nothing, not what some say they are. Like the next new buzzword, "extradimensionality", it is just a displacement into the Unknown of a process that may be something entirely other than what the experiencer thinks it is.
To get to the Truth we have to follow the age-old axiom to ‘Know Thyself,’ and be willing to engage in some conceptual atom-smashing of our cherished notions. Otherwise, one engages in a pre-conceived, self-confirmatory journey for validation not a Quest for knowledge.
Rather than extradimensional participation in some subtle physics process, it may just be another trick of the mind - in the end, nothing more than a concept that doesn't match up with nor describe Reality. Oh sure, intentionality may function mystically in some nonfungable parallel universe, or that could be just another mentally attractive perennial fantasy. Those most concerned with “changing the paradigm” may be among those most firmly attached to their own idiosyncratic interpretations.
If there are memes in our culture, there are strange attractors in our thought patterns, that can harden into fixed beliefs. The fact is we don't know, and anyone who charges you and says they do is a either a fraud or self-deluded, or both. We are components of mythic culture which recursively regenerates itself in a network of self-similar productions.
Anywhere there is non-equilibrium, a gap in personal or cultural awareness, myth will self-organize a meta-narrative to fill the lacuna. Mythic beliefs are self-contained. Even fantasies of holism automatically exclude other options, except through embedding and hierarchy.
There are many aspects of psi, some more credible and testable than others. ESP (information transfer) is the most plausble, psychokinesis (mind over matter) most problematical. Serious researchers are beyond parlour tricks such as seances, regressions, or ghostbusting.
Still, there is no scientific or spiritual consensus about the mechanics of physics or consciousness, much less mind/matter interaction or the influence of one mind on another organism. Some models appeal to our intuition, others are profoundly counter-intuitive. But Mystery doesn't need to be metaphysical, mystical, nor dismissed as "noetic nonsense". It simply isn't limited by any of our concepts nor scientific blindspots. We can just admit we stand in the Mystery.
The way to keep a path alive is to walk on it. Studying psi phenomena invariably involves extracting a signal from a lot of noise: the only credible way to do that is scientifically. But for many researchers, those disconcerting or luminous moments of utter uncanniness in our own personal experience sustain our interest, year after year. The effects aren't so much in question as the images and the way we imagine them.
In the future, our important practical and moral choices could be improved by our understanding of the brain's workings. The more we know about our monkey brains, the more likely we are to control them. But at the same time, we may be subjected to more powerful and insidious manipulation by merchandisers and propagandists who seek better ways to bypass our rational minds and appeal more directly to our primal fears and desires.
Doctrine of Intentionality
Jung (1961) said, "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly; all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse.”
There are several subcultures whose worldviews embrace psi phenomena as Reality, or react as if they do. They range through governments to tribal people to new agers and neo-pagans to leading-edge researchers. Even the most skeptical scientist can be compartmentalized or even superstitious in his or her subjective thinking at times.
Vision Bored
To conduct sound research, we must catch ourselves in the act of trying to verify our own preconceptions, a “perception Lab.” This is an intrinsic problem of armchair scientists who are long on theory and short on experimentation. We have to pierce beyond the perceptual artifact to solid postulates, testable hypotheses, rigorous protocols, and accurate statistical analysis.
But psi may prove to be more than just an artifact of primitive belief. Meta-narratives emerge as mythologizing, literature, psychology, sociology, religion or philosophy and cutting-edge science theories. The philosophy of science describes the dynamics of the scientific method. The issue of intentionality is riddled with philosophical problems. Moreso, remote mental intention. Is a brain state the template for action?
The loose use of the term intentionality as a buzzword is an import into pop culture from philosophy. As a collective belief, it has boomeranged back into the public and new age thought from psi research meta-analysis, justified by the research of Radin, Emoto, Schlitz, Targ, Taggert and others.
"Psi intentionality" is a term lifted from remote viewing and other distance intentionality practices and psi energetic theories. It has been confounded with physics notion of nonlocality, entanglement, resonance and "spooky action at a distance", peculiar to particular theories of quantum mechanics, and holism or holographic models. It is shorthand for what might be called quantum psychokinesis (PK). In psi theory, the transmission of information from a sender to receiver is less problematical than physical influence.
Intentionality bears on ontological and metaphysical questions about the fundamental nature of mental states: perceiving, remembering, expectancy, believing, desiring, hoping, knowing, intending, feeling, experiencing, and so on. What is it to have such mental states? How does the mental relate to the physical, i.e., how are mental states related to an individual's body, to states of his or her brain and to his or her behavior?
Intentionality is a pervasive feature of many different mental states: beliefs, hopes, judgments, intentions, love and hatred all exhibit intentionality. In an ideal world we can mentally wish things into and out of existence. It can seem that consciousness and intentionality pervade mental life. Perhaps one or both somehow constitute what it is to have a mind.
But achieving an articulate general understanding of either consciousness or intentionality presents an enormous challenge, part of which lies in figuring out how the two are related. In plain talk, we consider a behavior intentional when it appears purposeful or done intentionally -- that is, based on reasons (beliefs, desires) and performed with skill and awareness.
Just because the subject of psi remains objectively problematical doesn’t mean we should stop systematic investigation, both scientifically and metaphysically. Babies don’t know how the world works so they constantly keep testing their environment, over and over. Are we just cosmic babies, feeling our way along, blindly? We are when it comes to proofs of mind over matter. Perhaps intentionality is a permissible metaphor until we have a better shorthand for the effect. But we really need a bigger and better metaphor already without trotting out the well-worn notion of paradigm shift - another buzzword.
Quantum Chaos
We must be willing to question our own beliefs, comprehending the nature of subjectivity, experimenter bias, and memes or groupthink. The mind deploys them as explanations for unknown agency, the blindspots of our consciousness. As ever, any postulate and hypothesis we can make depends on "which" physics it is based in, since there are several competing models: Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Transactional, M-Theory, Plenum Physics, hyperspace, etc.
This simple fact makes quantum physics a domain of self-contained, mutually exclusive belief systems with their own presumed truths about the primordial nature of Reality. New Agers and armchair philosophers often confound them together into half-baked theories, sometimes compounded by theories of “ascension”, aliens, and evolution.
Philosophically, what does it mean that man's intention now substitutes for the exiled Demiurge, or divine "maker"? We've put ourselves in place of God or nature to augment healing, muddle about in global politics, and presumably perturb our evolutionary arc. We have to question how much more effective realworld pro-active behavior might be, considering that "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride." There is no end to the places the human ego would like to meddle in structure, meaning and labeling.
Ordinary intentionality means being directed toward some goal. It comes down to a control issue; who's got it and who wants it. Perhaps the most compelling results come from the realms of mindbody healing by deploring human beliefs and activating the mysterious placebo effect for shorter or longer periods of time. But this in no way means that this is a quantum process, since the mechanisms may be largely molecular and biochemical. We know that both psychosomatics and psychosemantics are influential.
“Fill in the blank” explanations can be outlandish, possible, plausible, probable, or match reality. The distinction between "true believers" and skeptics comes at the point of interpretation of phenomena, attributions of the source of events or perceptions, whether one's model is psibernetics, "magical thinking", external agents, nested hierarchies, holistic mysticism, or physicalism.
A theist will tend to attribute positive expectations of “agency” to God, a pagan to nature, a humanist to self, and an atheist to complex dynamics, or randomness,. A debunker is dismissive. A true skeptic remains open-minded, at home in the ambiguity. And the loose use of the buzzword ‘intentionality’ leaves its agent or means totally ambiguous, meaning not mechanism.
Is anomalous intentionality a catalyst? It came into the psi lexicon from consciousness studies and a few psi experiments that showed some promise suggesting mind/matter interaction. The protocols of all these experiments are questionable in terms of rigour even though the field polices itself. Replication for these studies is far from exhaustive. So, maybe it isn't outlandish, and perhaps it is possible, and maybe its plausible. But in no way is it probable. And we don't really know the deepest nature of reality to know whether it matches or we are simply deluding ourselves with a romantic notion.
My Karma Ran Over My Dogma
This fashionable term for mind/matter interaction, "intentionality", fails as a shorthand to explain anything. "Free will" has been dismissed as an agent by most consciousness researchers, though evolutionary intentionality is connected with the dynamic behavior of systems. You may as well call it karma, luck, or True Will, like the magicians do. Karma, whether you believe in it or not, at its root just means natural consequences of behavior.
Does it really work to claim an intention to be intentional? Doesn’t intentionality always imply future tense rather than concrete results? If the paradoxical implication is that the intentional result is acausal, isn’t that a pretzel-twist in logic? Jung tried to account for an acausal factor with his notion of synchronicity, but it is hardly testable, though most of us notice meaningful coicidences all the time. But then human beings have an inclination to look for "signs". Why this is so is another avenue of sociological investigation.
Even in clinical research, to name psi expression intentionality doesn't make it so. In actual fact, most of us can’t form enough intentionality to drink the amount of water the body needs each day or eat healthy. The unresolved New Year’s resolution is a truism.
What makes us think we can be more consistently intentional in the extradimensional? It is a ‘fantasy of intentionality,’ a subjective hypothesis that human intervention at some subtle level perturbs outcomes in some desirable manner. It might express our insecurity in an uncertain, uncontrollable world more than a physics process.
People often mystify their experiences unnecessarily when they don't have a more plausible explanation. It is endlessly interesting to speculate on, but the notion that the all-knowing nonlocal field identity exerts some influence over environment and personality may simply be mythopoesis, myth-making.
In mythopoesis many cultural forms meet and form an organic fusion. Does the contemporary revival of myth with focus on our creative potential point to the possibility of a unified world, a neo-Utopian variant where we wish and make it so? If collective intentionality could create a better world, why didn't we do it long ago?
The real question is why do all cultures engage in mythopoeisis? Mythopoesis means change, re-mythologizing in times of cultural chaos. What I mean here is not a mis-spelling, but an amalgamation of mythopoesis or story-making and the autopoeitic self-organization of chaos theory; self-maintaining unity.
Autopoiesis describes the way living systems address and engage domains in which they operate. What human need do these mythically patterned meta-theories fill? Identification with the field body may just be another way of being attached to a belief to explain the Unknowable, to push the agent beyond the threshold of observability.
The Emperor’s New Intentionality
The notion "we create our own reality" is a relative truth. From a Jungian point of view, any "intentionality" we could exert would be subject to the competing agendas of autonomous archetyal forces and dynamics that don't give a fig about your personality needs. Existentially, we are moved by more than a single metaphor, a single role, a singlular self-image. Whatever you choose to call them, we harbor nested competing agendas, conscious and unconscious.
Even in chaos theory, many forget there are strange repellors as well as strange attractors. Resonance is another buzzword rapidly equalling the old standby of spiritualism, “vibrations”, which has found vindication in quantum and vacuum fluctuation But somehow, both in our lives and quantum mechanics, these extradimensional entanglements are unobservable, beyond physics, and therefore strictly speaking, metaphysical.
The ancients conceived of magic working through focus and will. Now a diffuse holistic awareness is preferred, perturbing the quantum flow. Whether we think we are changing reality through a focused act of will or even by "broad-beam" self-transformation the whole scenario may be a self-delusion cast in perennial truths and pseudo-scientific terms.
If it bothers or offends you to think otherwise, this is more likely true. There is emotional attachment there, not clarity. If you think you can do it by "aligning" yourself rather than manifestation, why are you harboring fantasies of misalignment? It makes little sense that the particle "intends" and the field "corresponds". In Nature, the reverse leads to manifestion.
Is this notion harboring a demiurgic God-complex, a control fantasy in an otherwise uncontrollable world? If we believe in God, why do we presume to interfere with that fiat by introjecting our small agendas? Does it conceal a spiritual hubris to be co-equal or co-creator with divinity? Or, more to the point, why would we look to the divine as an agent of psychophysical dynamics?
Nonlocal Intentions
Intentions may or may not exert a nonlocal organizing effect. They do when they mobilize effective action. Often the 'butterfly effect' of chaos theory is invoked for pumping holistic mental effects up to macro- proportions. But chaos theory doesn't organize through intentionality; just the opposite, by criticality.
Correlation is not identity. There is appearance being and process being, which correlate with particle/wave. We are both particle and field, and they are both complex, and may be analogous or metaphorically connected to the hypothesis of intentionality - but that doesn't make it real: it makes it a belief, an operational worldview. The ego somehow facilitating the holistic self to manifest is solipsistic, because the field self is in no way diminished even by negative thinking by personality.
If you think distant intentionality works for you, that is an interpretation, an arbitrary allocation of a cause to a perceived effect, which may be largely unrelated and/or statistically irrelevant. Once the narrative is "set", that becomes the story and the person zealously sticks to it, right or wrong. This is human nature and the nature of emotional investment. It may be the eternal human yen to create order from the fear and chaos of our lives and cleave to faith in the Great Beyond, whatever one thinks resides there.
A myriad of "brandable" new age technologies are based on non-scientific interpretations and confabulations of scientific theory. Though having its own organic root in metaphysics, new age tech has hijacked and romanticized the philosophical territory of psi research with its own prosaic interpretations. Because it makes a romantically appealing metaphor doesn't mean it matches up with naked Reality. Often incompatible physics theories are confounded together for the so-called explanations.
Psi and Intentionality
Four models of psi intentionality are drawn from relativity theory and two from quantum mechanics. First is the energetic transmission model, which presumes the effects of conscious intention are mediated by an as-yet-unknown energy signal. Second is the model of path facilitation. According to general relativity, gravity "warps" space–time, easing certain pathways of movement, so may acts of consciousness have warping and facilitating effects on the fabric of the surrounding world.
Nonlocal entanglement is drawn from quantum mechanics, suggesting people, like particles, can become entangled so they behave as one system with instantaneous and unmediated correlations across a distance. Actualization of potentials reflects the act of measurement in quantum mechanics collapsing a probabilistic wave function into a single outcome. This notion of observer effect relates only to the standard Copenhagen interpretation of QM. Researrchers claim conscious healing intention and alignment may actualize one of a series of possibilities; for example, recovery from a potentially lethal tumor.
Psi researchers must be careful to see these explanatory buzzwords like 'alignment' and 'intentionality' for what they are, smoke and mirrors explaining nothing, not what some say they are. Like the next new buzzword, "extradimensionality", it is just a displacement into the Unknown of a process that may be something entirely other than what the experiencer thinks it is.
To get to the Truth we have to follow the age-old axiom to ‘Know Thyself,’ and be willing to engage in some conceptual atom-smashing of our cherished notions. Otherwise, one engages in a pre-conceived, self-confirmatory journey for validation not a Quest for knowledge.
Rather than extradimensional participation in some subtle physics process, it may just be another trick of the mind - in the end, nothing more than a concept that doesn't match up with nor describe Reality. Oh sure, intentionality may function mystically in some nonfungable parallel universe, or that could be just another mentally attractive perennial fantasy. Those most concerned with “changing the paradigm” may be among those most firmly attached to their own idiosyncratic interpretations.
If there are memes in our culture, there are strange attractors in our thought patterns, that can harden into fixed beliefs. The fact is we don't know, and anyone who charges you and says they do is a either a fraud or self-deluded, or both. We are components of mythic culture which recursively regenerates itself in a network of self-similar productions.
Anywhere there is non-equilibrium, a gap in personal or cultural awareness, myth will self-organize a meta-narrative to fill the lacuna. Mythic beliefs are self-contained. Even fantasies of holism automatically exclude other options, except through embedding and hierarchy.
There are many aspects of psi, some more credible and testable than others. ESP (information transfer) is the most plausble, psychokinesis (mind over matter) most problematical. Serious researchers are beyond parlour tricks such as seances, regressions, or ghostbusting.
Still, there is no scientific or spiritual consensus about the mechanics of physics or consciousness, much less mind/matter interaction or the influence of one mind on another organism. Some models appeal to our intuition, others are profoundly counter-intuitive. But Mystery doesn't need to be metaphysical, mystical, nor dismissed as "noetic nonsense". It simply isn't limited by any of our concepts nor scientific blindspots. We can just admit we stand in the Mystery.
The way to keep a path alive is to walk on it. Studying psi phenomena invariably involves extracting a signal from a lot of noise: the only credible way to do that is scientifically. But for many researchers, those disconcerting or luminous moments of utter uncanniness in our own personal experience sustain our interest, year after year. The effects aren't so much in question as the images and the way we imagine them.
In the future, our important practical and moral choices could be improved by our understanding of the brain's workings. The more we know about our monkey brains, the more likely we are to control them. But at the same time, we may be subjected to more powerful and insidious manipulation by merchandisers and propagandists who seek better ways to bypass our rational minds and appeal more directly to our primal fears and desires.
REFERENCES
Blackmore, Susan, There is no stream of consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 9, number 5-6, on the Grand Illusion. See http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs/, it is reprinted here with permission. http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/jcs02.htm
Eugene Subbotsky, The belief in magic in the age of science, http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/subbotsk/%20E.Subbotsky-2.pdf
Evans, TRANSCENDENTAL PRAGMATISM: A SYSTEMATIC EXISTENTIALISM Method & Application,
http://beutel.narod.ru/write/transprag.htm
Fodor, Jerry. Psychosemantics. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1987.
Leder, Drew (1995) "Spooky Actions at a Distance": Physics, Psi, and Distant Healing, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Oct 2005, Vol. 11, No. 5 : 923 -930 Schlitz, Marilyn and Braud, William (1997). "Distance intentionality and healing", Alternative Therapies, Vol. 3, No. 6.
Lutz, Antoine and Thompson, Evan, Neurophenomenology Integrating Subjective Experience and Brain Dynamics in the Neuroscience of Consciousness http://espra.risc.cnrs.fr/LutzThompson.pdf
Anthony J. Marcel, Introspective Report Trust, Self-Knowledge and Science, http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cogsci/private/marcel-introspective.pdf
Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Cassandra Vieten & Elizabeth M. Miller, Worldview Transformation and the Development of
Social Consciousness, http://media.noetic.org/uploads/files/JCS_17_7-8_018-036.pdf
S - Introspective Training
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/IntrospTrain.pdf
Blackmore, Susan, There is no stream of consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 9, number 5-6, on the Grand Illusion. See http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs/, it is reprinted here with permission. http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/jcs02.htm
Eugene Subbotsky, The belief in magic in the age of science, http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/subbotsk/%20E.Subbotsky-2.pdf
Evans, TRANSCENDENTAL PRAGMATISM: A SYSTEMATIC EXISTENTIALISM Method & Application,
http://beutel.narod.ru/write/transprag.htm
Fodor, Jerry. Psychosemantics. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1987.
Leder, Drew (1995) "Spooky Actions at a Distance": Physics, Psi, and Distant Healing, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Oct 2005, Vol. 11, No. 5 : 923 -930 Schlitz, Marilyn and Braud, William (1997). "Distance intentionality and healing", Alternative Therapies, Vol. 3, No. 6.
Lutz, Antoine and Thompson, Evan, Neurophenomenology Integrating Subjective Experience and Brain Dynamics in the Neuroscience of Consciousness http://espra.risc.cnrs.fr/LutzThompson.pdf
Anthony J. Marcel, Introspective Report Trust, Self-Knowledge and Science, http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cogsci/private/marcel-introspective.pdf
Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Cassandra Vieten & Elizabeth M. Miller, Worldview Transformation and the Development of
Social Consciousness, http://media.noetic.org/uploads/files/JCS_17_7-8_018-036.pdf
S - Introspective Training
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/IntrospTrain.pdf
Tactics of the Fringe: Exercises in Futility
Sunday May 2012
http://ancientneareast.org/2012/05/20/tactics-of-the-fringe-exercises-in-futility/
Posted by kmtsesh in Ancient Egypt, Biblical Events & Historicity, Combating the Fringe, Mesopotamia
Tags - Ancient Aliens, ancient Near East, chronic astonishment, conspiracy, critical thinking, cult archaeology, Egypt, Erich von Däniken, Flinders Petrie, fraud, fringe, Giorgio Tsoukalos, Great Pyramid, John Taylor, junk science, Mesopotamia, Michael Heiser, Nibiru, Piazzi Smyth, Planet X, Puma Punku, pyramid inch, Pyramid-measurers, pyramidiots, sitchiniswrong.com, Sumerians, VA243, Zecharia Sitchin
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend as of late. I’m not the only one. It’s become evident to many who appreciate the orthodox and conventional approach to historical studies. More and more have we seen the growing popularity in alternative history and alternative science. It goes by other names, my own favorite being “fringe.” You’ll also see “pyramiodiocy” applied to those strange theories smacking against the academic understanding of pharaonic Egypt. “Pseudoscience” and “pseudohistory” are also commonly used, as is “junk science.” “Cult archaeology” is yet another.
Whatever you wish to call it, the phenomenon reflects a growing trend among laypeople to question orthodox science and research in favor of the implausible, the unrealistic, and the just plain bizarre. Exactly why this trend is on the rise is not always clear, but to me it seems many adults seem to lack the ability to apply critical thinking in their everyday lives.
This very problem was the subject of a recent article in the Chicago Tribune (see online article here). Whether our students are being educated to learn and apply critical thinking is a subject unto itself, so I encourage you to read the article in the link. For the subject of my current blog article, I’d like to touch on the phenomenon as it concerns historical studies specifically.
We are bombarded in our modern media by all manner of questionable literature and television programming, and to be sure this is part of the problem. The sharp decline in the quality of programming on the History Channel as of late is a painfully obvious example of this. That the once-solid channel should now air and promote uninformed flotsam such as Ancient Aliens is a symptom of a much larger problem. More and more I’m encountering people in my museum work who watch and actually believe this program to be accurate. It’s cute when a little kid tells me this, but rather depressing when the same is said by an adult.
Fringe media are aimed at the non-expert due to overt and covert reasons, be they religious, political, or commercial (Flemming 2006: 47-49). Think of the books sold by the likes of Zecharia Sitchin, Erich von Däniken, Graham Hancock, and Robert Bauval. While I don’t decry these people’s right to earn a living in they way they might best be suited, I definitely charge them with patent dishonesty and intellectual malfeasance in trying to pass off their literature as hard-core fact. As with Ancient Aliens, such literature is an artful collection of half-truths, twisted truths, incomplete information, distorted evidence, and just plain nonsense. Few people have contributed so heartily to human stupidity.
The Origin of Fringe Thought
Where this all began is not so easy to pinpoint. It’s not exactly a modern problem—it has become only much more serious in modern times. Wherever and whenever man does not understand something and does not have the opportunity to educate himself—or just plain doesn’t have the desire to educate himself—he tends to replace facts with fantasy.
There have always been kooks among us. It’s human nature. I can take us back to the nineteenth century, when the study of the great ancient Near Eastern civilizations was still in its early stages. Not everyone touring and exploring the ancient pharaonic monuments was doing so with sound academic mind.
In 1859 a Brit named John Taylor published a book called The Great Pyramid: Why was it built and Who built it? Taylor devised all sorts of supernatural origins for the Great Pyramid and argued that its astonishing precision meant it simply could not have been built by man. Science itself was still in its early days, if you will, so Taylor was one of many in his time who regarded the Bible as literal truth. This means he held to Archbishop Usher’s conclusions that the Earth was created in 4004 BCE (Drower 1995: 27). Even in Taylor’s day many people must have fathomed the great antiquity of the Great Pyramid, so they could not reconcile it with Archbishop Usher’s dates.
(By the way, please do not confuse the nineteenth century John Taylor with the modern Egyptologist John Taylor, whose contributions to our understanding of pharaonic Egypt are considerable. I always wonder if Dr. Taylor cringes when the nineteenth century John Taylor is mentioned. I know I do.)
A friend and supporter of Taylor’s was Chalres Piazzi Smyth, who was much influenced by the former and published a book in 1874 called Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. Smyth wasn’t completely daft, I have to admit. An educated man, he was Astronomer Royal for Scotland. His enthusiasm for Taylor’s work and his own writing on the subject was arguably more due to his religious faith than to any scientific thought.
Charles Piazzi Smyth, 1819 – 1900
Consider, for example that Smyth belonged to the British Israelites and believed the British were the Lost Tribes of Israel. His odd leanings toward the Great Pyramid were more or less certain to follow. Smyth believed that locked within the Great Pyramid were divine mathematical measurements reflecting the physical location of the pyramid itself and the world in general. When the measurements were drawn and correctly interpreted, Smyth argued, the divinely constructed Great Pyramid would convey God’s message. To help to affect this, Smyth even devised a means of measurement called the “pyramid inch” that he based on the Hebrew cubit so that each pyramid inch was equal to 1.001 of a British inch (ibid 28).
Talk about critical thinking, or a lack thereof. I have to hope, due to the man’s sound scientific training in astronomy, that Smyth himself understood his pyramid inch was not something known in ancient Egypt. In other words, the pyramid inch is irrelevant.
Enter William Matthew Flinders Petrie, a self-educated Brit and one of the founders of the modern field of Egyptology. What follows is what I consider to be a delicious irony. As a young man Petrie read Smyth’s Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid and was thrilled by it. His imagination was charged. Petrie originally went to Egypt to measure the Great Pyramid for himself, to see how precise Smyth’s scheme might be reflected in real surveying. Petrie and Smyth were actually friends, so Petrie was hoping to corroborate his friend’s beliefs.
William Matthew Flinders Petrie, 1853-1942
Petrie’s father, William Petrie, was a talented land surveyor and passed on his skills to his son. Petrie himself went on to improve on his father’s techniques and built his own surveying equipment. In fact, Petrie was the first man to perform an accurate land survey of Stonehenge.
Petrie spent considerable time surveying the Great Pyramid. He lived on-site. Petrie’s surveys were so precise and thorough that they are still used today (see Craig B. Smith, 2004). And upon his conclusions, Petrie couldn’t help but report that Piazzi Smyth’s entire theme of divine mathematics was a load of bull-flop (my words, not Petrie’s). The science doesn’t lie. Needless to say, Petrie and Smyth were no longer friends after Petrie’s work was published.
Nevertheless, many other people were inspired by the writing of folks like Taylor and Smyth, and went to Egypt for themselves to explore and poke and prod the Great Pyramid. And measure it, of course. So rose the derogatory term “Pyramid-measurer,” employed by Petrie and others of sound academic mind to refer to Taylor’s and Smyth’s misguided acolytes.
And just like today, the pyramidiots of Petrie’s time were not above dishonesty to prove their schemes. One day a friend of Petrie’s, Dr. James Grant, came upon a Pyramid-measurer at the Great Pyramid who was busy filing down a granite boss. When Grant inquired to the fellow as to why he was doing this, the Pyramid-measurer relied that he wanted to refine the spot so it would work for his “Inspiration theories” (ibid 40).
It would appear, then, that a lack of critical thinking was quite a problem in Petrie’s day, too.
—————————————————--
Let’s turn to the tactics of the fringe. What do fringe writers do to present their themes? How do they deal with real-world evidence as established by research and the scientific method? (You might notice that when I write about the fringe, I often use the word “theme” in place of “theory,” and it’s because I’m not comfortable giving fringe conclusions the legitimate word “theory,” which implies at least some measure of real-world research.)
Chronic Astonishment
A common tactic is summarily to dismiss ancient achievements as those of regular humankind. The Great Pyramid couldn’t have been built by men living in the Early Bronze Age. The wonderful stonework of Puma Punku in Bolivia couldn’t have been achieved by primitive indigenous populations. The beautiful stoneware vessels of the ancient Near East, going back into Neolithic times, just couldn’t have been made by such primitives.
You’ll see the sentiment echoed by the likes of Chris Dunn, who sees only modern-type tool marks in ancient engineering and believes the Great Pyramid was actually a gigantic machine. Dunn is popular with a lot of fringe adherents today, but the chief failing in such people is their lack of familiarity with ancient engineering and the capabilities as well as limitations of craftsmen and builders in the Bronze Age. Their conclusions are simply divorced from reality.
It’s also a tactic employed in almost every episode of the History Channel’s program Ancient Aliens. Time and again you’ll see Erich von Däniken and Giorgio Tsoukalos express chronic astonishment at the feats of ancient engineering, and the common theme is, again, that ancient man simply couldn’t have made or built these things. Of course, in the case of Ancient Aliens, the conclusion is always and forever that aliens are responsible for these ancient wonders.
Erich von Däniken (left) and GiorgioTsoukalos, the faces of the History Channel’s regrettable program Ancient Aliens
Never mind that von Däniken has a criminal record in Europe for fraud, and has been caught falsifying “evidence” for his alien stories. The man has still sold a hell of a lot of books. The gullible among us seem to lap them up.
It also strikes me as decidedly odd that all of this should be ascribed to aliens. We are to imagine an alien race so advanced that they can travel the cosmos in interstellar spacecraft, and possess levels of technology we humans can’t even fathom. We are still supposed to believe that these aliens came all the way to our lovely little blue planet to teach ancient humans to build in…stone.
Maybe these aliens accidentally left all of their tools back on their home planet.
So instead of taking the time to research ancient engineering and the tools and techniques ancient man used to achieve his wonders—and trust me, the body of literature on this research is ample—we should instead exercise chronic astonishment and just chalk it up to aliens. Or lost technologies. Or lost civilizations. Atlanteans, maybe? This is the point where I might use the emoticon with rolling eyes.
Misrepresenting Evidence
Here is a tactic fringe writers are more or less obligated to use. And they have done so with great abandon. I personally consider dishonesty in presenting historical accounts to be loathsome, so this one bothers me in particular.
For example, for a NOVA special called The Case of the Ancient Astronauts Erich von Däniken presented photos of ancient Peruvian stones showing men employing modern technologies that could only have been taught to them by aliens. However, NOVA investigated this independently and learned that the stones were modern, and even found the potter in Peru who made them. Von Däniken had not admitted that he’d met this potter himself.
Other fringe writers have turned to more subtle tactics. One of the most prolific fringe writers was Zecharia Sitchin, an author who published many books on ancient alien visitation. It is from Sitchin that the popular myth of Planet X, otherwise known as Nibiru, has proliferated on the internet—on countless half-baked websites.
Zecharia Sitchin, 1920-2010
One could write an entire book, if not several, in pointing out the errors, omissions, and misrepresentations in Sitchin’s many books. A legitimate scholar of the ancient Near East named Michael Heiser has his own website with that in mind (source). The mythical planet Nibiru is a good example.
Sitchin wrote in The 12th Planet that Nibiru is a planet beyond Pluto that once collided with a planet between Mars and Jupiter called Tiamat. The resulting destruction of Tiamat led to the creation of Earth, as well as other celestial bodies in our solar system. Sitchin believed Nibiru, which is still in orbit, is the home world of an advanced race of aliens known as the Anunnaki.
This is of course an obvious and clumsy bastardization of ancient Mesopotamian myths and names, and goodness only knows how in the hell Sitchin even came up with it. Whether Sitchin himself actually believed in this stuff can be argued, but it sold his books.
As “proof” for the planet Nibiru Sitchin turned to a Mesopotamian cylinder seal known as VA243, which resides in the Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin.
Cylinder seal VA243
Note the area in the image circled in red. Sitchin argued it was a depiction of the sun circled by planets, and indicated an additional planet unknown to modern astronomy. Sitchin wrote that the ancient Sumerians received advanced knowledge of science and astronomy from the visiting aliens known as the Anunnaki.
This is not correct. The cylinder seal imparts no such information. The writing on it in cuneiform merely mentions a couple of names of minor officials. The circled portion in the “sky” of the seal does not show sun and planets, but stars. In Sumerian iconography, such depictions represented either stars or deities, not planets. It’s possible the small dots and larger star represen the Pleaides, which is represented as such on other cylinder seals from this region (see Heiser’s article, in PDF).
In his book The Stairway to Heaven Sitchin spent a considerable amount of time misrepresenting the colossal masonry pyramids of Egypt’s Dynasty 3 and Dynasty 4. For example, he notes that these pyramids do not have hieroglyphs inscribed outside or inside them, which leads him to believe that these pyramids were either built long before hieroglyphs existed and thus long before conventional research dates them, or were not built by the Egyptians at all (1980: 339). The implication is, once again, aliens built the pyramids.
This flies in the face of science and legitimate historical research. We know the Great Pyramid, for example, was built no more than about a century earlier than the conventional date of 2500 BCE (see Bonani et al 2001). And we know that no pyramid bore hieroglyphic inscriptions prior to the end of Dynasty 5, about 150 years after the erection of the Great Pyramid. There is ample research in the professional literature to explain the reasons behind this, but Sitchin’s twisting of facts is not an explanation on which one should rely.
Historical Research is Just Plain Wrong/Misleading/Insufficient
This represents a tactic of desperation on the part of fringe authors. Very few fringe writers ever attempt to deal with professional research head on, for the simple reason that they know professional historical research disproves their claims in a swift stroke. Rather, it is easier just to ignore and dismiss professional research without cause.
I’ve encountered numerous fringe adherents who claim modern historical research can’t be trusted simply because it’s not really modern at all. They claim modern historians use the same tools, the same approaches, and the same attitudes as historians did in the nineteenth century.
All such a comment reveals is that the person making it does not have any working understanding of modern historical research. Egyptology is a good example. I know an Egyptoloist at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, who likes to joke that everything she learned back in her days as a graduate student is now wrong. The field of research of pharaonic Egypt has made leaps and bounds in all facets of study in just the last several decades. At the present time Egyptology makes use of a wide range of modern specialists including surveyors, architects, cartographers, photographers, conservators, forensic anthropologists, X-ray technicians, archaeobotonists, archaeozoologists, palynologists, geologists, mineralogists, hydrologists, artists, art historians, ceramic specialists, soil experts, stratigraphy experts, hot-air balloon pilots, aerial photographers, satellite imaging technicians, electrical, mining, and structural engineers, chemists, computer programmers, draftsmen, graphic designers, cultural resource managers, statisticians, philologists, epigraphers, geophysicists, and stone technology experts (Weeks 2008: 15). As scientific fields expand and refine their methods and tools, Egyptologists turn to them for expert analysis. Paleopathologists have become an important part of studying ancient human remains, and genetics have now entered the sphere of research, too.
Fringe writers will often resort to acerbic tactics to bolster their own claims while simultaneously whittling away at the world of orthodox study. These writers will paint unflattering pictures of professional historians and present them as close-minded, stale, dusty old professors. While this might aptly describe some historians, it is hardly a fair or accurate assessment. And it really doesn’t work for fringe writers. Whether they realize it or not, the more time fringe adherents spend on ridiculing professional historians, the more they themselves damage their own credibility. Personally I find this tactic to be childish.
The Grand Conspiracy
This is perhaps the most absurd and comical tactic employed by fringe writers. It definitely lacks observable critical thinking on the face of it. In this ploy fringe writers try to present the world of orthodox research as one great, shady, nefarious cabal bent on hiding “the truth” from all of us and maintaining the status quo. So there must be evidence out there for ancient alien intervention—or Atlantis or Nibiru or lost advanced technologies, what have you—but orthodox academia is working in concert to keep the information contained.
Alien overlords!
So in this tactic it is known, for example, that the Great Pyramid was built by aliens or the building of it was overseen by aliens, et cetera. Egyptologists know this, but if they admit it they’ll have to rewrite all of their books and papers and all of our knowledge will have to be refashioned. Heaven forbid!
This implies, then, that over the course of the past two centuries, all Egyptologists working for all institutions and universities from all over the world, have been in league with governments to keep the secret.
A moment’s thought reveals the grand absurdity of this notion. Governments have never been terribly good at keeping secrets—academia, less so. This might make for an entertaining sci-fi movie, and I like movies as much as the next guy, but I do not see how any thinking, reasoning, educated adult could believe this for even a moment.
Conclusions
So why is the appeal for the fringe so strong? Why does it continue to grow? Is it a reflection of human nature where we favor the underdog over the big and sinister opponent, in this case academia (Flemming 2006: 56)? Are people uncomfortable with science and professional research because it seems so daunting and inaccessible? I personally believe this has much to do with it, but I think the intimidation many might feel is quite exaggerated.
More so than ever, the information is out there and accessible to anyone who wants to learn it. Advanced college degrees are not necessarily needed, especially if one is just an enthusiast and wants to learn. People have all manner of literature and media to educate themselves. Archaeological expeditions like Çatalhöyük, Göbekli Tepe, and the Giza Plateau Mapping Project have their own websites to keep professionals and laypeople alike informed on the work conducted there. More and more archaeologists post blogs to deliver their own work to an immediate audience. Going forward, the internet will become an even more common medium for all manner of scientific and historical information.
The trick is to discern fact from fiction. For every credible and worthwhile website put up by an institute or university, I’d wager there are at least ten others of little to no scientific or historical merit. Let’s face it: any nut case with a computer and an internet connection can slap together a website to showcase his ideas, regardless of how bizarre and divorced from reality they are. One needs to recognize which is which in some cases. Sometimes websites smack of legitimate merit and reel you in, even if uniformed or misinformed material is there (something at which numerous religious zealots excel, in their bias on religious history).
I worry about sincere and curious young people who want to learn about ancient history and inadvertently stumble first into the tar-pit literature of Erich von Däniken or Zecharia Sitchin. Make no mistake: these guys are good writers. It’s just that the material they impart is more fitting to Hollywood than to academia.
I am always heartened, then, when I visit a book store and see this kind of stuff not in the history section but somewhere else, like occult or New Age. I feel all book stores should follow this procedure.
In the end it boils down to an individual’s ability to know what is worthwhile and what is bull-flop. And this boils down to critical thinking, an ability many adults nowadays seem to lack. And so I worry.
——————————————————–
Bonani, Georges et al. “Radiocarbon Dates of Old and Middle Kingdom Monuments in Egypt.” 2001.
Drower, Margaret S. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. 1995.
Flemming, N.C. “The attraction of non-rational archaeological hypotheses.” Archaeological Fantasies. Garrett G. Fagan, ed. 2006.
Heiser, Michael S. Sitchin Is Wrong.
Sitchin, Zecharia. The Stairway to Heaven. 1980.
Smith, Craig B. How the Great Pyramid Was Built. 2004.
Weeks, Kent. “Archaeology and Egyptology.” Egyptology Today. Richard H. Wilkinson, ed. 2008.
Sunday May 2012
http://ancientneareast.org/2012/05/20/tactics-of-the-fringe-exercises-in-futility/
Posted by kmtsesh in Ancient Egypt, Biblical Events & Historicity, Combating the Fringe, Mesopotamia
Tags - Ancient Aliens, ancient Near East, chronic astonishment, conspiracy, critical thinking, cult archaeology, Egypt, Erich von Däniken, Flinders Petrie, fraud, fringe, Giorgio Tsoukalos, Great Pyramid, John Taylor, junk science, Mesopotamia, Michael Heiser, Nibiru, Piazzi Smyth, Planet X, Puma Punku, pyramid inch, Pyramid-measurers, pyramidiots, sitchiniswrong.com, Sumerians, VA243, Zecharia Sitchin
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend as of late. I’m not the only one. It’s become evident to many who appreciate the orthodox and conventional approach to historical studies. More and more have we seen the growing popularity in alternative history and alternative science. It goes by other names, my own favorite being “fringe.” You’ll also see “pyramiodiocy” applied to those strange theories smacking against the academic understanding of pharaonic Egypt. “Pseudoscience” and “pseudohistory” are also commonly used, as is “junk science.” “Cult archaeology” is yet another.
Whatever you wish to call it, the phenomenon reflects a growing trend among laypeople to question orthodox science and research in favor of the implausible, the unrealistic, and the just plain bizarre. Exactly why this trend is on the rise is not always clear, but to me it seems many adults seem to lack the ability to apply critical thinking in their everyday lives.
This very problem was the subject of a recent article in the Chicago Tribune (see online article here). Whether our students are being educated to learn and apply critical thinking is a subject unto itself, so I encourage you to read the article in the link. For the subject of my current blog article, I’d like to touch on the phenomenon as it concerns historical studies specifically.
We are bombarded in our modern media by all manner of questionable literature and television programming, and to be sure this is part of the problem. The sharp decline in the quality of programming on the History Channel as of late is a painfully obvious example of this. That the once-solid channel should now air and promote uninformed flotsam such as Ancient Aliens is a symptom of a much larger problem. More and more I’m encountering people in my museum work who watch and actually believe this program to be accurate. It’s cute when a little kid tells me this, but rather depressing when the same is said by an adult.
Fringe media are aimed at the non-expert due to overt and covert reasons, be they religious, political, or commercial (Flemming 2006: 47-49). Think of the books sold by the likes of Zecharia Sitchin, Erich von Däniken, Graham Hancock, and Robert Bauval. While I don’t decry these people’s right to earn a living in they way they might best be suited, I definitely charge them with patent dishonesty and intellectual malfeasance in trying to pass off their literature as hard-core fact. As with Ancient Aliens, such literature is an artful collection of half-truths, twisted truths, incomplete information, distorted evidence, and just plain nonsense. Few people have contributed so heartily to human stupidity.
The Origin of Fringe Thought
Where this all began is not so easy to pinpoint. It’s not exactly a modern problem—it has become only much more serious in modern times. Wherever and whenever man does not understand something and does not have the opportunity to educate himself—or just plain doesn’t have the desire to educate himself—he tends to replace facts with fantasy.
There have always been kooks among us. It’s human nature. I can take us back to the nineteenth century, when the study of the great ancient Near Eastern civilizations was still in its early stages. Not everyone touring and exploring the ancient pharaonic monuments was doing so with sound academic mind.
In 1859 a Brit named John Taylor published a book called The Great Pyramid: Why was it built and Who built it? Taylor devised all sorts of supernatural origins for the Great Pyramid and argued that its astonishing precision meant it simply could not have been built by man. Science itself was still in its early days, if you will, so Taylor was one of many in his time who regarded the Bible as literal truth. This means he held to Archbishop Usher’s conclusions that the Earth was created in 4004 BCE (Drower 1995: 27). Even in Taylor’s day many people must have fathomed the great antiquity of the Great Pyramid, so they could not reconcile it with Archbishop Usher’s dates.
(By the way, please do not confuse the nineteenth century John Taylor with the modern Egyptologist John Taylor, whose contributions to our understanding of pharaonic Egypt are considerable. I always wonder if Dr. Taylor cringes when the nineteenth century John Taylor is mentioned. I know I do.)
A friend and supporter of Taylor’s was Chalres Piazzi Smyth, who was much influenced by the former and published a book in 1874 called Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. Smyth wasn’t completely daft, I have to admit. An educated man, he was Astronomer Royal for Scotland. His enthusiasm for Taylor’s work and his own writing on the subject was arguably more due to his religious faith than to any scientific thought.
Charles Piazzi Smyth, 1819 – 1900
Consider, for example that Smyth belonged to the British Israelites and believed the British were the Lost Tribes of Israel. His odd leanings toward the Great Pyramid were more or less certain to follow. Smyth believed that locked within the Great Pyramid were divine mathematical measurements reflecting the physical location of the pyramid itself and the world in general. When the measurements were drawn and correctly interpreted, Smyth argued, the divinely constructed Great Pyramid would convey God’s message. To help to affect this, Smyth even devised a means of measurement called the “pyramid inch” that he based on the Hebrew cubit so that each pyramid inch was equal to 1.001 of a British inch (ibid 28).
Talk about critical thinking, or a lack thereof. I have to hope, due to the man’s sound scientific training in astronomy, that Smyth himself understood his pyramid inch was not something known in ancient Egypt. In other words, the pyramid inch is irrelevant.
Enter William Matthew Flinders Petrie, a self-educated Brit and one of the founders of the modern field of Egyptology. What follows is what I consider to be a delicious irony. As a young man Petrie read Smyth’s Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid and was thrilled by it. His imagination was charged. Petrie originally went to Egypt to measure the Great Pyramid for himself, to see how precise Smyth’s scheme might be reflected in real surveying. Petrie and Smyth were actually friends, so Petrie was hoping to corroborate his friend’s beliefs.
William Matthew Flinders Petrie, 1853-1942
Petrie’s father, William Petrie, was a talented land surveyor and passed on his skills to his son. Petrie himself went on to improve on his father’s techniques and built his own surveying equipment. In fact, Petrie was the first man to perform an accurate land survey of Stonehenge.
Petrie spent considerable time surveying the Great Pyramid. He lived on-site. Petrie’s surveys were so precise and thorough that they are still used today (see Craig B. Smith, 2004). And upon his conclusions, Petrie couldn’t help but report that Piazzi Smyth’s entire theme of divine mathematics was a load of bull-flop (my words, not Petrie’s). The science doesn’t lie. Needless to say, Petrie and Smyth were no longer friends after Petrie’s work was published.
Nevertheless, many other people were inspired by the writing of folks like Taylor and Smyth, and went to Egypt for themselves to explore and poke and prod the Great Pyramid. And measure it, of course. So rose the derogatory term “Pyramid-measurer,” employed by Petrie and others of sound academic mind to refer to Taylor’s and Smyth’s misguided acolytes.
And just like today, the pyramidiots of Petrie’s time were not above dishonesty to prove their schemes. One day a friend of Petrie’s, Dr. James Grant, came upon a Pyramid-measurer at the Great Pyramid who was busy filing down a granite boss. When Grant inquired to the fellow as to why he was doing this, the Pyramid-measurer relied that he wanted to refine the spot so it would work for his “Inspiration theories” (ibid 40).
It would appear, then, that a lack of critical thinking was quite a problem in Petrie’s day, too.
—————————————————--
Let’s turn to the tactics of the fringe. What do fringe writers do to present their themes? How do they deal with real-world evidence as established by research and the scientific method? (You might notice that when I write about the fringe, I often use the word “theme” in place of “theory,” and it’s because I’m not comfortable giving fringe conclusions the legitimate word “theory,” which implies at least some measure of real-world research.)
Chronic Astonishment
A common tactic is summarily to dismiss ancient achievements as those of regular humankind. The Great Pyramid couldn’t have been built by men living in the Early Bronze Age. The wonderful stonework of Puma Punku in Bolivia couldn’t have been achieved by primitive indigenous populations. The beautiful stoneware vessels of the ancient Near East, going back into Neolithic times, just couldn’t have been made by such primitives.
You’ll see the sentiment echoed by the likes of Chris Dunn, who sees only modern-type tool marks in ancient engineering and believes the Great Pyramid was actually a gigantic machine. Dunn is popular with a lot of fringe adherents today, but the chief failing in such people is their lack of familiarity with ancient engineering and the capabilities as well as limitations of craftsmen and builders in the Bronze Age. Their conclusions are simply divorced from reality.
It’s also a tactic employed in almost every episode of the History Channel’s program Ancient Aliens. Time and again you’ll see Erich von Däniken and Giorgio Tsoukalos express chronic astonishment at the feats of ancient engineering, and the common theme is, again, that ancient man simply couldn’t have made or built these things. Of course, in the case of Ancient Aliens, the conclusion is always and forever that aliens are responsible for these ancient wonders.
Erich von Däniken (left) and GiorgioTsoukalos, the faces of the History Channel’s regrettable program Ancient Aliens
Never mind that von Däniken has a criminal record in Europe for fraud, and has been caught falsifying “evidence” for his alien stories. The man has still sold a hell of a lot of books. The gullible among us seem to lap them up.
It also strikes me as decidedly odd that all of this should be ascribed to aliens. We are to imagine an alien race so advanced that they can travel the cosmos in interstellar spacecraft, and possess levels of technology we humans can’t even fathom. We are still supposed to believe that these aliens came all the way to our lovely little blue planet to teach ancient humans to build in…stone.
Maybe these aliens accidentally left all of their tools back on their home planet.
So instead of taking the time to research ancient engineering and the tools and techniques ancient man used to achieve his wonders—and trust me, the body of literature on this research is ample—we should instead exercise chronic astonishment and just chalk it up to aliens. Or lost technologies. Or lost civilizations. Atlanteans, maybe? This is the point where I might use the emoticon with rolling eyes.
Misrepresenting Evidence
Here is a tactic fringe writers are more or less obligated to use. And they have done so with great abandon. I personally consider dishonesty in presenting historical accounts to be loathsome, so this one bothers me in particular.
For example, for a NOVA special called The Case of the Ancient Astronauts Erich von Däniken presented photos of ancient Peruvian stones showing men employing modern technologies that could only have been taught to them by aliens. However, NOVA investigated this independently and learned that the stones were modern, and even found the potter in Peru who made them. Von Däniken had not admitted that he’d met this potter himself.
Other fringe writers have turned to more subtle tactics. One of the most prolific fringe writers was Zecharia Sitchin, an author who published many books on ancient alien visitation. It is from Sitchin that the popular myth of Planet X, otherwise known as Nibiru, has proliferated on the internet—on countless half-baked websites.
Zecharia Sitchin, 1920-2010
One could write an entire book, if not several, in pointing out the errors, omissions, and misrepresentations in Sitchin’s many books. A legitimate scholar of the ancient Near East named Michael Heiser has his own website with that in mind (source). The mythical planet Nibiru is a good example.
Sitchin wrote in The 12th Planet that Nibiru is a planet beyond Pluto that once collided with a planet between Mars and Jupiter called Tiamat. The resulting destruction of Tiamat led to the creation of Earth, as well as other celestial bodies in our solar system. Sitchin believed Nibiru, which is still in orbit, is the home world of an advanced race of aliens known as the Anunnaki.
This is of course an obvious and clumsy bastardization of ancient Mesopotamian myths and names, and goodness only knows how in the hell Sitchin even came up with it. Whether Sitchin himself actually believed in this stuff can be argued, but it sold his books.
As “proof” for the planet Nibiru Sitchin turned to a Mesopotamian cylinder seal known as VA243, which resides in the Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin.
Cylinder seal VA243
Note the area in the image circled in red. Sitchin argued it was a depiction of the sun circled by planets, and indicated an additional planet unknown to modern astronomy. Sitchin wrote that the ancient Sumerians received advanced knowledge of science and astronomy from the visiting aliens known as the Anunnaki.
This is not correct. The cylinder seal imparts no such information. The writing on it in cuneiform merely mentions a couple of names of minor officials. The circled portion in the “sky” of the seal does not show sun and planets, but stars. In Sumerian iconography, such depictions represented either stars or deities, not planets. It’s possible the small dots and larger star represen the Pleaides, which is represented as such on other cylinder seals from this region (see Heiser’s article, in PDF).
In his book The Stairway to Heaven Sitchin spent a considerable amount of time misrepresenting the colossal masonry pyramids of Egypt’s Dynasty 3 and Dynasty 4. For example, he notes that these pyramids do not have hieroglyphs inscribed outside or inside them, which leads him to believe that these pyramids were either built long before hieroglyphs existed and thus long before conventional research dates them, or were not built by the Egyptians at all (1980: 339). The implication is, once again, aliens built the pyramids.
This flies in the face of science and legitimate historical research. We know the Great Pyramid, for example, was built no more than about a century earlier than the conventional date of 2500 BCE (see Bonani et al 2001). And we know that no pyramid bore hieroglyphic inscriptions prior to the end of Dynasty 5, about 150 years after the erection of the Great Pyramid. There is ample research in the professional literature to explain the reasons behind this, but Sitchin’s twisting of facts is not an explanation on which one should rely.
Historical Research is Just Plain Wrong/Misleading/Insufficient
This represents a tactic of desperation on the part of fringe authors. Very few fringe writers ever attempt to deal with professional research head on, for the simple reason that they know professional historical research disproves their claims in a swift stroke. Rather, it is easier just to ignore and dismiss professional research without cause.
I’ve encountered numerous fringe adherents who claim modern historical research can’t be trusted simply because it’s not really modern at all. They claim modern historians use the same tools, the same approaches, and the same attitudes as historians did in the nineteenth century.
All such a comment reveals is that the person making it does not have any working understanding of modern historical research. Egyptology is a good example. I know an Egyptoloist at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, who likes to joke that everything she learned back in her days as a graduate student is now wrong. The field of research of pharaonic Egypt has made leaps and bounds in all facets of study in just the last several decades. At the present time Egyptology makes use of a wide range of modern specialists including surveyors, architects, cartographers, photographers, conservators, forensic anthropologists, X-ray technicians, archaeobotonists, archaeozoologists, palynologists, geologists, mineralogists, hydrologists, artists, art historians, ceramic specialists, soil experts, stratigraphy experts, hot-air balloon pilots, aerial photographers, satellite imaging technicians, electrical, mining, and structural engineers, chemists, computer programmers, draftsmen, graphic designers, cultural resource managers, statisticians, philologists, epigraphers, geophysicists, and stone technology experts (Weeks 2008: 15). As scientific fields expand and refine their methods and tools, Egyptologists turn to them for expert analysis. Paleopathologists have become an important part of studying ancient human remains, and genetics have now entered the sphere of research, too.
Fringe writers will often resort to acerbic tactics to bolster their own claims while simultaneously whittling away at the world of orthodox study. These writers will paint unflattering pictures of professional historians and present them as close-minded, stale, dusty old professors. While this might aptly describe some historians, it is hardly a fair or accurate assessment. And it really doesn’t work for fringe writers. Whether they realize it or not, the more time fringe adherents spend on ridiculing professional historians, the more they themselves damage their own credibility. Personally I find this tactic to be childish.
The Grand Conspiracy
This is perhaps the most absurd and comical tactic employed by fringe writers. It definitely lacks observable critical thinking on the face of it. In this ploy fringe writers try to present the world of orthodox research as one great, shady, nefarious cabal bent on hiding “the truth” from all of us and maintaining the status quo. So there must be evidence out there for ancient alien intervention—or Atlantis or Nibiru or lost advanced technologies, what have you—but orthodox academia is working in concert to keep the information contained.
Alien overlords!
So in this tactic it is known, for example, that the Great Pyramid was built by aliens or the building of it was overseen by aliens, et cetera. Egyptologists know this, but if they admit it they’ll have to rewrite all of their books and papers and all of our knowledge will have to be refashioned. Heaven forbid!
This implies, then, that over the course of the past two centuries, all Egyptologists working for all institutions and universities from all over the world, have been in league with governments to keep the secret.
A moment’s thought reveals the grand absurdity of this notion. Governments have never been terribly good at keeping secrets—academia, less so. This might make for an entertaining sci-fi movie, and I like movies as much as the next guy, but I do not see how any thinking, reasoning, educated adult could believe this for even a moment.
Conclusions
So why is the appeal for the fringe so strong? Why does it continue to grow? Is it a reflection of human nature where we favor the underdog over the big and sinister opponent, in this case academia (Flemming 2006: 56)? Are people uncomfortable with science and professional research because it seems so daunting and inaccessible? I personally believe this has much to do with it, but I think the intimidation many might feel is quite exaggerated.
More so than ever, the information is out there and accessible to anyone who wants to learn it. Advanced college degrees are not necessarily needed, especially if one is just an enthusiast and wants to learn. People have all manner of literature and media to educate themselves. Archaeological expeditions like Çatalhöyük, Göbekli Tepe, and the Giza Plateau Mapping Project have their own websites to keep professionals and laypeople alike informed on the work conducted there. More and more archaeologists post blogs to deliver their own work to an immediate audience. Going forward, the internet will become an even more common medium for all manner of scientific and historical information.
The trick is to discern fact from fiction. For every credible and worthwhile website put up by an institute or university, I’d wager there are at least ten others of little to no scientific or historical merit. Let’s face it: any nut case with a computer and an internet connection can slap together a website to showcase his ideas, regardless of how bizarre and divorced from reality they are. One needs to recognize which is which in some cases. Sometimes websites smack of legitimate merit and reel you in, even if uniformed or misinformed material is there (something at which numerous religious zealots excel, in their bias on religious history).
I worry about sincere and curious young people who want to learn about ancient history and inadvertently stumble first into the tar-pit literature of Erich von Däniken or Zecharia Sitchin. Make no mistake: these guys are good writers. It’s just that the material they impart is more fitting to Hollywood than to academia.
I am always heartened, then, when I visit a book store and see this kind of stuff not in the history section but somewhere else, like occult or New Age. I feel all book stores should follow this procedure.
In the end it boils down to an individual’s ability to know what is worthwhile and what is bull-flop. And this boils down to critical thinking, an ability many adults nowadays seem to lack. And so I worry.
——————————————————–
Bonani, Georges et al. “Radiocarbon Dates of Old and Middle Kingdom Monuments in Egypt.” 2001.
Drower, Margaret S. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. 1995.
Flemming, N.C. “The attraction of non-rational archaeological hypotheses.” Archaeological Fantasies. Garrett G. Fagan, ed. 2006.
Heiser, Michael S. Sitchin Is Wrong.
Sitchin, Zecharia. The Stairway to Heaven. 1980.
Smith, Craig B. How the Great Pyramid Was Built. 2004.
Weeks, Kent. “Archaeology and Egyptology.” Egyptology Today. Richard H. Wilkinson, ed. 2008.
In Ken Wilber's integral theory, vision-logic is a post-formal but personal level of cognitive development. A characteristic of vision-logic is the ability to conceptualize and compare different perspectives or point of view. In Wilber's theory, vision-logic corresponds to awareness at the centauric level of consciousness. In the book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality Wilber describes vision-logic as a planetary awareness. He uses it to translate the term vernunft as used by the German idealists, which means something like "transcendental knowledge".
Vision-logic Bald Ambition, Chapter 3 Jeff Meyerhoff
Egoic-rational consciousness arises with the arrival of modernity and allows humans to consider other peoples' perspectives. Prior to this, the pre-modern, mythical consciousness required a belief in its absolute truth and the denial of alternative perspectives. This advance in consciousness is essential for the moral advance of tolerance because if we can consider the perspectives of others we can understand them better. Rationality has its limits though; the perceiver can acknowledge differing perspectives, but cannot integrate them without reducing them to his or her own “truth.” The rational person understands what the other believes, but simultaneously excludes it as wrong. The choice is between being a dogmatic defender of our chosen view or a wishy-washy relativist who says any view is as good as any other.
Wilber claims that a solution to this problem is occurring through a shift in consciousness. We are moving from the dominance of egoic-rationality to a new consciousness and mode of being called vision-logic or the integral-aperspectival. This new consciousness allows us to step back and mindfully view the contents of consciousness. By gaining this ability to view rationality as a whole we can now transcend it. This transcendence is no mere detachment, but a greater embrace in which the previously disassociated spheres of matter, life, mind and spirit can be integrated. Humans can become qualitatively different beings. Instead of experiencing ourselves as an awkward mixture of a mechanical living machine and a seemingly immaterial consciousness, we can experience ourselves as an integrated whole of sensations, emotions, thoughts and spirit, all held within a larger witnessing awareness. Wilber sometimes refers to this new mode of being as centauric, after the mythic beast that combined the human and the animal.
Wilber's conception of vision-logic has remained relatively consistent since his early account of it in 1981, although its fullest elaboration occurred more recently in SES and Integral Psychology. As a mode of cognition, vision-logic is not rooted in one perspective. It can range over multiple perspectives and differing domains of knowledge, seeing the interconnections, relationships and analogies between systems of knowledge, and integrate these seemingly disparate systems. Differing kinds of knowledge – scientific, religious, poetic, experiential, rational – and their multifarious perspectives on reality, are not pejoratively or invidiously compared – “Science is true, religion is bunk.”, “the liberals are right, the conservatives wrong” – but considered and understood, with their truths culled and integrated into greater understandings and larger systems of knowledge.
Rational thinkers cannot affirm the truth of their perspectives without reducing opposing perspectives to their own, yet cannot find the justification for such a reduction using reason alone. They are stuck with the prospect of a fragmented culture in which there is no final arbiter of truth. Vision-logic or the integral-aperspectival can solve this dilemma. Wilber's solution is similar to Karl Marx's. In a breathtaking move, Marx said that communism is the riddle of history solved and knows itself to be that answer. Similarly, with the emergence of vision-logic, consciousness grasps its own structure for the first time and so is transparent to itself. Wilber states that “so much of the verbal-mental-egoic dimension…. becomes increasingly objective, increasingly transparent, to centauric consciousness”[1] and notes that “this 'transparency,' according to Gebser, is a primary characteristic of the integral-aperspectival mind.”[2] Vision-logic he says has “the capacity to go within and look at rationality [and] results in a going beyond rationality.”[3] What consciousness now sees is its holonic nature; that there are “contexts within contexts within contexts forever.”[4] In seeing this infinity of contexts, the integral-aperspectival mind is not tempted to reduce one perspective to another as rationality does. The poststructural insight that no perspective is final is accepted and integrated, but the nihilistic conclusion that all perspectives are of equal value is rejected. The integral-aperspectival mind solves the riddle of relativism by preserving the truths of differing perspectives and integrating them into the great holarchy. Each perspective now has its proper place within the whole.
There are three ways that Wilber argues for the superiority of vision-logic: one, that the vantage-point itself is superior – the means of knowledge acquisition are better; two, that the knowledge gained from the vantage-point is better – it produces better results; and three, that developmental psychology has verified its existence – the research confirms it.
Mindfully observing consciousness can produce profound results and it is a method neglected by most mind researchers.[ Yet the power of this type of mental observation does not necessarily mean that it is a superior means of observation, only different. Different approaches to understanding mind and reason range from the detached rationality of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind to the subjective immediacy of phenomenology. All deal with the upper left quadrant of Wilber's map and understand the mind in differing ways. These other investigative methods use rationality and self-reflection to understand the mind in ways different than the supposed disinterested witnessing consciousness of vision-logic.
Mindful viewing of one's subjective consciousness does give an experience of self-certainty regarding what is seen, but the criterion of experienced self-certainty is different from the criteria that the rational inquirer uses. Since different methods and criteria of validity are used, one cannot say that one is superior to the other. That would require a meta-criterion to adjudicate the differences between the two approaches. The mystic would say to the rational inquirer that they have not done the mindful viewing necessary to examine consciousness. The rational inquirer would say to the mystic that their statements regarding the nature of consciousness or rationality are open to this or that criticism. For example, the rational inquirer could contend that vision-logic doesn't really stand outside of a thing called rationality; what it actually does is offer a view from a unique, subjective, witnessing position of the flow of reasoning and thought inside of one's own mind. Witnessing one's personal reasoning and flow of thought is not the same as empirically studying reason itself. Should we adjudicate the difference using the experienced self-certainty of mystical inquiry or do we use the results of a critical rational questioning? The criteria we think superior is an existential choice, neither ultimately rationally defensible nor ultimately demonstrable to all.
A central insight of the 20th century's “linguistic turn” in the social sciences and the humanities is an appreciation of the fundamental role that language plays in the existence of consciousness. The aforementioned fields of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind have focused on language as a presupposition of rationality and consciousness. Wilber notes that Jean Gebser, the pioneering theoretician of a potential integral consciousness, emphasizes the importance of language for our historical age. Wilber quotes Gebser stating that “Language itself is treated as a primordial phenomenon by recognizing its originating-creative nature.”[6] But language and the linguistic turn are tricky things. Once you acknowledge the “originating-creative” nature of language for consciousness, it is hard (I would contend impossible) to escape it. Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer say language creates our unique form of human being, but they do not argue that there is any form of transparency available to man of the sort that Wilber implies. Jacques Derrida and others would argue that language can never be a transparent transmitter of reality because its multiple and ever-changing words and meanings do not allow one to escape its confines. An intention to produce the most precise and permanent description of anything will always be undermined by the changing multiplicity of meanings that are inherent in language. There is no one-to-one correspondence between word and world.
Whether our capacity to view the internal contents of our minds allows us a transparent or unmediated viewing of those contents is quite a vexed question in the philosophy of mind. The apparent direct witnessing of the contents of our minds has been disputed by many in the philosophical tradition including Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, Wilfred Sellars and the late Donald Davidson.[7] In a recent paper the philosopher Ernest Sosa reviews the “various accounts of how beliefs can be foundationally justified through sticking to the character of the subject's own conscious experience at the time” and concludes that “[n]one of these has been successful.”[8] Simon Blackburn in his Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines Wilfred Sellars' 'Myth of the Given' as the
Name adopted by Sellars for the now widely-rejected view that sense experience gives us peculiar points of certainty, suitable to serve as foundations for the whole of empirical knowledge and science.[9] A convincing transcendent experience must still be put into words to have the kind of interpersonal verification that Wilber seeks. The criteria of verification within a mystical community, such as a Buddhist monastery, may be clear-cut as Wilber contends, but if one is inclined toward rational verification, the verbalized propositions are open to questioning and counter-argument and drawn into inevitable debate.[10] The verbalized propositions will assume their role as the vehicles of one perspective among many.
Vision-logic does not transcend and include other perspectives and put them in their proper place. To place them, it must extract the partial truths of differing perspectives using the orienting generalizations of knowledge. As I show throughout the book, the method of determining orienting generalizations is not possible and not done by Wilber. Since Wilber does not use orienting generalizations he does not have truths according to that criterion. What he is claiming is not automatically sanctioned by the relevant research in the natural and social sciences. Therefore, he must be using a perspective to determine what is true and false. Yet he says that he is using integral-aperspectivism which transcends perspectives. Wilber's solution to perspectivalism doesn't work because integral-aperspectivalism is a perspective.
Wilber contends that vision-logic incorporates the poststructural insight of contexts within contexts, yet he leaves out the crucial poststructural contextualization: the contextualization of oneself, the observer. Wilber reacts with such vehemence when confronting the relativists, and takes such repeated delight in exposing their alleged self-contradiction – they supposedly make the absolute statement that “all is relative” – because their alleged contradiction is his actual contradiction. His contradiction is that, on the one hand, he wants to claim that he is practicing a non-reductionistic, aperspectival synthesis of the partial truths of knowledge while, on the other hand, he is actually using an unacknowledged perspective and criterion of truth in order to decide what will count as truth. He uses the fiction of the orienting generalization, and its purported sanction of what he considers the facts, to promote as universal his highly partisan and selective vision of what is true for all.
This desire to both honor contextualization and transcend it causes Wilber to make confused assertions. He commends poststructuralism for saying that no perspective is final, but condemns it for saying that this means that no perspective is better than any other.[11] (As usual, no actual poststructuralists are quoted saying these things.) He then deploys the usual self-contradiction argument and says that because they make the absolute assertion that no perspective is better than any other they are committing a self-contradiction. What Wilber does not notice is that even asserting that no perspective is final, as he and the poststructuralists do, involves one in a self-contradiction. For from what perspective can one assert that no perspective is final, and have it be absolutely true, than from a perspective that claims itself to be final. What could final mean here but the ultimate perspective?
Ironically, Wilber, who has personally had such a profound non-dual insight, is so locked into the paramount epistemological duality of absolutism vs. relativism that he cannot see beyond it. It causes him to say things like, “That all perspectives interrelate, or that no perspective is final (aperspectivism), does not mean that there are no relative merits among them.”[12] Yet how does he determine relative merits except through his perspective, which he unwittingly disguises by thinking of it as a transcendent aperspective?
Finally, that Wilber's aperspective is a perspective is apparent from what follows his description of vision-logic: a defense of his view against the inevitable (but comfortably simplified) objections, i.e. other perspectives.
The superiority of vision-logic as a mode of knowing is dependent upon the arguments made for the validity of the integral synthesis as a whole. Wilber argues that vision-logic is superior because: it transcends and includes rationality; it is developmentally later and so is more advanced; and it explains more since it integrates all that has come before. In each instance, vision-logic's superiority is dependent upon the validity of the integral theory. When Wilber states that vision-logic sees that “consciousness is actually holonic” so that “its own operation [is] increasingly transparent to itself,”[13] he assumes that the holonic way of looking at consciousness is correct. Yet that is the burden of Wilber's work, which I show is highly problematic.
This attempt to validate the superiority of vision-logic through the results of the integral theory leads to a circular logic. Wilber's ability to create his integral synthesis is supposedly a result of his use of vision-logic. Vision-logic is that state of mind that allows the weaving together of the partial truths of the other sciences in order to create a synthesis of knowledge that the rational consciousness cannot accomplish. Yet the validity of vision-logic, as we have seen, is justified by the correctness of the entire integral synthesis, which, through its evolutionary-developmental perspective, makes sense of the welter of scientific knowledge currently available and gives vision-logic a favored place. Wilber writes,
The aperspectival mind, in other words, is holonic through and through….every structure of consciousness is actually holonic (there are only holons), but vision-logic consciously grasps this fact for the first time, and thus finds its own operation increasingly transparent to itself (this 'transparency,' according to Gebser, is a primary characteristic of the integral-aperspectival mind.)[14] In other words, the key to Wilber's integral synthesis is the insight into the holonic nature of the Kosmos. This holonic nature is seen for the first time by vision-logic, which transparently sees its own operation because it sees the holonic nature of things, placing vision-logic beyond rational consciousness. So the fact that vision-logic sees holons within holons demonstrates its transparency to the nature of mind, because we know, through using vision-logic, that the nature of the Kosmos is holonic. It's like saying, “I know I'm right because I have the best faculty for judging rightness. How do I know it's the best faculty for judging rightness? Because it judges things rightly. How do I know it judges things rightly? Because it is the best faculty for judging rightness,” ad infinitum.
If vision-logic's transparency to consciousness is evidenced by its ability to see the holonic nature of consciousness then its validity is dependent upon Wilber's description of consciousness. Certainly, all describers of consciousness would claim that their view is the right one, so Wilber appears to be no different. However, he is different because he claims that his description of consciousness is the knowledge of everyone else's combined. Whereas most researchers assert the truth of their view within the context of the debate in which they are engaged, Wilber tries to assume a position above the debate through the device of the orienting generalization. This device makes it appear as if he is neutrally reporting the findings of all the members of the debate and causes him to make grandiose claims, such as consciousness finally becomes transparent to itself through vision-logic.
Wilber's unreliable reporting of the results of scholarly research is one central feature of my critique and this same problem arises, although less severely than usual, when he justifies vision-logic by citing scholarly research.[15] In developmental psychology, Wilber's vision-logic is called postformal thought. Scholars in the field use the term “postformal” to refer to a hypothesized stage of cognitive development beyond Piaget's formal stage of cognition.
Wilber refers to a number of researchers exploring vision-logic. A measured and knowledgeable survey of postformal thinking, written by Helena Marchand,[16] confirms Wilber's characterization of postformal thinkers as having a general consensus regarding, what Wilber terms, “the developmental space they portray.”[17] She writes that
it is possible to identify in the diverse descriptions of postformal thought (cf. Kramer, 1983, 1989) some features which would be specific to this level: (1) the recognition and understanding of the relativistic, non-absolutist, nature of knowledge; (2) the acceptance of contradiction to the extent that it is part of reality; and (3) the integration of contradiction into comprehensive systems, i.e., into a dialectical whole ( Kramer, 1989). This statement confirms Wilber's claim that there is a broad consensus within postformal studies regarding what postformal theorists agree upon, but it says nothing about the status of the postformal concept outside of postformal studies in the larger discipline of developmental studies .
Michael Commons and Francis Richards are the postformal thinkers Wilber refers to most frequently. Commons and Richards divide the postformal stage into four increasingly advanced levels termed the systemic, the metasystemic, the paradigmatic and the crossparadigmatic. In essence, each level uses the products of the previous level as its object of thought. For example, the person at the paradigmatic level will work with metasystems to create a new paradigm. Wilber believes he's at the highest or crossparadigmatic level: “I am presenting a cross-paradigmatic model.”[18] However, while Marchand thinks Commons and Richards work is the most worthwhile among postformal thinkers, she notes that it has not been confirmed by later empirical studies, a major drawback. She writes that:
The results obtained by Commons, Richards & Kuhn (1982) confirm such reconstructions in that which relates to the systematic, metasystematic, and paradigmatic stages (They did not find such results at the transparadigmatic level). However, these results were not confirmed in studies carried out by various researchers who studied the relationships among formal thought and systematic and metasystematic thought (Demetriou, 1990; Kallio, 1995; Kallio & Helkema, 1991; Kohlberg, 1990). For these authors, systematic thought would be identical to that designated by Piaget as "consolidated formal operations" (i.e., Formal B) and, thus, could not be considered postformal. And in her conclusion, the whole area of postformal thinking does not fare well. Marchand concludes that
Given the heterogeneity of theories about thought beyond the formal level, and given the inconclusiveness of the research carried out so far, it is not possible, for now, to determine the true nature of the type of thought referred to as postformal. This being the case, and it being necessary to defend the requirement that any scientific and epistemological theory must be based on underlying presuppositions such as conceptual clarification, parsimony, and simplicity, it seems preferable to abandon the term "postformal" (except, possibly, in the case of the conceptualization put forth by Commons and coworkers) and to speak simply of adult cognition, or adult thought. Of course, Marchand's view is not the last word, but, at the very least, her conclusion, so contrary to Wilber's confident assertions, indicates that there are grounds for a healthy scholarly debate. Since the postformal scholarly literature is supposed to validate vision-logic, this disagreement brings its nature and existence into question.
Other problems arise for vision-logic as a social-historical phenomenon, as opposed to an individual, cognitive phenomenon. As with all holons, vision-logic has its aspect in the lower left or intersubjective quadrant. Vision-logic is purported to be a qualitative shift in social consciousness on the scale of the magical, mythical and rational socio-historical shifts. Yet what distinguishes these categories as massive historical shifts is that they each provide new criteria of validity for knowledge. Wilber makes an invidious comparison between the methods of knowledge acquisition in medieval times versus that of modernity. Foucault gives a vivid portrayal of these differing regimes of knowledge.[19] The pre-Enlightenment Renaissance period used appeals to authority and metaphorical association to gain and validate knowledge claims. This method contrasts with modernity's use of empirical evidence, experimentation and the standards of rationality. If the shift to vision-logic is of the same order of magnitude as the shift from the medieval to the modern, then vision-logic must have its own new criteria of valid knowledge. Wilber does describe the three strands of any valid knowledge claim, but that is not a new criterion of knowledge. (As I show in chapter 8 it is a pragmatic criterion of knowledge.) So no new criterion of knowledge is offered that would distinguish vision-logic from the standard rules of rational argumentation and establish it as a new stage of social-historical development.
An intellectual maneuver, used, I would argue, to forestall criticism of his integral synthesis, hints at or presupposes a significant epistemological difference between egoic-rationality and the higher levels of vision-logic. Recently, Wilber has claimed that you need to have attained a certain level of consciousness to really understand his theory. He writes that “nothing that can be said in this book will convince you that a [theory of everything] is possible, unless you already have a touch of turquoise [higher consciousness] coloring your cognitive palette.”[20] So I, at the first or second level of vision-logic (the green level according to Spiral Dynamics (SD)), simply can't fully understand Wilber's theory which is at the fourth level of vision-logic (turquoise in SD) because my cognitive development is not advanced enough. I still see a relativistic world of multiple perspectives and can't transcend that consciousness and see the interconnections and patterns between perspectives, the holarchical nature of things. It's similar to a scientific rationalist at the egoic-rational stage (orange in SD) having a debate with a religious fundamentalist at the mythic level (blue in SD).[21] The person at the lower level just can't understand the higher-level person's thinking. As Wilber says about these “cross-level debates:”
This is why developmental studies in general indicate that many philosophical debates are not really a matter of the better objective argument, but of the subjective level of those debating. No amount of orange scientific evidence will convince blue mythic believers; no amount of green bonding will impress orange aggressiveness; no amount of turquoise holarchy will dislodge green hostility – unless the individual is ready to develop forward through the dynamic spiral of consciousness unfolding. This is why "cross-level" debates are rarely resolved, and all parties usually feel unheard and unappreciated.[22] This argument is problematic in a number of ways and has the potential, already partially realized in the Wilberian integral community, of stifling the free flow of ideas and causing exclusionary behavior. As stated above, Wilber's description of the problem is odd. He says he's talking about “philosophical debates,” yet refers to “orange aggressiveness,” “green bonding” and “green hostility” as if the discussants aren't asserting their views using rational arguments and rhetoric, but instead bullying or hugging each other. Presumably, I would be labeled a green hostile. But I'm not trying to dislodge Wilber's turquoise holarchy with hostility; I'm making arguments, asking questions and producing evidence. How else would people have a rational discussion about their views? He also says that these debates “are not really a matter of the better objective argument” as if that can be determined objectively, independently of the debate itself. While it's true that debates often end in stalemate, there is a simpler explanation that I suggest below.
Any objectivity claimed for Wilber's arguments is fundamentally dependent upon the validity of the developmental levels that Wilber has adopted. If vision-logic or the postformal is not a separate stage of development, then there is no discrete, hierarchic difference in consciousness between people assigned to different levels. As I show above, there is much room for debate about the reality of a postformal stage. Even more, the citations in Chapter 2, on individual consciousness, show that there are well-established developmental psychologists who question, criticize and have abandoned Piaget's and Kohlberg's developmental models. More broadly, outside of developmental psychology, there are non-developmental psychologists who simply don't use a developmental model at all. As Wilber himself says, in a curious statement for someone who says he's relying upon the scholarly consensus for the validity of his integration,
[a version of the postmodern green meme, with its pluralism and relativism] has also made developmental studies, which depend on second-tier [higher stage] thinking, virtually anathema at both conventional and alternative universities.[23] This statement is so mistaken that I wonder if Wilber had a mental lapse when writing it since Wilber also contends, in that very same piece, that the developmental models he uses have the sanction of mainstream academia. In addition, even a superficial survey shows that developmental studies are well ensconced in academe. But it does indicate, from Wilber himself, the embattled – as opposed to the consensual – situation of developmentalism. An embattled situation means that arguments and evidence against developmentalism have a strong foothold in academia, as shown in chapter 2. This directly contradicts Wilber's frequent statements that the developmental models he's using are validated by the consensus in the field. So the validity of vision-logic – and developmentalism itself – is an open question.
Assuming vision-logic were a separate level of development, does it hold, as Wilber suggests, that those who have not achieved it can't understand the thinking of those who have or can only understand it in a limited fashion? Andrew P. Smith is, with Mark Edwards, one of the best students of Wilber's work. He has constructed his own novel one-scale model of holarchy. To create such a model, according to Commons and Richards, requires taking intellectual paradigms as one's object of thought; this means that Smith is working at the highest, cross-paradigmatic level of vision-logic. So he has the requisite level of consciousness, according to Wilber, to understand his integral theory. Yet Smith has been so ignored by Wilber and his followers that he's resorted to subtitling one of his essays: “Further Monologues with Ken Wilber.” In addition, Smith's evaluation of Wilber's integral theory is done in the standard way: he describes the theory, asks whether it agrees with the facts, whether it's consistent and whether it provides a solid explanation for what it purports to describe. Even I, a lowly, entry-level vision-logician, have read Smith's work, understand it, and have used it in my book and received a strong, positive review from Smith.[24] So Smith, a cross-paradigmatic thinker, has critically evaluate Wilber's work, using the standard modes of intellectual evaluation, so successfully that neither Wilber nor any one of his supporters has even tried to contradict him. Were Smith to be engaged, it would be an intra-level debate acceptable to Wilber and is virtually required by Wilber's hero Jürgen Habermas in his conception of the ideal speech situation.
Smith, Wilber and everyone else's use of the well-known tools of rational substantiation and evaluation raises the question of what special criteria of validity Wilber, or any cross-paradigmatic thinker, uses? Commons and Richards illustrate the highest level of postformal thinking – called crossparadigmatic or transparadigmatic thinking, the stage Marchand says Commons and Richards themselves could not empirically validate – with the great discoveries of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Planck, Einstein and Gödel. All of their revolutionary discoveries were validated by the standard criteria of scientific rationality: logic, consistency, evidence, experimentation, elegance. Where is the new criterion of knowledge that accompanies any shift in cognition of the scale that Wilber claims for vision-logic?
If it is not a difference in levels of consciousness, what causes the common occurrence of unresolved and unsatisfying intellectual debates? I propose that irreconcilable debates are caused by people adhering to differing criteria of validity. When I've had discussions with fundamentalist Christians and we disagree, I don't think I have a higher level of consciousness and that's why they don't agree with me; I think that because of their personality and life experiences they have decided that the ultimate criteria of validity is a literal reading of the Bible. I still think I'm right and they're wrong, but I also know there is no way to ultimately adjudicate the difference. They think that if I could take a leap of faith and surrender to the infinite love of Jesus Christ I would understand His Truth; while I think that if they would just look at the facts and the evidence and be reasonable they would understand what's true. Moreover, there are fundamentalists who understand science well enough to state the basics correctly – they just don't believe in it. We just believe different things and we each think we're right and the other wrong. As the quote from Stanley Cavell on my title page says, “There is such a thing as an intellectual tragedy.”
Wilber's argument here is so weak that another explanation has to be found for why he's asserting it. It's obvious to me that this is a transparent, and somewhat sad, attempt to avoid criticism by devising a rationale that invalidates the criticizer. If, as he often laments, people don't understand his theory, the explanation lies in their not being cognitively developed enough to understand it. In addition, all the explaining in the world will not help because they are constitutionally unable to understand; therefore no attempt even needs to be made. And, any criticism the critic makes can be ignored because of the lower level of consciousness of the person making it. Wilber is committing the common fallacy of the ad hominem argument – the argument against the man.
In conclusion, the burden of Wilber's theory of everything is to use the perspective-laden scholarship of noted academics to construct a synthesis that transcends their interminable debates. While the witness consciousness of vision-logic may give the experience of transcending the rational mind, as soon as any insight gained from that perspective, or any defense of that perspective, is put into words it can be subject to rational debate. By entering the realm of rational debate the tools of reason become operative. Debate participants use arguments, facts, rhetoric, logic and, most fundamentally, language. The 20th century's 'linguistic turn' in the humanities and the social sciences has not, contrary to Wilber and Gebser, led to a 'transparency' of rationality and a superior vision-logic, but instead to the inescapability of language. As soon as we think or speak or, as some would now argue, become humanly conscious, we presuppose language. Vision-logic, and the integral synthesis that justifies its status as an advanced form of consciousness, is one perspective among many. It is doubtful as a new type of socio-historical consciousness because it does not have a new criterion of knowledge which is a fundamental characteristic of earlier types, such as the magical, mythic and the egoic-rational. Debates within and outside of developmental psychology cast doubt on the reality of vision-logic as a separate stage of development. Without the proper validation, the use of levels of development as a tool to exclude particular debate participants or to rationalize inferior argumentation can be seen as a transparent attempt to avoid rational discussion, the standard way of adjudicating differences between differing intellectual perspectives.
References [1] SES, p. 189.
[2] SES, p. 187.
[3] SES, p. 258
[4] SES, p. 187.
[5] For an exception see Varela, F., Rosch E., and Thompson, E., The Embodied Mind, (MIT Press, 1991).
[6] SES, pp. 189-190.
[7] William Lycan has published two books that describe the variety of positions regarding the nature of consciousness from the perspective of the philosophy of mind. Lycan, William G., Consciousness, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987) and Lycan, William G., editor, Mind and Cognition, (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999).
[8] Sosa, E, “Privileged Access” in Consciousness, edited by Quentin Smith and Aleksandar Jokic, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p.289. Sosa does go on to “sketch…a positive view that seems more promising.”
[9] Blackburn, Simon, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.253.
[10] See the work of Steven Katz, et al discussed in Chapter 4.
[11] SES, p. 188.
[12] SES, p. 188.
[13] SES, p. 187.
[14] SES, p. 187.
[15] Frank Visser alerted me to the material in this section and the importance of examining it.
[16] Marchand, Helena, “Some Reflections on Postformal Thought,” The Genetic Epistemologist, Vol. 29, Number 3, 2001. http://www.piaget.org/GE/2001/GE-29-3.html#item2
[17] Wilber, Ken, Integral Psychology, (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000), p. 90.
[18] Wilber, Ken, “Waves, Streams, States and Self,” fn. 4, at http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/psych_model/psych_model10.cfm/
[19] Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).
[20] Wilber, Ken, A Theory of Everything, (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000), p. 14.
[21] See chapter 5 for a description of these levels of consciousness.
[22] Wilber, Ken, “Introduction to Volume 7 of the Collected Works,” in the section entitled “The Jump to Second-Tier Consciousness,” at http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/cowokev7_intro.cfm/
[23] Wilber, Ken, “Introduction to Volume 7 of the Collected Works,” in the section entitled “The Jump to Second-Tier Consciousness,” at http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/cowokev7_intro.cfm/
[24]Smith, Andrew P., “Contextualizing Ken: A Review of Jeff Meyerhoff's Bald Ambiton" at http://www.integralworld.net/smith20.html, Sept. 2004.
© Jeff Meyerhoff, 2003, updated 2006
Vision-logic Bald Ambition, Chapter 3 Jeff Meyerhoff
Egoic-rational consciousness arises with the arrival of modernity and allows humans to consider other peoples' perspectives. Prior to this, the pre-modern, mythical consciousness required a belief in its absolute truth and the denial of alternative perspectives. This advance in consciousness is essential for the moral advance of tolerance because if we can consider the perspectives of others we can understand them better. Rationality has its limits though; the perceiver can acknowledge differing perspectives, but cannot integrate them without reducing them to his or her own “truth.” The rational person understands what the other believes, but simultaneously excludes it as wrong. The choice is between being a dogmatic defender of our chosen view or a wishy-washy relativist who says any view is as good as any other.
Wilber claims that a solution to this problem is occurring through a shift in consciousness. We are moving from the dominance of egoic-rationality to a new consciousness and mode of being called vision-logic or the integral-aperspectival. This new consciousness allows us to step back and mindfully view the contents of consciousness. By gaining this ability to view rationality as a whole we can now transcend it. This transcendence is no mere detachment, but a greater embrace in which the previously disassociated spheres of matter, life, mind and spirit can be integrated. Humans can become qualitatively different beings. Instead of experiencing ourselves as an awkward mixture of a mechanical living machine and a seemingly immaterial consciousness, we can experience ourselves as an integrated whole of sensations, emotions, thoughts and spirit, all held within a larger witnessing awareness. Wilber sometimes refers to this new mode of being as centauric, after the mythic beast that combined the human and the animal.
Wilber's conception of vision-logic has remained relatively consistent since his early account of it in 1981, although its fullest elaboration occurred more recently in SES and Integral Psychology. As a mode of cognition, vision-logic is not rooted in one perspective. It can range over multiple perspectives and differing domains of knowledge, seeing the interconnections, relationships and analogies between systems of knowledge, and integrate these seemingly disparate systems. Differing kinds of knowledge – scientific, religious, poetic, experiential, rational – and their multifarious perspectives on reality, are not pejoratively or invidiously compared – “Science is true, religion is bunk.”, “the liberals are right, the conservatives wrong” – but considered and understood, with their truths culled and integrated into greater understandings and larger systems of knowledge.
Rational thinkers cannot affirm the truth of their perspectives without reducing opposing perspectives to their own, yet cannot find the justification for such a reduction using reason alone. They are stuck with the prospect of a fragmented culture in which there is no final arbiter of truth. Vision-logic or the integral-aperspectival can solve this dilemma. Wilber's solution is similar to Karl Marx's. In a breathtaking move, Marx said that communism is the riddle of history solved and knows itself to be that answer. Similarly, with the emergence of vision-logic, consciousness grasps its own structure for the first time and so is transparent to itself. Wilber states that “so much of the verbal-mental-egoic dimension…. becomes increasingly objective, increasingly transparent, to centauric consciousness”[1] and notes that “this 'transparency,' according to Gebser, is a primary characteristic of the integral-aperspectival mind.”[2] Vision-logic he says has “the capacity to go within and look at rationality [and] results in a going beyond rationality.”[3] What consciousness now sees is its holonic nature; that there are “contexts within contexts within contexts forever.”[4] In seeing this infinity of contexts, the integral-aperspectival mind is not tempted to reduce one perspective to another as rationality does. The poststructural insight that no perspective is final is accepted and integrated, but the nihilistic conclusion that all perspectives are of equal value is rejected. The integral-aperspectival mind solves the riddle of relativism by preserving the truths of differing perspectives and integrating them into the great holarchy. Each perspective now has its proper place within the whole.
There are three ways that Wilber argues for the superiority of vision-logic: one, that the vantage-point itself is superior – the means of knowledge acquisition are better; two, that the knowledge gained from the vantage-point is better – it produces better results; and three, that developmental psychology has verified its existence – the research confirms it.
Mindfully observing consciousness can produce profound results and it is a method neglected by most mind researchers.[ Yet the power of this type of mental observation does not necessarily mean that it is a superior means of observation, only different. Different approaches to understanding mind and reason range from the detached rationality of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind to the subjective immediacy of phenomenology. All deal with the upper left quadrant of Wilber's map and understand the mind in differing ways. These other investigative methods use rationality and self-reflection to understand the mind in ways different than the supposed disinterested witnessing consciousness of vision-logic.
Mindful viewing of one's subjective consciousness does give an experience of self-certainty regarding what is seen, but the criterion of experienced self-certainty is different from the criteria that the rational inquirer uses. Since different methods and criteria of validity are used, one cannot say that one is superior to the other. That would require a meta-criterion to adjudicate the differences between the two approaches. The mystic would say to the rational inquirer that they have not done the mindful viewing necessary to examine consciousness. The rational inquirer would say to the mystic that their statements regarding the nature of consciousness or rationality are open to this or that criticism. For example, the rational inquirer could contend that vision-logic doesn't really stand outside of a thing called rationality; what it actually does is offer a view from a unique, subjective, witnessing position of the flow of reasoning and thought inside of one's own mind. Witnessing one's personal reasoning and flow of thought is not the same as empirically studying reason itself. Should we adjudicate the difference using the experienced self-certainty of mystical inquiry or do we use the results of a critical rational questioning? The criteria we think superior is an existential choice, neither ultimately rationally defensible nor ultimately demonstrable to all.
A central insight of the 20th century's “linguistic turn” in the social sciences and the humanities is an appreciation of the fundamental role that language plays in the existence of consciousness. The aforementioned fields of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind have focused on language as a presupposition of rationality and consciousness. Wilber notes that Jean Gebser, the pioneering theoretician of a potential integral consciousness, emphasizes the importance of language for our historical age. Wilber quotes Gebser stating that “Language itself is treated as a primordial phenomenon by recognizing its originating-creative nature.”[6] But language and the linguistic turn are tricky things. Once you acknowledge the “originating-creative” nature of language for consciousness, it is hard (I would contend impossible) to escape it. Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer say language creates our unique form of human being, but they do not argue that there is any form of transparency available to man of the sort that Wilber implies. Jacques Derrida and others would argue that language can never be a transparent transmitter of reality because its multiple and ever-changing words and meanings do not allow one to escape its confines. An intention to produce the most precise and permanent description of anything will always be undermined by the changing multiplicity of meanings that are inherent in language. There is no one-to-one correspondence between word and world.
Whether our capacity to view the internal contents of our minds allows us a transparent or unmediated viewing of those contents is quite a vexed question in the philosophy of mind. The apparent direct witnessing of the contents of our minds has been disputed by many in the philosophical tradition including Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, Wilfred Sellars and the late Donald Davidson.[7] In a recent paper the philosopher Ernest Sosa reviews the “various accounts of how beliefs can be foundationally justified through sticking to the character of the subject's own conscious experience at the time” and concludes that “[n]one of these has been successful.”[8] Simon Blackburn in his Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines Wilfred Sellars' 'Myth of the Given' as the
Name adopted by Sellars for the now widely-rejected view that sense experience gives us peculiar points of certainty, suitable to serve as foundations for the whole of empirical knowledge and science.[9] A convincing transcendent experience must still be put into words to have the kind of interpersonal verification that Wilber seeks. The criteria of verification within a mystical community, such as a Buddhist monastery, may be clear-cut as Wilber contends, but if one is inclined toward rational verification, the verbalized propositions are open to questioning and counter-argument and drawn into inevitable debate.[10] The verbalized propositions will assume their role as the vehicles of one perspective among many.
Vision-logic does not transcend and include other perspectives and put them in their proper place. To place them, it must extract the partial truths of differing perspectives using the orienting generalizations of knowledge. As I show throughout the book, the method of determining orienting generalizations is not possible and not done by Wilber. Since Wilber does not use orienting generalizations he does not have truths according to that criterion. What he is claiming is not automatically sanctioned by the relevant research in the natural and social sciences. Therefore, he must be using a perspective to determine what is true and false. Yet he says that he is using integral-aperspectivism which transcends perspectives. Wilber's solution to perspectivalism doesn't work because integral-aperspectivalism is a perspective.
Wilber contends that vision-logic incorporates the poststructural insight of contexts within contexts, yet he leaves out the crucial poststructural contextualization: the contextualization of oneself, the observer. Wilber reacts with such vehemence when confronting the relativists, and takes such repeated delight in exposing their alleged self-contradiction – they supposedly make the absolute statement that “all is relative” – because their alleged contradiction is his actual contradiction. His contradiction is that, on the one hand, he wants to claim that he is practicing a non-reductionistic, aperspectival synthesis of the partial truths of knowledge while, on the other hand, he is actually using an unacknowledged perspective and criterion of truth in order to decide what will count as truth. He uses the fiction of the orienting generalization, and its purported sanction of what he considers the facts, to promote as universal his highly partisan and selective vision of what is true for all.
This desire to both honor contextualization and transcend it causes Wilber to make confused assertions. He commends poststructuralism for saying that no perspective is final, but condemns it for saying that this means that no perspective is better than any other.[11] (As usual, no actual poststructuralists are quoted saying these things.) He then deploys the usual self-contradiction argument and says that because they make the absolute assertion that no perspective is better than any other they are committing a self-contradiction. What Wilber does not notice is that even asserting that no perspective is final, as he and the poststructuralists do, involves one in a self-contradiction. For from what perspective can one assert that no perspective is final, and have it be absolutely true, than from a perspective that claims itself to be final. What could final mean here but the ultimate perspective?
Ironically, Wilber, who has personally had such a profound non-dual insight, is so locked into the paramount epistemological duality of absolutism vs. relativism that he cannot see beyond it. It causes him to say things like, “That all perspectives interrelate, or that no perspective is final (aperspectivism), does not mean that there are no relative merits among them.”[12] Yet how does he determine relative merits except through his perspective, which he unwittingly disguises by thinking of it as a transcendent aperspective?
Finally, that Wilber's aperspective is a perspective is apparent from what follows his description of vision-logic: a defense of his view against the inevitable (but comfortably simplified) objections, i.e. other perspectives.
The superiority of vision-logic as a mode of knowing is dependent upon the arguments made for the validity of the integral synthesis as a whole. Wilber argues that vision-logic is superior because: it transcends and includes rationality; it is developmentally later and so is more advanced; and it explains more since it integrates all that has come before. In each instance, vision-logic's superiority is dependent upon the validity of the integral theory. When Wilber states that vision-logic sees that “consciousness is actually holonic” so that “its own operation [is] increasingly transparent to itself,”[13] he assumes that the holonic way of looking at consciousness is correct. Yet that is the burden of Wilber's work, which I show is highly problematic.
This attempt to validate the superiority of vision-logic through the results of the integral theory leads to a circular logic. Wilber's ability to create his integral synthesis is supposedly a result of his use of vision-logic. Vision-logic is that state of mind that allows the weaving together of the partial truths of the other sciences in order to create a synthesis of knowledge that the rational consciousness cannot accomplish. Yet the validity of vision-logic, as we have seen, is justified by the correctness of the entire integral synthesis, which, through its evolutionary-developmental perspective, makes sense of the welter of scientific knowledge currently available and gives vision-logic a favored place. Wilber writes,
The aperspectival mind, in other words, is holonic through and through….every structure of consciousness is actually holonic (there are only holons), but vision-logic consciously grasps this fact for the first time, and thus finds its own operation increasingly transparent to itself (this 'transparency,' according to Gebser, is a primary characteristic of the integral-aperspectival mind.)[14] In other words, the key to Wilber's integral synthesis is the insight into the holonic nature of the Kosmos. This holonic nature is seen for the first time by vision-logic, which transparently sees its own operation because it sees the holonic nature of things, placing vision-logic beyond rational consciousness. So the fact that vision-logic sees holons within holons demonstrates its transparency to the nature of mind, because we know, through using vision-logic, that the nature of the Kosmos is holonic. It's like saying, “I know I'm right because I have the best faculty for judging rightness. How do I know it's the best faculty for judging rightness? Because it judges things rightly. How do I know it judges things rightly? Because it is the best faculty for judging rightness,” ad infinitum.
If vision-logic's transparency to consciousness is evidenced by its ability to see the holonic nature of consciousness then its validity is dependent upon Wilber's description of consciousness. Certainly, all describers of consciousness would claim that their view is the right one, so Wilber appears to be no different. However, he is different because he claims that his description of consciousness is the knowledge of everyone else's combined. Whereas most researchers assert the truth of their view within the context of the debate in which they are engaged, Wilber tries to assume a position above the debate through the device of the orienting generalization. This device makes it appear as if he is neutrally reporting the findings of all the members of the debate and causes him to make grandiose claims, such as consciousness finally becomes transparent to itself through vision-logic.
Wilber's unreliable reporting of the results of scholarly research is one central feature of my critique and this same problem arises, although less severely than usual, when he justifies vision-logic by citing scholarly research.[15] In developmental psychology, Wilber's vision-logic is called postformal thought. Scholars in the field use the term “postformal” to refer to a hypothesized stage of cognitive development beyond Piaget's formal stage of cognition.
Wilber refers to a number of researchers exploring vision-logic. A measured and knowledgeable survey of postformal thinking, written by Helena Marchand,[16] confirms Wilber's characterization of postformal thinkers as having a general consensus regarding, what Wilber terms, “the developmental space they portray.”[17] She writes that
it is possible to identify in the diverse descriptions of postformal thought (cf. Kramer, 1983, 1989) some features which would be specific to this level: (1) the recognition and understanding of the relativistic, non-absolutist, nature of knowledge; (2) the acceptance of contradiction to the extent that it is part of reality; and (3) the integration of contradiction into comprehensive systems, i.e., into a dialectical whole ( Kramer, 1989). This statement confirms Wilber's claim that there is a broad consensus within postformal studies regarding what postformal theorists agree upon, but it says nothing about the status of the postformal concept outside of postformal studies in the larger discipline of developmental studies .
Michael Commons and Francis Richards are the postformal thinkers Wilber refers to most frequently. Commons and Richards divide the postformal stage into four increasingly advanced levels termed the systemic, the metasystemic, the paradigmatic and the crossparadigmatic. In essence, each level uses the products of the previous level as its object of thought. For example, the person at the paradigmatic level will work with metasystems to create a new paradigm. Wilber believes he's at the highest or crossparadigmatic level: “I am presenting a cross-paradigmatic model.”[18] However, while Marchand thinks Commons and Richards work is the most worthwhile among postformal thinkers, she notes that it has not been confirmed by later empirical studies, a major drawback. She writes that:
The results obtained by Commons, Richards & Kuhn (1982) confirm such reconstructions in that which relates to the systematic, metasystematic, and paradigmatic stages (They did not find such results at the transparadigmatic level). However, these results were not confirmed in studies carried out by various researchers who studied the relationships among formal thought and systematic and metasystematic thought (Demetriou, 1990; Kallio, 1995; Kallio & Helkema, 1991; Kohlberg, 1990). For these authors, systematic thought would be identical to that designated by Piaget as "consolidated formal operations" (i.e., Formal B) and, thus, could not be considered postformal. And in her conclusion, the whole area of postformal thinking does not fare well. Marchand concludes that
Given the heterogeneity of theories about thought beyond the formal level, and given the inconclusiveness of the research carried out so far, it is not possible, for now, to determine the true nature of the type of thought referred to as postformal. This being the case, and it being necessary to defend the requirement that any scientific and epistemological theory must be based on underlying presuppositions such as conceptual clarification, parsimony, and simplicity, it seems preferable to abandon the term "postformal" (except, possibly, in the case of the conceptualization put forth by Commons and coworkers) and to speak simply of adult cognition, or adult thought. Of course, Marchand's view is not the last word, but, at the very least, her conclusion, so contrary to Wilber's confident assertions, indicates that there are grounds for a healthy scholarly debate. Since the postformal scholarly literature is supposed to validate vision-logic, this disagreement brings its nature and existence into question.
Other problems arise for vision-logic as a social-historical phenomenon, as opposed to an individual, cognitive phenomenon. As with all holons, vision-logic has its aspect in the lower left or intersubjective quadrant. Vision-logic is purported to be a qualitative shift in social consciousness on the scale of the magical, mythical and rational socio-historical shifts. Yet what distinguishes these categories as massive historical shifts is that they each provide new criteria of validity for knowledge. Wilber makes an invidious comparison between the methods of knowledge acquisition in medieval times versus that of modernity. Foucault gives a vivid portrayal of these differing regimes of knowledge.[19] The pre-Enlightenment Renaissance period used appeals to authority and metaphorical association to gain and validate knowledge claims. This method contrasts with modernity's use of empirical evidence, experimentation and the standards of rationality. If the shift to vision-logic is of the same order of magnitude as the shift from the medieval to the modern, then vision-logic must have its own new criteria of valid knowledge. Wilber does describe the three strands of any valid knowledge claim, but that is not a new criterion of knowledge. (As I show in chapter 8 it is a pragmatic criterion of knowledge.) So no new criterion of knowledge is offered that would distinguish vision-logic from the standard rules of rational argumentation and establish it as a new stage of social-historical development.
An intellectual maneuver, used, I would argue, to forestall criticism of his integral synthesis, hints at or presupposes a significant epistemological difference between egoic-rationality and the higher levels of vision-logic. Recently, Wilber has claimed that you need to have attained a certain level of consciousness to really understand his theory. He writes that “nothing that can be said in this book will convince you that a [theory of everything] is possible, unless you already have a touch of turquoise [higher consciousness] coloring your cognitive palette.”[20] So I, at the first or second level of vision-logic (the green level according to Spiral Dynamics (SD)), simply can't fully understand Wilber's theory which is at the fourth level of vision-logic (turquoise in SD) because my cognitive development is not advanced enough. I still see a relativistic world of multiple perspectives and can't transcend that consciousness and see the interconnections and patterns between perspectives, the holarchical nature of things. It's similar to a scientific rationalist at the egoic-rational stage (orange in SD) having a debate with a religious fundamentalist at the mythic level (blue in SD).[21] The person at the lower level just can't understand the higher-level person's thinking. As Wilber says about these “cross-level debates:”
This is why developmental studies in general indicate that many philosophical debates are not really a matter of the better objective argument, but of the subjective level of those debating. No amount of orange scientific evidence will convince blue mythic believers; no amount of green bonding will impress orange aggressiveness; no amount of turquoise holarchy will dislodge green hostility – unless the individual is ready to develop forward through the dynamic spiral of consciousness unfolding. This is why "cross-level" debates are rarely resolved, and all parties usually feel unheard and unappreciated.[22] This argument is problematic in a number of ways and has the potential, already partially realized in the Wilberian integral community, of stifling the free flow of ideas and causing exclusionary behavior. As stated above, Wilber's description of the problem is odd. He says he's talking about “philosophical debates,” yet refers to “orange aggressiveness,” “green bonding” and “green hostility” as if the discussants aren't asserting their views using rational arguments and rhetoric, but instead bullying or hugging each other. Presumably, I would be labeled a green hostile. But I'm not trying to dislodge Wilber's turquoise holarchy with hostility; I'm making arguments, asking questions and producing evidence. How else would people have a rational discussion about their views? He also says that these debates “are not really a matter of the better objective argument” as if that can be determined objectively, independently of the debate itself. While it's true that debates often end in stalemate, there is a simpler explanation that I suggest below.
Any objectivity claimed for Wilber's arguments is fundamentally dependent upon the validity of the developmental levels that Wilber has adopted. If vision-logic or the postformal is not a separate stage of development, then there is no discrete, hierarchic difference in consciousness between people assigned to different levels. As I show above, there is much room for debate about the reality of a postformal stage. Even more, the citations in Chapter 2, on individual consciousness, show that there are well-established developmental psychologists who question, criticize and have abandoned Piaget's and Kohlberg's developmental models. More broadly, outside of developmental psychology, there are non-developmental psychologists who simply don't use a developmental model at all. As Wilber himself says, in a curious statement for someone who says he's relying upon the scholarly consensus for the validity of his integration,
[a version of the postmodern green meme, with its pluralism and relativism] has also made developmental studies, which depend on second-tier [higher stage] thinking, virtually anathema at both conventional and alternative universities.[23] This statement is so mistaken that I wonder if Wilber had a mental lapse when writing it since Wilber also contends, in that very same piece, that the developmental models he uses have the sanction of mainstream academia. In addition, even a superficial survey shows that developmental studies are well ensconced in academe. But it does indicate, from Wilber himself, the embattled – as opposed to the consensual – situation of developmentalism. An embattled situation means that arguments and evidence against developmentalism have a strong foothold in academia, as shown in chapter 2. This directly contradicts Wilber's frequent statements that the developmental models he's using are validated by the consensus in the field. So the validity of vision-logic – and developmentalism itself – is an open question.
Assuming vision-logic were a separate level of development, does it hold, as Wilber suggests, that those who have not achieved it can't understand the thinking of those who have or can only understand it in a limited fashion? Andrew P. Smith is, with Mark Edwards, one of the best students of Wilber's work. He has constructed his own novel one-scale model of holarchy. To create such a model, according to Commons and Richards, requires taking intellectual paradigms as one's object of thought; this means that Smith is working at the highest, cross-paradigmatic level of vision-logic. So he has the requisite level of consciousness, according to Wilber, to understand his integral theory. Yet Smith has been so ignored by Wilber and his followers that he's resorted to subtitling one of his essays: “Further Monologues with Ken Wilber.” In addition, Smith's evaluation of Wilber's integral theory is done in the standard way: he describes the theory, asks whether it agrees with the facts, whether it's consistent and whether it provides a solid explanation for what it purports to describe. Even I, a lowly, entry-level vision-logician, have read Smith's work, understand it, and have used it in my book and received a strong, positive review from Smith.[24] So Smith, a cross-paradigmatic thinker, has critically evaluate Wilber's work, using the standard modes of intellectual evaluation, so successfully that neither Wilber nor any one of his supporters has even tried to contradict him. Were Smith to be engaged, it would be an intra-level debate acceptable to Wilber and is virtually required by Wilber's hero Jürgen Habermas in his conception of the ideal speech situation.
Smith, Wilber and everyone else's use of the well-known tools of rational substantiation and evaluation raises the question of what special criteria of validity Wilber, or any cross-paradigmatic thinker, uses? Commons and Richards illustrate the highest level of postformal thinking – called crossparadigmatic or transparadigmatic thinking, the stage Marchand says Commons and Richards themselves could not empirically validate – with the great discoveries of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Planck, Einstein and Gödel. All of their revolutionary discoveries were validated by the standard criteria of scientific rationality: logic, consistency, evidence, experimentation, elegance. Where is the new criterion of knowledge that accompanies any shift in cognition of the scale that Wilber claims for vision-logic?
If it is not a difference in levels of consciousness, what causes the common occurrence of unresolved and unsatisfying intellectual debates? I propose that irreconcilable debates are caused by people adhering to differing criteria of validity. When I've had discussions with fundamentalist Christians and we disagree, I don't think I have a higher level of consciousness and that's why they don't agree with me; I think that because of their personality and life experiences they have decided that the ultimate criteria of validity is a literal reading of the Bible. I still think I'm right and they're wrong, but I also know there is no way to ultimately adjudicate the difference. They think that if I could take a leap of faith and surrender to the infinite love of Jesus Christ I would understand His Truth; while I think that if they would just look at the facts and the evidence and be reasonable they would understand what's true. Moreover, there are fundamentalists who understand science well enough to state the basics correctly – they just don't believe in it. We just believe different things and we each think we're right and the other wrong. As the quote from Stanley Cavell on my title page says, “There is such a thing as an intellectual tragedy.”
Wilber's argument here is so weak that another explanation has to be found for why he's asserting it. It's obvious to me that this is a transparent, and somewhat sad, attempt to avoid criticism by devising a rationale that invalidates the criticizer. If, as he often laments, people don't understand his theory, the explanation lies in their not being cognitively developed enough to understand it. In addition, all the explaining in the world will not help because they are constitutionally unable to understand; therefore no attempt even needs to be made. And, any criticism the critic makes can be ignored because of the lower level of consciousness of the person making it. Wilber is committing the common fallacy of the ad hominem argument – the argument against the man.
In conclusion, the burden of Wilber's theory of everything is to use the perspective-laden scholarship of noted academics to construct a synthesis that transcends their interminable debates. While the witness consciousness of vision-logic may give the experience of transcending the rational mind, as soon as any insight gained from that perspective, or any defense of that perspective, is put into words it can be subject to rational debate. By entering the realm of rational debate the tools of reason become operative. Debate participants use arguments, facts, rhetoric, logic and, most fundamentally, language. The 20th century's 'linguistic turn' in the humanities and the social sciences has not, contrary to Wilber and Gebser, led to a 'transparency' of rationality and a superior vision-logic, but instead to the inescapability of language. As soon as we think or speak or, as some would now argue, become humanly conscious, we presuppose language. Vision-logic, and the integral synthesis that justifies its status as an advanced form of consciousness, is one perspective among many. It is doubtful as a new type of socio-historical consciousness because it does not have a new criterion of knowledge which is a fundamental characteristic of earlier types, such as the magical, mythic and the egoic-rational. Debates within and outside of developmental psychology cast doubt on the reality of vision-logic as a separate stage of development. Without the proper validation, the use of levels of development as a tool to exclude particular debate participants or to rationalize inferior argumentation can be seen as a transparent attempt to avoid rational discussion, the standard way of adjudicating differences between differing intellectual perspectives.
References [1] SES, p. 189.
[2] SES, p. 187.
[3] SES, p. 258
[4] SES, p. 187.
[5] For an exception see Varela, F., Rosch E., and Thompson, E., The Embodied Mind, (MIT Press, 1991).
[6] SES, pp. 189-190.
[7] William Lycan has published two books that describe the variety of positions regarding the nature of consciousness from the perspective of the philosophy of mind. Lycan, William G., Consciousness, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987) and Lycan, William G., editor, Mind and Cognition, (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999).
[8] Sosa, E, “Privileged Access” in Consciousness, edited by Quentin Smith and Aleksandar Jokic, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p.289. Sosa does go on to “sketch…a positive view that seems more promising.”
[9] Blackburn, Simon, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.253.
[10] See the work of Steven Katz, et al discussed in Chapter 4.
[11] SES, p. 188.
[12] SES, p. 188.
[13] SES, p. 187.
[14] SES, p. 187.
[15] Frank Visser alerted me to the material in this section and the importance of examining it.
[16] Marchand, Helena, “Some Reflections on Postformal Thought,” The Genetic Epistemologist, Vol. 29, Number 3, 2001. http://www.piaget.org/GE/2001/GE-29-3.html#item2
[17] Wilber, Ken, Integral Psychology, (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000), p. 90.
[18] Wilber, Ken, “Waves, Streams, States and Self,” fn. 4, at http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/psych_model/psych_model10.cfm/
[19] Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).
[20] Wilber, Ken, A Theory of Everything, (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000), p. 14.
[21] See chapter 5 for a description of these levels of consciousness.
[22] Wilber, Ken, “Introduction to Volume 7 of the Collected Works,” in the section entitled “The Jump to Second-Tier Consciousness,” at http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/cowokev7_intro.cfm/
[23] Wilber, Ken, “Introduction to Volume 7 of the Collected Works,” in the section entitled “The Jump to Second-Tier Consciousness,” at http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/cowokev7_intro.cfm/
[24]Smith, Andrew P., “Contextualizing Ken: A Review of Jeff Meyerhoff's Bald Ambiton" at http://www.integralworld.net/smith20.html, Sept. 2004.
© Jeff Meyerhoff, 2003, updated 2006
1a Re: Personal Theories, Science, and Consciousness studies Thu Jul 18, 2013 11:56 pm (PDT) . Posted by: "Holvenstot" cholvenstot
I agree, RLG
Until we can refer to ALL theories/beliefs/ models/etc. (including science, spirituality, and even our sacred empiricism) as just different versions of one kind of thing (all are kinds of cognitive world-modeling artifacts), we will not be able to have a coherent conversation about consciousness. A coherent conversation requires we not only be aware of the model we apply within our analyses, but also the oftentimes hidden purposes lurking behind the model we use (control, certainty, comfort, orientation, survival advantage, cultural cohesion etc).
The closest useful language we have at the moment is that of psychology which allows us to speak of cognitive dynamics free of the material encumbrance. The language we use for a conversation about consciousness- as-a-world- modeling- process can borrow metaphors from causal-physical and energetic dynamics but when we are too literal with them (confuse them with the totality of reality) we miss the fact that the product, purpose, and vehicle of consciousness (awareness and intention) are entirely different from the processes described within the physical/energetic matrix. And the spiritual catchall for all things non-physical is insufficient (in the explanatory sense) as well so the supposed war of worldviews that either pits science against religion or which envisions them joining forces, is never going to get us to a place of analysis regarding the back-stage cognitive construction of world-models per se.
Best,
CH
I agree, RLG
Until we can refer to ALL theories/beliefs/ models/etc. (including science, spirituality, and even our sacred empiricism) as just different versions of one kind of thing (all are kinds of cognitive world-modeling artifacts), we will not be able to have a coherent conversation about consciousness. A coherent conversation requires we not only be aware of the model we apply within our analyses, but also the oftentimes hidden purposes lurking behind the model we use (control, certainty, comfort, orientation, survival advantage, cultural cohesion etc).
The closest useful language we have at the moment is that of psychology which allows us to speak of cognitive dynamics free of the material encumbrance. The language we use for a conversation about consciousness- as-a-world- modeling- process can borrow metaphors from causal-physical and energetic dynamics but when we are too literal with them (confuse them with the totality of reality) we miss the fact that the product, purpose, and vehicle of consciousness (awareness and intention) are entirely different from the processes described within the physical/energetic matrix. And the spiritual catchall for all things non-physical is insufficient (in the explanatory sense) as well so the supposed war of worldviews that either pits science against religion or which envisions them joining forces, is never going to get us to a place of analysis regarding the back-stage cognitive construction of world-models per se.
Best,
CH
After reading Jack Hunter’s excellent E-Book; “Why People Believe in Spirits, Gods and Magic”[1] recently, the use of the word “Believe” in its title, as well as its appearance and that of the word belief in the text, reminded me of something that I have been pondering for some time. Other than in Jack Hunter’s book, I have noted a trend in papers and on-line discussions relating to such areas as Consciousness and Parapsychology to break everything down into one or the other of two classifications, that of either being grounded in material science (read true), or if not in agreement with the Materialists views of the Universe, as being based upon belief (read unproven or a fantasy). The thing that has surprised me recently though is that I am also beginning to see a trend where even the proponents of the of non-material science explanations for observations made in these areas have begun to accept a pre-assigned position as “believer” in discussions, as opposed to demanding recognition as someone dealing in facts and reality, albeit a alternative one.
For example, if a published paper deals with a review of events experienced by people who “believe” that they have had interaction with a ghostly presence, details of the interaction are never stated in a form that would indicate even the possibility that what was related by the individual as their personal experience was in fact what the individual had experienced. Instead, words and phrases like; may have, believed to be, possibility, unexplained, etc., are used throughout the paper to describe their experience, leaving one with the impression that “while this may be what happened, they may have also just been imagining it”. Even if the incident is not fully understood by the author, by going so far in the effort to never state anything in terms that would indicate that the event being reported was a “paranormal event”, the author is in effect capitulating to the Science and/or Skeptic’s position that no matter what kind or quality of evidence is produced it will be inadequate as proof of anything.
Of course there is a definite need and place for an approach that involves a healthy skepticism on the part of anyone studying or researching such areas as Consciousness and Parapsychology, but to place all of the data collected into the realm of belief rather than experience, personal or otherwise, predetermines the outcome of the research with respect to its lack of acceptance by the academic community. To illustrate why I feel this is so I would like to review the connotations that come with the use of the word “belief”.
be·lief*
You will note that there is no mention in the definition above of any relationship between belief and fact. More exactly, it points out that belief is based upon the mere acceptance that something is true. Therefore, when the word belief is used to label a person’s understanding of a causal factor relating to an experience it implies that their understanding is not based upon any fact, just an acceptance without proof that something is, and consequently their conclusions related to the causality of the event should not be taken as of any consequence.
As I said in the opening, it seems at present that much of Academia and all of the Skeptic Community seem to divide personal knowledge into being based either upon “Science” or “Belief”. Frequently they deride the latter group through the use of such descriptive words as superstition, delusion and fantasy. But why must all reality that cannot be explained by current science be categorized only as a belief?
While it is true that societies in general, and we as individuals, all hold some personal beliefs that may not be possible to assign proofs to, at least some beliefs have been formed as a result of personal experience.
In some areas of science it is taught that all “knowing” (read personal reality) comes from one of only two sources: either through “Agreement Reality or through “Experiential Reality”.
Agreement Reality is reality that is based upon an acceptance of what we have been told, not what we have experienced ourselves. This form of reality matches the definition of belief very well. It would seem to me than that agreement reality is what is in operation when most people refer to science to explain something; we accept that something is true and real because science says it is. For example, we can accept that it is electricity that is lighting a room when we flip a light switch, and not magic, because we are told that it is electricity at work and not through any personal knowledge of the physics of electricity.
For another example, I doubt that anyone would use the word “belief” to describe their personal relationship with gravity, even though science is not able to explain what gravity is, or what produces the effect that we call gravity. I think that most people’s acceptance of the existence of gravity comes from both a form of “Agreement Reality” and from a form of “Experiential Reality.
Why? Because although we experience the effects of gravity all of our lives and can predict and make use of these effects, no one, including scientists, actually knows what the source of gravity is. Is it a wave form of undetectable energy that is generated by atoms, or are there something like gravity particles that are undetectable except by their effect? And although we know that gravity affects a beam of light, if gravity is a relationship between a mass and a mass, then how can there be a gravitational effect upon light which is a wave and not a mass (this is pretty much why the concept of the photon was developed, to offer an explanation for the inconvenient fact that light acts both like a wave, and like a particle with mass). So, although we accept gravity as being true with a sense of certainty, because we cannot define in terms of science just what gravity is, only describe what it does based upon personal experience, then by using the logic of some of Academia and the Skeptic Community, gravity should be dismissed as being merely a belief, not a fact.
But of course in the practical world of most people, gravity just is. There is no need to deal with the philosophical aspects of its effects on our lives. That is because in the “real world” the primary form of reality is “Experiential Reality”, a reality based upon or pertaining to, or derived from, experience. But when branches of science, such as Anthropology, study what they refer to as “primitive societies” they tend to classify the reality that governs the lives of the members of these societies as beliefs. In fact, they generally take it a step further and dismiss those beliefs as superstitions. But to truly understand such a culture it is first necessary to accept that these people’s lives are based at least as much upon experiential reality as through agreement reality.
For instance, the person being studied may have a life experience where they have witnessed a local person who is a healer curing people of injuries or illnesses through use of techniques that are in no way related to modern western medicine. Or they may well have at some point in their life experienced the healing process themselves. For them the healing process is an experiential reality based upon personal experience. For those from outside the culture that are studying the society to automatically label an experiential reality of this type as a belief or superstition is questionable science at best, and arrogance at worst.
What I propose is that those who study either these Primitive Societies or the field of Parapsychology in the modern Western World consider substituting something similar to the phase “experiential reality” for the word “belief” in evaluating the lives and personal experiences of the individuals in these cultures
[1] “Why People Believe in Spirits, Gods and Magic” by Jack Hunter
Available from www.Amazon.com at:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/182-8099735-8558353?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Why%20People%20Believe%20in%20Spirits%2C%20Gods%20and%20Magic
And from www.barnesandnoble.com at:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/why-people-believe-in-spirits-god-and-magic-jack-hunter/1114192570?ean=9781446358108
For example, if a published paper deals with a review of events experienced by people who “believe” that they have had interaction with a ghostly presence, details of the interaction are never stated in a form that would indicate even the possibility that what was related by the individual as their personal experience was in fact what the individual had experienced. Instead, words and phrases like; may have, believed to be, possibility, unexplained, etc., are used throughout the paper to describe their experience, leaving one with the impression that “while this may be what happened, they may have also just been imagining it”. Even if the incident is not fully understood by the author, by going so far in the effort to never state anything in terms that would indicate that the event being reported was a “paranormal event”, the author is in effect capitulating to the Science and/or Skeptic’s position that no matter what kind or quality of evidence is produced it will be inadequate as proof of anything.
Of course there is a definite need and place for an approach that involves a healthy skepticism on the part of anyone studying or researching such areas as Consciousness and Parapsychology, but to place all of the data collected into the realm of belief rather than experience, personal or otherwise, predetermines the outcome of the research with respect to its lack of acceptance by the academic community. To illustrate why I feel this is so I would like to review the connotations that come with the use of the word “belief”.
be·lief*
- acceptance of truth of something: acceptance by the mind that something is true or real, often underpinned by an emotional or spiritual sense of certainty.
- trust: confidence that somebody or something is good or will be effective.
- something that somebody believes in: a statement, principle, or doctrine that a person or group accepts as true.
You will note that there is no mention in the definition above of any relationship between belief and fact. More exactly, it points out that belief is based upon the mere acceptance that something is true. Therefore, when the word belief is used to label a person’s understanding of a causal factor relating to an experience it implies that their understanding is not based upon any fact, just an acceptance without proof that something is, and consequently their conclusions related to the causality of the event should not be taken as of any consequence.
As I said in the opening, it seems at present that much of Academia and all of the Skeptic Community seem to divide personal knowledge into being based either upon “Science” or “Belief”. Frequently they deride the latter group through the use of such descriptive words as superstition, delusion and fantasy. But why must all reality that cannot be explained by current science be categorized only as a belief?
While it is true that societies in general, and we as individuals, all hold some personal beliefs that may not be possible to assign proofs to, at least some beliefs have been formed as a result of personal experience.
In some areas of science it is taught that all “knowing” (read personal reality) comes from one of only two sources: either through “Agreement Reality or through “Experiential Reality”.
Agreement Reality is reality that is based upon an acceptance of what we have been told, not what we have experienced ourselves. This form of reality matches the definition of belief very well. It would seem to me than that agreement reality is what is in operation when most people refer to science to explain something; we accept that something is true and real because science says it is. For example, we can accept that it is electricity that is lighting a room when we flip a light switch, and not magic, because we are told that it is electricity at work and not through any personal knowledge of the physics of electricity.
For another example, I doubt that anyone would use the word “belief” to describe their personal relationship with gravity, even though science is not able to explain what gravity is, or what produces the effect that we call gravity. I think that most people’s acceptance of the existence of gravity comes from both a form of “Agreement Reality” and from a form of “Experiential Reality.
Why? Because although we experience the effects of gravity all of our lives and can predict and make use of these effects, no one, including scientists, actually knows what the source of gravity is. Is it a wave form of undetectable energy that is generated by atoms, or are there something like gravity particles that are undetectable except by their effect? And although we know that gravity affects a beam of light, if gravity is a relationship between a mass and a mass, then how can there be a gravitational effect upon light which is a wave and not a mass (this is pretty much why the concept of the photon was developed, to offer an explanation for the inconvenient fact that light acts both like a wave, and like a particle with mass). So, although we accept gravity as being true with a sense of certainty, because we cannot define in terms of science just what gravity is, only describe what it does based upon personal experience, then by using the logic of some of Academia and the Skeptic Community, gravity should be dismissed as being merely a belief, not a fact.
But of course in the practical world of most people, gravity just is. There is no need to deal with the philosophical aspects of its effects on our lives. That is because in the “real world” the primary form of reality is “Experiential Reality”, a reality based upon or pertaining to, or derived from, experience. But when branches of science, such as Anthropology, study what they refer to as “primitive societies” they tend to classify the reality that governs the lives of the members of these societies as beliefs. In fact, they generally take it a step further and dismiss those beliefs as superstitions. But to truly understand such a culture it is first necessary to accept that these people’s lives are based at least as much upon experiential reality as through agreement reality.
For instance, the person being studied may have a life experience where they have witnessed a local person who is a healer curing people of injuries or illnesses through use of techniques that are in no way related to modern western medicine. Or they may well have at some point in their life experienced the healing process themselves. For them the healing process is an experiential reality based upon personal experience. For those from outside the culture that are studying the society to automatically label an experiential reality of this type as a belief or superstition is questionable science at best, and arrogance at worst.
What I propose is that those who study either these Primitive Societies or the field of Parapsychology in the modern Western World consider substituting something similar to the phase “experiential reality” for the word “belief” in evaluating the lives and personal experiences of the individuals in these cultures
[1] “Why People Believe in Spirits, Gods and Magic” by Jack Hunter
Available from www.Amazon.com at:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/182-8099735-8558353?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Why%20People%20Believe%20in%20Spirits%2C%20Gods%20and%20Magic
And from www.barnesandnoble.com at:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/why-people-believe-in-spirits-god-and-magic-jack-hunter/1114192570?ean=9781446358108