An Alternate Possible Interpretation of Spiritual Experiences

I've been writing a lot lately about interpreting spiritual experiences, and the sources of legitimacy that certain interpretations draw on. In the interest of showing that there are possibilities other than "Spirit exists" I'd like to present an alternate interpretation.

My intent here is not to suggest that this interpretation is right or true, or that it's the best interpretation available, or even that it's a very good interpretation. I simply wish to point out that there are options to choose from, and that we ought to think pretty hard about how we're going to choose between them. With that in mind, here's an interpretation from a materialist perspective:

1. The physical, material world exists.

2. The material world, although existing "out there," is experienced "in here," since the processes of our physical brains produce what we call consciousness.

3. There are certain brain states (which correlate with states of mind) that most of us never realize, because we have either lost or never developed the capability.

4. There is a way to train our brains to exist in these states.

5. Training our brains in this way results in increased awareness, of our mental processes and the world around us, which

6. reduces our tendency to fall into unhealthy, dysfunctional, or unpleasant states, and

7. increases our empathy and responsiveness to others, resulting in changed behavior.

This interpretation does incur certain problems, since it reduces mind to brain and assumes that all causality runs from physical to mental -- the classic reductionist approach. But it has certain advantages as well: it's compatible with experiential validation, it leaves the door open to reason, and there are credible authorities who can attest that practice does indeed alter brain states (because they've tried it and measured the result.)

Of course, paralleling the "Spirit exists" interpretation, it simply asserts the existence of the physical world as a premise for further interpreting. And it doesn't self-reflexively recognize itself as an interpretation, nor argue for its interpretive merit in comparison to other interpretations. This doesn't really fit the bill either, if we're looking for an integral or yellow interpretation. At least it seems to be a step in the right direction -- we've upgraded from one leg of the epistemological stool to three.

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Metaphysical Justifications

The major pitfall of the blue meme is the conflict between groups that each have their own ultimate, absolute source of legitimacy and meaning. Each group claims that the existence of a particular metaphysical or transcendent entity justifies the group's particular set of rules and roles. Since neither group can refute the existence of the other group's god in a convincing way, the situation nearly inevitably results in a stalemate. These conflicts tend to be long-running, since there are only a few possible end-games: one group conquers the other (through violence or conversion), one group evaporates (dying off by attrition and a failure to attract new adherents), or one group evolves to orange (ending that particular conflict while creating a new one.) The classic example is the long-standing conflict between those Jews and Muslims centered in the blue meme, which seems to have no end in sight.

On the surface, the problem with blue worldviews is ethnocentrism. Since their source of legitimacy is only valid within their own particular in-group, blue worldviews tend to have difficulty interacting peacefully with outsiders. I believe there's a deeper problem though, and it's one that has dogged integral theory as well.

Using any of the many forms of the "the absolute" to justify a particular conclusion cuts off any examination of that conclusion using other measures of legitimacy and validity. In the case of blue, this means using the absolute to justify particular rules and roles. Questions like "Do these rules work?" can't be asked in the face of such a justification. (Notably, asking precisely that question marks the emergence of utilitarian value systems and the orange meme.)

In the case of integral thought, a similar problem is created by the interpretation offered by Wilber that "Spirit exists." He uses this proposition as a justification for a certain set of values, and for parts of his conceptual model. Like with blue, the unfortunate result is that this puts these values and concepts beyond critical examination, even by truly integral thinkers. There's no room for a discussion regarding interpretive coherence, relevance, or usefulness when an interpretation claims to be backed by the ultimate nature of existence.

This method of justification by the absolute also offers an easy way to wave off the validity criteria of other memes, rather than transcending and including them. "My yellow values are justified by the transcendent, so I don't need to pay attention to blue/orange/green." This is one of the ways integral thinkers neglect unhealthy stages in their own growth. If I didn't develop healthy orange, it's easy to find a way to use transcendent justification of integral values to demonstrate that orange values aren't all that important. "Science can't tell us anything about Spirit, so I can safely ignore empirical validation." A similar line of thought applies to green: "Spirit is non-interpretive, so I can safely ignore the interpretive nature of truth and meaning." And to blue: "Spirit transcends any particular rules and roles, so rules and roles aren't that important."

What's more, metaphysical justification of values is one of the major ways that first tier memes mistake themselves for yellow when they encounter AQAL. In a similar fashion to genuinely yellow thinkers finding ways to ignore memes they didn't like, first tier memes can use Spirit to ignore the validity claims of any memes that stand between them and yellow. In its less subtle forms, this sometimes leads to rather strange assertions: that the green meme doesn't exist, or that orange and green are really parallel options that both lead to yellow, for example. (Yes, I've actually heard both of these stated point blank.) On more subtle levels, this sometimes leads to lip service to the truths of postmodernism, without an understanding of their radical consequences. "Yes, meaning is interpretive...can we move on now?"

For all of these reasons, I think using metaphysical or transcendent justifications is a very dangerous game. It's not that I want to do away with spirituality, but instead that I think an interpretation of spiritual experience that doesn't resort to unquestionable, ultimate sources of legitimacy will prove much more amenable to both the integrative and the interpretive strands of the integral project.

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Spiral Dynamics On YouTube

This video collects clips from various channels on YouTube, and uses them to demonstrate Spiral Dynamics. Pretty interesting:


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Anderson on Theory

As sometimes happens, just when I'm getting to a point where I've thought something through almost well enough to start writing about it, I find that someone else has been thinking about it too and has beaten me to the punch by writing an insightful piece on the topic of my contemplation. That's certainly the case with Daniel Gustav Anderson's article in the new issue of Integral Review, entitled "Such a Body We Must Create: New Theses on Integral Micropolitics." I'm still digesting the full weight of it, but a first inspection reveals a very intriguing vision of theory, values, and novelty. I liked the following section.

"Theory is systematic applied conceptual work, a method one uses to accomplish practical, tactical matters. The purpose of any theory, inclusive of integral theory, is to make and coordinate the use of effective tools (concepts) for addressing actual problems. As those of us who may have worked with our hands know, effective tools are made with a specific kind of precision -- a helpful tool is crafted, even repurposed, in response to the contours and textures of the problem addressed in the given job site and the systematic design strategy of the architects.

Here, concepts are precise tools used in the day-to-day labor of a theoretical project. I repurpose several of them -- totality, articulation, coherence, flicker, novelty, surprise—in an analogous way in this essay. This work is intended as an essay in the etymological sense of an attempt, a test, a trial, and an inquiry. It is not a treatise, nor a manifesto, nor a loyalty oath, nor a “life starter kit.” For this reason, I invite the reader to consider taking up further points of inquiry as suggested by any one line of thinking presented here. The problem at hand, the integral problem, demands this kind of conceptual precision, actually a greater and more scientifically rigorous precision than I personally am capable of. As such, these are new values, new to integral theory. New values are necessarily exotic, in that they present themselves as they are relative to their new context—unfamiliar, perhaps unwelcome, perhaps uncomfortable or uncomforting. To adopt a Nietzschean trope, they are unfit for easy consumption. The usefully new is like this. At first it is puzzling and exotic, beyond the reader’s horizon, but through a respectful approach and repeated exposure it becomes familiar and useful in the way a handtool does when one has mastered its use. A handtool is impersonal. It does not care about its user’s hopes or fears; mercilessly, it carries on with its task of hammering or cutting, regardless. Theory generally and new values specifically are like this also: philosophizing with a hammer, cutting through spiritual materialism (Trungpa, 1987), making the Body without Organs with a "very fine file" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 160), as appropriate. Unlike theology, theory is not a consolation[...]"

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Integrally Interpreting Spirituality

There's an important distinction to be made regarding spirituality, which is this: A certain sort of spiritual experience may in fact be an experience of something non-interpretive. However, communication is always based on interpretation. So when Wilber or the wisdom traditions talk about this experience, they must be offering an interpretation. One common interpretation of this experience is that, as Wilber says, "Spirit exists." What other interpretations might we choose?

It could be, as Wilber says the wisdom traditions agree, that there is a thing we call Spirit that exists outside of us, but that we find through exploring our own interiors. It could be that these experiences are simply the result of strange brainwave patterns, as orange reductionism would have us believe. It could be an experience of the most fundamental consciousness humans are capable of registering, without necessarily being an experience of the fundamental nature of the universe. Or it could be that we've lumped several things together and called them Spirit, where an interpretation that differentiated them from each other would serve us better.

From a yellow perspective, which of these interpretations should we accept and how do we decide?

If we're going with the theory that each successively more adequate explanation of life, the universe, and everything (i.e. each meme) must transcend and include the previous, then a yellow explanation must transcend and include the green explanation. The include part is to acknowledge that is it's all interpretation. The transcend part is to become able to make judgments between interpretations, to see that they aren't all equally good. Any truly yellow interpretation must then (1) self-reflexively recognize that it is an interpretation and interpret accordingly, and (2) put forth arguments as to why it is a better interpretation than others. I can argue that a certain interpretation is more relevant, more inclusive, more cooperative, more complete, or more explanatory than others, and each of these has some validity without presuming that the interpretation describes what "actually exists."

The question, then, is not which interpretation is really true, but which most adequately meets the validity criteria we choose to evaluate it with. As an integral approach demands of us, we must then take into account the validity claims of each meme.

I believe, in this case, that the place to begin untangling the interpretive knot is with the orange meme. The quintessential orange interpretation, that all experience can be explained wholly in terms of brain activity, quickly proves problematic. Given our very limited understanding (interpretation) of how the brain functions, our ability to explain subjective experiences in this way is limited to only the most basic aspects. This interpretation is much less complete and less explanatory than some of our other options. An interpretation that allows both the brain and the mind as causes of subjective experience allows us to explain a wider variety of experiences, and to describe them in a more complete fashion, by utilizing psychology, sociology, and spirituality in addition to neuroscience.

On the other hand, the interpretation that spirit exists in the world outside of us also rather quickly runs into problems under integral scrutiny. Even if we put aside green's objection to the notion that anything "really exists" and focus solely on orange's validity claims, problems crop up pretty much immediately. While there is a valid complaint to be made that orange science tends to focus on the material world to the exclusion of everything else, the flip side is that science has gotten very good at exploring and explaining the material world. That being the case, we probably ought to give some credence to scientific interpretations of material reality. If Spirit really exists, and it really exists outside ourselves, why hasn't science found it yet? Over several hundred years of science, why haven't we run into any questions about the material world that require Spirit to answer?

One common answer is that Spirit isn't "in" the material world, it's "behind" the material world. Spirit, in this explanation, is the "pre-existing condition" for all existence. Well, OK, but how do you test that? It's now completely out of reach of any sort of scientific explanation. As Wilber has argued, this is because of the limitations of materialist science, which needs to be broadened to include empirical observation of subjective experience. How would we test the existence of Spirit with this sort of "deep science"? Well, meditate or follow a spiritual practice, until you have a certain sort of experience which confirms this to be the case. If we buy this sort of approach, then orange is at least partially satisfied. The existence of Spirit is now testable, but there are still some loose ends. What do we make of the apparent correlation between meditative states and brain activity? If Spirit is what you experience when you meditate, and it isn't in the physical world, then why does the brain react to it at all? I have no answers acceptable to orange, nor have I seen any.

If we can't resolve the problem through empirical observation, then maybe the problem is that the experience itself is being interpreted strangely. As I've already argued rather extensively, green throws penalty flags on the "Spirit exists" interpretation immediately, by pointing out that we can't know what exists separately from our perceptions of it. (10 yard penalty, repeat first down.) The inevitable response is that the experience itself is inherently non-interpretive, and simply reveals itself to be true. "No, no, no!" cries green, rightfully pointing out that you can't simply refer to a transcendental signified and use it as the basis of your worldview, or you've done exactly what blue does. But, of course, from a green perspective, it's hard to register a strong opposition to anything without committing major hypocrisy.

And that brings me around to yellow, and my ultimate point: In my view, any interpretation of anything that ignores or waves off the validity claims of orange and green can not be considered an integral interpretation. "Spirit exists" seems to fall into this category. I can't say if it's ultimately true or not (and neither can anyone else), but I can criticize it on a number of other fronts. In terms of the inclusiveness, cooperation, completeness, and explanatory adequacy criteria, such an interpretation seems fairly bad. This sort of interpretation does not, in my view, point a path toward a better world, because it excludes a large chunk of the human population –- namely, those centered in orange and green. It's therefore divisive and controversial, which is the opposite of what integral thought seems to aim for.

It would be easy to say that if everyone adopted the viewpoint that Spirit exists, then it would no longer be controversial and could be a legitimate source of universally compassionate action. But then, that's exactly what blue says about Christianity and Islam, which has often lead semi-directly to evangelism. Evangelism hasn't exactly proved to be a great model for harmonious human existence, so I have severe doubts about this sort of approach. Spiral Dynamics offers a pretty good explanation why evangelism often fails: one meme's validity claim usually doesn't make sense to the other memes. (That situation is why integral thought is important in the first place.)

So where do we go from there? I hope it's toward an integral interpretation of spiritual experiences that doesn't marginalize orange and green. Whatever it is, I believe it should satisfy the following:

• Recognize itself as an interpretation and argue for its interpretive merits according to integral (yellow+) values
• Acknowledge consciousness as a causal reality along side the social and material worlds (thus avoiding reductionism)
• Allow for correlation between the social, material, and conscious spheres (thus avoiding essentialism)
• Open itself to investigation with scientific methods

My own best candidate so far is this:

There are several sorts of experiences that we call spiritual, since they all seem to transcend linguistic and conceptual description. Spiritual experience "without form" seems to be an experience of the most basic, fundamental sort of consciousness accessible to humans. While this doesn't imply that it is the most fundamental nature of the universe, it may be the essential nature of being aware and having consciousness, underlying all of our experiences and existing prior to our capacity to interpret and conceptualize. This would explain why this sort of consciousness is ever-present. It avoids reductionism, since it acknowledge subjectivity but doesn't say that subjectivity can be explained solely in terms of brain function, while it still remains open to scientific exploration of the correlations with human brain structure and material evolution. On the other end of the spiritual spectrum, experiences with form which nonetheless transcend conceptualization may be drawn from the more complex and significant varieties of consciousness lying beyond our everyday functioning, which are as of yet (or perhaps permanently) beyond the grasp of linguistic explanation and conceptualization. This allows a place for the social construction of interpretive frameworks while simultaneously acknowledging the shortcomings of current interpretive contexts.

This interpretation is not inherently at odds with ritual, power, rules and roles, broad empiricism, or the interpretive nature of meaning, except insofar as it includes elements from multiple first tier world views. By simple omission, it can be "down-translated" into each of the memetic value spheres in ways that affirm the primary values of each meme while ignoring the rest. Therefore, I believe it to be much more cooperative and inclusive than "Spirit exists", while also remaining fairly comprehensive and complete. Since it doesn't assert that anything in particular exists beyond question, it remains open to examination and refinement by all of the memes in their own fashion. All of this makes it a superior interpretation in comparison to "Spirit exists" -- in my integral estimation.
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Can We Ever Be Right About Right and Wrong?

In these videos, Sam Harris gives a fairly full-throated expression of an orange perspective on morality. Topics he covers (intentionally or accidentally) include utilitarianism, moral realism, consequentialism, reducing mind to brain, Jonathan Haidt's research, uncertainty and incomplete consensus in regard to truth, contextual objectivity, and demanding verification of moral claims while simultaneously making unverified moral claims. He also makes orange's best argument against green -- that "moral relativism" enables red. All in all, a very entertaining 20 minutes.

(Videos after the jump)

Part 1:


Part 2:

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Derrida Saves The Day

Integral Options Cafe pointed me toward this article concerning Derrida and metaphysics. It strongly relates to the ongoing topic here of incorporating the insights of postmodernism in an integral worldview. While Derrida does tend toward the aperspectival madness side of postmodernism, he very effectively explodes the Myth of the Given -- that there can be any fixed pre-given center of meaning or truth. The following quote is the portion most relevant to integrating postmodernism.

Derrida begins with the observation that in so far as the entities that constitute our reality have to be set apart before we can even begin to speak about them, nothing actually exists prior to this differentiating process. This differentiation process that precedes and sets up the very conditions of language and meaning is what Derrida calls différance, which he characterizes as “the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences.” As the dynamic structuring principle of language and communication, différance can also be described as the never constituted enabling condition of Western metaphysics, and as such it describes the very ‘conditions of possibility’ for distinguishing between metaphysical oppositions such as ‘sensible/intelligible’, ‘nature/culture’, ‘inside/outside’, etc.

As the “common root of all conceptual oppositions”, Derrida is therefore able to employ his non-concept of différance to deconstruct all metaphysical determinations and all pre-given centers of meaning so as to dismantle all fixed principles of order and governance in a highly influential assault on the entire history of Western metaphysical tradition, leaving only a endlessly sliding system of meanings in which “all is textual play with no connection with original truth.”

To briefly elaborate, in carrying out his far-reaching deconstruction, Derrida argues that the deepest and most persistent desire in the Western metaphysical tradition has been to locate some fixed and permanent center, some Archimedean point, some certain grounds for timeless truth and unchanging meaning—whether we think of this as the ‘transcendental signified’ or as a ‘metaphysics of presence’ in its full transparency and plenitude. In summarizing this strategic longing for metaphysical comfort that has pervaded the entire tradition of thinking in the West, Derrida contends that

All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent.

For Derrida, then, Western thought is infected with a yearning for a non-existent ‘fixed center of meaning’, a desire that is manifested in 1) a hierarchical axiology, where metaphysical determinations spawn binary oppositions and subordinate these opposing values to each other (subject/object, presence/absence, material/ideal); or 2) the enterprise of returning to an origin held to be simple, self-evident, and pure, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, accident, and so forth.

In this way, Derrida argues that we are always and already situated within the effects of différance, and that metaphysics in the history of the West has always depended upon a hierarchical privileging or a clear-cut opposition between binary pairs that is fixed in place, resulting in an extreme rigidity where all that does not fit into any particular scheme tends to be marginalized, suppressed or rendered unconscious.

And so in undertaking his deconstructive venture, Derrida exposes the ‘metaphysics of presence’ as a futile attempt to fix the meaning of conceptual oppositions and freeze the play of linguistic differences, by radically questioning the notion that a transcendental signified constitutes some permanent invocation of truth that resides eternally outside of the differential spacing of signifiers.

And moreover, by confusing the linguistic construction of meaning by virtue of the metaphysical center with a permanent endorsement of essential truth, Derrida lays open the great philosophers of the past as masters of illusion, and their philosophies are shown up as false dreams of plenitude, where all philosophical concepts rest on “a delusion and non-respect for their own condition of origin”.

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Certainty In A Post-Post-Modern World

In her post today about an inclusive epistemology, Teri mentions my concerns regarding postmodernism and certainty:

YES, as Karl[...]has been arguing, we can never know anything for sure. But Dr. Ahmad taught me that the closest we can come is to rely on all three legs of the stool.

Dr Ahmad explained that Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali took issue in 1100 AD with Aristotle's faith in reason. Reason alone is never enough, Al-Ghazali wrote. Rather knowledge rests on three legs, like a stool. There are, however, at least two ways to count the legs.

In al-Ghazali's formulation, the three legs are reason, authority, and experiment[...]

I like the overall thrust. Certainly experiment can't be the only valid basis for knowledge, because we don't have the time or ability to test everything we believe. And reason alone won't do either, because reason has no way to validate its initial premises. It also seems reasonable that since we exist in a social context, we can trust others, to an extent, to help us figure out what to believe.

In the interest of figuring out how we can integrate these, let's consider what implications contextualism, constructivism, and pluralism have for epistemology.While this will probably be an ongoing IMIE topic, let's start here:

Postmodernism implies not reduced certainty, but instead the death of ontology as a distinct entity kept separate from epistemology. According to postmodern thought, what exists and how you know can not be kept separate, but should be seen as interrelated and co-creating.

To illustrate the difference between this and what came before, let's back up for a second and look at how orange handles certainty. For orange, there is a real truth out there to find, although we may not have all of it yet. The aims of the "scientific method" are to get as close to this whole truth as we can. We do this by guessing at the truth, conducting experiments to prove or disprove our guess, and repeating the experiments to verify that the results aren't a fluke. Repeating the experiments increases our certainty -- the more tests we do that come back the same, the more certain we are that we have guessed correctly.

Still, we can never be 100% sure. Maybe we're 95% sure that our guess is true, but there's always some uncertainty. Maybe there are hidden variables we haven't accounted for, or the methodology itself produces strange results. If we find this is the case, then we revise our guess and our methodology and try again. The underlying assumption here is a definite singular ontology (there really is a single 'what is') with an indefinite multiple epistemology (we can't entirely know, so different people may know different parts of the whole truth.)

Now for the green perspective: Postmodernism points out that you can never separate what you know from how you know it -- that's contextualism, in a nutshell. Indefinite multiple epistemology also then implies indefinite multiple ontology. There isn't a single way things really are, but instead many ways that things are.

The basic result is this:

From an orange point of view, we may each hold different beliefs about the world. We can use experiments, authority, and reason to decide which one of us is right to a fair degree of certainty. Using these tools, we can decide that some views are clearly incorrect, but the remaining uncertainty allows some wiggle room in which there may still be more than one reasonable view.

From a green point of view, we can both be 100% certain of own views, and neither of us is necessarily wrong. The wiggle room comes not from uncertainty, but from the understanding that what you see depends on where you stand. From a postmodern perspective, "what is" is the same thing as "how you know." However things appear to me is "what is"...for me. Your "what is" may be different, but it is no less "what is" for you than mine is for me.
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The Radical Novelty of Integral Theory

I ran across a lecture by E.W. Dijkstra on computer science, which contains a section concerning radical novelties -- things which can't be adequately understood by analogy with what we already know. It seems to me that each new meme contains some element of the sort of radical novelty that Dijkstra describes, which makes it inappropriate to understand it in terms of what came before. I think this has some application to integral theory, since there is a tendency to discuss it by analogy to the paradigms of previous memes, as being about gaining certain powers, behaving according to certain principles, finding the whole truth, or respecting all perspectives. While integral theory has elements of each of those (by design), we can't understand the motivation or methods of integral theory as being super-versions of the motivations or methods of previous memes.

Dijkstra explains why (after the jump):

The usual way in which we plan today for tomorrow is in yesterday's vocabulary. We do so, because we try to get away with the concepts we are familiar with and that have acquired their meanings in our past experience. Of course, the words and the concepts don't quite fit because our future differs from our past, but then we stretch them a little bit. Linguists are quite familiar with the phenomenon that the meanings of words evolve over time, but also know that this is a slow and gradual process.

It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name "common sense", our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating. This is the situation that is characteristic for the "radical" novelty.

Coping with radical novelty requires an orthogonal method. One must consider one's own past, the experiences collected, and the habits formed in it as an unfortunate accident of history, and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, consciously refusing to try to link it with what is already familiar, because the familiar is hopelessly inadequate. One has, with initially a kind of split personality, to come to grips with a radical novelty as a dissociated topic in its own right. Coming to grips with a radical novelty amounts to creating and learning a new foreign language that can not be translated into one's mother tongue. (Any one who has learned quantum mechanics knows what I am talking about.) Needless to say, adjusting to radical novelties is not a very popular activity, for it requires hard work. For the same reason, the radical novelties themselves are unwelcome.

By now, you may well ask why I have paid so much attention to and have spent so much eloquence on such a simple and obvious notion as the radical novelty. My reason is very simple: radical novelties are so disturbing that they tend to be suppressed or ignored, to the extent that even the possibility of their existence in general is more often denied than admitted.

On the historical evidence I shall be short. Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematicians but also somewhat of a coward, was certainly aware of the fate of Galileo --and could probably have predicted the calumniation of Einstein-- when he decided to suppress his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, thus leaving it to Bolyai and Lobatchewsky to receive the flak. It is probably more illuminating to go a little bit further back, to the Middle Ages. One of its characteristics was that "reasoning by analogy" was rampant; another characteristic was almost total intellectual stagnation, and we now see why the two go together. A reason for mentioning this is to point out that, by developing a keen ear for unwarranted analogies, one can detect a lot of medieval thinking today.

The other thing I can not stress enough is that the fraction of the population for which gradual change seems to be all but the only paradigm of history is very large, probably much larger than you would expect. Certainly when I started to observe it, their number turned out to be much larger than I had expected.

For instance, the vast majority of the mathematical community has never challenged its tacit assumption that doing mathematics will remain very much the same type of mental activity it has always been: new topics will come, flourish, and go as they have done in the past, but, the human brain being what it is, our ways of teaching, learning, and understanding mathematics, of problem solving, and of mathematical discovery will remain pretty much the same. Herbert Robbins clearly states why he rules out a quantum leap in mathematical ability:

"Nobody is going to run 100 meters in five seconds, no matter how much is invested in training and machines. The same can be said about using the brain. The human mind is no different now from what it was five thousand years ago. And when it comes to mathematics, you must realize that this is the human mind at an extreme limit of its capacity."

My comment in the margin was "so reduce the use of the brain and calculate!". Using Robbins's own analogy, one could remark that, for going from A to B fast, there could now exist alternatives to running that are orders of magnitude more effective. Robbins flatly refuses to honour any alternative to time-honoured brain usage with the name of "doing mathematics", thus exorcizing the danger of radical novelty by the simple device of adjusting his definitions to his needs: simply by definition, mathematics will continue to be what it used to be. So much for the mathematicians.

Let me give you just one more example of the widespread disbelief in the existence of radical novelties and, hence, in the need of learning how to cope with them. It is the prevailing educational practice, for which gradual, almost imperceptible, change seems to be the exclusive paradigm. How many educational texts are not recommended for their appeal to the student's intuition! They constantly try to present everything that could be an exciting novelty as something as familiar as possible. They consciously try to link the new material to what is supposed to be the student's familiar world. It already starts with the teaching of arithmetic. Instead of teaching 2 + 3 = 5 , the hideous arithmetic operator "plus" is carefully disguised by calling it "and", and the little kids are given lots of familiar examples first, with clearly visible such as apples and pears, which are in, in contrast to equally countable objects such as percentages and electrons, which are out. The same silly tradition is reflected at university level in different introductory calculus courses for the future physicist, architect, or business major, each adorned with examples from the respective fields. The educational dogma seems to be that everything is fine as long as the student does not notice that he is learning something really new; more often than not, the student's impression is indeed correct. I consider the failure of an educational practice to prepare the next generation for the phenomenon of radical novelties a serious shortcoming. [When King Ferdinand visited the conservative university of Cervera, the Rector proudly reassured the monarch with the words; "Far be from us, Sire, the dangerous novelty of thinking.". Spain's problems in the century that followed justify my characterization of the shortcoming as "serious".] So much for education's adoption of the paradigm of gradual change.

The concept of radical novelties is of contemporary significance because, while we are ill-prepared to cope with them, science and technology have now shown themselves expert at inflicting them upon us. Earlier scientific examples are the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics; later technological examples are the atom bomb and the pill. For decades, the former two gave rise to a torrent of religious, philosophical, or otherwise quasi-scientific tracts. We can daily observe the profound inadequacy with which the latter two are approached, be it by our statesmen and religious leaders or by the public at large. So much for the damage done to our peace of mind by radical novelties.

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Integration, Mind, God, and Warranted Belief

I found two interesting articles over at the global spiral. While there are parts of each I agree with and also parts with which I disagree, both of them are certainly thought provoking.

The first is on the nature of the meta/trans-disciplinary project -- the integral project, by any other name -- and whether or not a complete picture is possible. The author has an interesting perspective: even if a complete picture is impossible, we ought to make one anyway. I'll let you read the details for yourself.

The second is on postmodernism and religion, which makes it somewhat relevant to postmodern conservatism. In particular, I liked the third section regarding the mind's knowledge of God. It discusses the notion of warranted beliefs which require no proof. Briefly, I like the terminology of a warranted belief, because it's helpful in acknowledging that a certain belief is natural from a certain perspective, without piling on the baggage carried by the term "true." On the other hand, I don't think that belief necessarily entails existence, in the orange sense of absolute truth and really real reality, even if it is warranted. If we limit existence to a certain perspective though, we can then say that within the context generated by that perspective, belief entails existence, since both belief and existence are now limited to the same scope.
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