dmb, I am still plugging away through SES and plan to put Marriage of Sense and Soul next on my play list. Here are some more general observations:
I too love a good generalist. My single mission in life has been to actually be one. But there are problems with generalists. As Bohr suggests you either sacrifice truth of clarity or clarity for truth. I see a lot of this in Wilber particularly in the area psychology. His use of Freud and Jung for example; these two are of much more significance to literature and art than to a science of psychology. Psychoanalysis is a dubious practice at best. Repeated studies have shown that trained therapists are no more effective in solving people's problems that having heart to heart chats with close associates. In other words your analyst is little more than a professional "friend". His use of Piaget and his followers is likewise suspect. I seriously doubt that Piaget would embrace Wilber's interpretation of his work. I do not think Piaget's levels of child development for example, transpose that well to cultures across history. I have similar problems with Bennedict's application of personality theory to cultures. They both kind of work as a broad outlines but fall apart with you get specific. Piaget's disciples like Kohlberg and Gilligan have been criticized at length because for example Kohlberg started with the notion of moral developmental stages then looked for them in his subjects. It is not surprising therefore that he found them. Gilligan as a student of Kohlberg criticized his specific stages in men then defined and found her own in women. But the problem with Gilligan's work is essentially the same as with Kohlberg. As you might guess I think Wilber does not treat the behaviorists fairly. His dismissal of them is pretty typical. Even in the field, cognitive and psychoanalytic types write behaviorism off mostly because it is "icky", not because it is wrong. The fact is that no other psychological theory has been as successful in stimulating good research and accounting for so much of how and why creatures behave as they do. One could easily argue that it is a Newtonian theory in that it accounts for an enormous amount of what we observe in the real world but like Newton's theories it does fray around the edges. Unfortunately psychology has yet to produce an Einstein to move it beyond. The difference between the Behaviorists and say the psychoanalytic types illustrates a fundamental split in metaphysical approaches. They both seek after an understanding of why organisms do what they do. The psychoanalytics approach the subject from the inside out while the behaviorists look from the outside in. The saner advocates from both sides stated that they were both just killing time until the neurosciences could tell them what was really going on. Within the field of psychiatry for example the real advances in the treatment of emotional disorders has not come from changing either what people do or what they think. It has come from using pharmaceuticals to restore chemical balance to disordered brains. In short while I think he does a good job of covering the bases and pointing to people who have made significant contributions I really don't trust what he makes of them. He makes me want to go read Habermas for example but I am suspicious of his treatment of the man. My fundamental problem with Wilber is evident from the second paragraph of the introduction to SES. To the question of why is there something instead of nothing Wilber tries to dismiss the "Oops" answer. Like Pirsig he longs for some higher meaning, for some teleological purpose to be the motivating force behind evolution. Wilber at least address systems theory and complexity but I did not see that he truly grasped their significance. Here is an example of Wilber confounding of complexity theory and teleology: "Now I believe that there are indeed mystical "archetypes"... but these archetypes cannot be explained as an inheritance from the past; they are strange Attractors lying in our future, omega points that have not been collectively manifested anywhere in the past, but are nonetheless available to each and every individual as structural potentials, as future structures attempting to come down, not past structures struggling to come up." This is not how strange attractors work. They are statistical probabilities of possible states of a system. They do not attract the way a magnet does. They are not causal agents. Likewise Wilber goes at great length to show that higher levels emerge from lower levels but I keep waiting for him to explain how higher consciousness is supposed to have anything whatever to do with setting up the lower levels. He claims "spirit" exists before the Big Bang and is at work in all of time and space and yet this spirit and consciousness emerge from the lower levels. If he were advocating a bottom up organic growth scenario that would be one thing but that is not my sense of where he is going. His treatment of mysticism is likewise confused. Saying that various practices will produce a common understanding among practitioners is one thing. Saying that this understanding of ones internal states provides knowledge of spirit's agency in the external world is quite another. Swamis can say what ever they want about how their internal states can be trained but what this yields is an understanding of ones' self, not an understanding of how the real world works. Saying that you have a feeling of oneness with the universe does not make the universe One. When sages across time agree on their feeling and experiences this speaks more to the functions of their nervous systems than to how the world works. In fact the claims of the mystics and Wilber in support of them do make testable claims. I am surprised that he does not include more actual research into the physiology of meditation. I am having trouble finding much on it either. I do appreciate the fact that Wilber at least does not deny the existence of the external world. He does not deny the fact of evolution. His division of the world into physiosphere, biosphere and noosphere is nice in that he tend to treat them more as fuzzy sets without rigidly defined boundaries. He thus avoids many of the pitfalls we see in discussions of the MoQ levels. This is going on and on and I doubt if most MoQers really care about this all that much but just a couple of final observations here. Wilber does not even attempt to deny SOM, do you think? I mean the whole right hand left hand business. The first cut of his quadrants in into what is inside the self and outside the self. What do you make of this? There are a couple of key concepts that I do not see Wilber using that would alter his system drastically. First with regards his notion of holons all the way down. This seems to me to be an example of scaling. When he looks at holons at various stages what he points to their similar natures and the common factors that influence them. What this illustrates is self similarity across scale. To use optical metaphors this is more a question of resolution or what level of detail we are selecting to look at; not some fixity of natural processes. The clarity of vision is in large measure determine by how closely we look and at what level of detail we examine. I am rambling but I have been saving up so sorry about that. By the way you said last time, "... Pirsig is like the Hemmingway of metaphysicians." Bravo I like that one a lot. Sometime when you are looking the other way I might steal it. Finally, while I can see where Platt would like Wilber's anti-oops stance I wonder how he reconciles this with Wilber's outright globalist position. He clearly thinks planetary consciousness will lead to planetary government... Case moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
