Thoughts on an article from Integral World, "Tangled Phone Lines: Why Richard Dawkins Hung up on Ken Wilber"

[shaman sun]

original article

I sometimes browse through Integral World, reading interesting critiques and sometimes just plain nasty ones. This article started out interesting, "I don't necessarily think that mystics and skeptics should depart company and go on their respective ways..." the author writes in the beginning. The relationship between science and mysticism is fascinating to me, so the article caught my attention.

But the author seems to focus on one aspect: that is, mystics that must abandon some assumptions due to their unscientific grounding. He cites a particular guru who did this, Baba Faqir Chand. This man rejected he had anything to do with miracles or visions people associated him with, attributing them to "either the devotee's previous karma or intense faith."

This reminded me of Krishnamurti, and I was relatively agreeing with the author's point up to here. If the self is illusory, if there is no ultimate "I" - that's fine. In fact, the teachings I enjoy the most are the ones that allow the "self" to dissolve gently into light, love, simply being.

A number of other thinkers, scientists are cited: that perhaps our being is grounded in the physical, too, that there is no soul, and that a very material-based reality may be ultimately true. I can't help but question, do we really understand what is "physical," especially with new implications of quantum physics, and a holographic universe? Let alone, we barely understand what the observer is...

Appropriately he quotes someone asking, "Why should I meditate for 3 hours a day if what I am experiencing isn't God but sophisticated neural fireworks?"

I don't know how to wrap up the next part, so I'll let the author speak for himself:

"In other words, isn’t at least a good part of the mystic quest predicated upon a false idea to start with? We aren’t looking for just stuff, as Patricia Churchland once put it; we are looking for some divine meaning.

I think there is a reason Ken Wilber and Richard Dawkins don’t talk. Or, if they do, why Richard Dawkins would have hung up on Wilber. Ken Wilber still wants to believe in mystic “goo.” He wants a cosmic feel good story, even if his flowery description of the same doesn’t have even an ounce of scientific credibility. How do you think Dawkins would respond to this from Wilber [in "On the Nature of Involutionary Givens"]:"

This seems very assuming to me. First, the mystic quest is the yearning to understand who and what we are, to explore this "spiritual" inclination, this sense of presence, other, and ultimately discover that spiritual "other" is you. Is that a false idea? I'm not so sure. Also secondly, Wilber may be prone to exploring the "goo," but I don't think it's as void of meaning or even content as the author seems to make out to be. This "goo" is a cosmic creation story: Ultimately consciousness, God, Brahman, etc. forgetting itself, birthing the world, and remembering again. Involution and evolution. He cites this as "Wilber's fantasy," and mentions that Dawkin's might say: "I have just been slimed by a huge ball of New Age goo."

"Wilber wants us to still believe in fairy tales, even if dressed up in pseudo-scientific jargon.

Dawkins on the other hand wants us to finally grow up and admit what we have secretly thought for a long time. We were wrong about the gods and we were wrong about ourselves."

Though brief statements- the misunderstanding would take an equally long essay to dispel them. I think I'll keep it short and open it for discussion. To me, the author makes serious flaws: 1) Isn't he confusing these descriptions as being literal and mythic, while they are not meant to be taken like that? Isn't there a difference between esoteric and exoteric teachings? He hasn't distinguished the two at all. 2) Is what Dawkin's doing really that mature? To me it seems like he's failing to understand mythic perspectives, telling them to grow up, snap out of it, but in the end only strengthening their world views. If you divide yourself from another, simply based on different beliefs, you only strengthen the gap between the two. We are all one, after all.

To bring some light back into the discussion, I think I'll end with a paraphrase of Thich Nhat Hanh:

"Nirvana can be seen as the absence of views, which are ideas and opinions. Without views, we have wisdom, which is the direct perceiving of reality."

[Grey Drane]

No time right now to give this a lot of thought or detailed response, but a couple of things that arise on a first read-through (in order of arising):

(1) Generally speaking, whenever someone uses pejorative terms ("mystic goo", "fairy tales", etc.) to describe one side of an issue being presented as two-sided, they aren't really considering or understanding both perspectives, which you would presume an article coming from an integral altitude would try to do; and

(2) It sounds a bit like Orange thinking it's Teal, a scientific materialist with higher aspirations, but just not quite making the cut. Maybe the author has certain lines tending towards higher altitudes, but still has a CoG stuck largely in Orange.

Anyway, like I said, these are just off-the-cuff initial impressions without having given it much thought and without having checked the original article in question. I will do that, though, and may come back with more thoughts, and more direct answers to your questions, when I have.

Cheers,
g.d:

[Bryan Plasters]

In my experience the Flatlander is always blind to the Interior. The mystic experience can always be boiled down to certain "neuronal activity" as if our actual witnessed experience of it is negligible. Exterior without acknowledgement of the Interior. The same as saying a meaning of a word is the neuron pattern and the perception of the meaning is unacknowledged, as yuo all know.

I find it fascinating when Upper Left discussions are debated in open where the majority are Orange scientific rationalist. Like this one on Reddit. I think the key is finding injunctions that lead to the visualization of the Interior--and you will see it played out a few comments deep (my Wilber-referenced argument here (not as well recieved :(.:..:... but to the same conclusion).

FWIW, The title of said submission is "There is no aspect of the mind that does not correspond to any area of the brain." The title is clearly designed to hint at the nonexistence of the Interior, but surprisingly concludes about consciousness:



Who or what is the the observer, the "I", that resides within each of our minds and does the actual perceiving? How is it possible that we can "step back" and examine our own mental functioning with a brain made up of neurons, even though no individual neuron possesses such an ability?

a full answer to this question is beyond the scope of this essay, and indeed beyond the scope of human knowledge at this time,

[Grey Drane]

I like the way you linked to that video of "a guy" stopping his brainwaves consciously. Unfortunately, whenever you mention Wilber explicitly in circles like those (e.g. the reddit atheist subscribers), you immediately polarize the discussion around him.

G:D

[Steven Nickeson]

Before I get into an analyis of the Lane article, I want to write that I like most of Lane's work on Integral World and think, to some extent, that any assessment of this piece is incomplete if the assessor has not read the entire exchange over the past several months between Lane, Andy Smith and Elliot Benjamin. But, from another perspective, that exercise could be comparable to witnessing a pissing match over a penny-ante side bet and hardly worth the time. Anyway Lane is bright and articulate. His arguments for Darwinism, however one holds with that, are characterized by imaginative irony that leaves the tedious, oh-so-earnest Integralite arguments of Smith and Benjamin looking like just more of the same old oh-so-earnest tedium of the standard Integral party line.

A little deconstruction, I think, shows that Lane's little piece is nothing but an over-worked, rhetorical jab at Mister Wilber and a dismissal of Eliot Benjamin's comments on the respective Lane/Smith urine trajectories.

Lane wrote several paragraphs in from the start: "In other words, if a mystic is serious about studying the subject scientifically it means that he or she may have to radically revise their understandings and prior theological dogmas about what is actually happening when they undergo a transformation of consciousness."

This is the guts of the piece; the set-up for his later attack on Mister Wilber which comes after he easily walks all over Benjamin's earlier arguments with his Faqir Chand material that Lane then highlights with his Francis Crick and Thomas Metzinger evidence.

The questionable rhetoric begins here where Lane writes:

"As Crick so astutely puts it: 'The Astonishing Hypothesis is that "You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: "you're nothing but a pack of neurons." This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can be truly called astonishing.'"

Lane's problem begins with the adverb "astutely" because the Crick quote is anything but astute. Crick was, (or at least should have been) bright enough to know that to say "you're nothing but a pack of neurons." is the equivalent of saying a Ferrari Testarossa is nothing but a ton-and-a-half of loosely composited metal, petroleum by-products and trace amounts of leather. The same can be said of a junked '56 Ford Fairlane (without the leather) and all of that is true about structures and contents of structures, but not true of their respective performances. For both Ferraris and Fords performance is their raison d'être. The analogy can be carried forward by saying that a bonobo is nothing more than a pack of neurons, which by dint of the Crick argument would make a bonobo the equivalent of a "you." Fine, as far as it goes. You(s) and bonobos share a hydrocarbon structure of biochemically electrified neurons. Everyone can agree on that. That's the structure part of the picture. Then there is the content aspect that defies agreement. Science says structure is content because nothing else there is datable. Mystics and spiritualists and religionists like to believe differently for whatever reason and there the argument re: "nothing but..." stalls in an inevitable dead-end pissing match. (I think this has to do the similarly sacrosanct self-image of scientists on one hand and mystics, spiritualists and religionists on the other. Integralites for the most part are stuck in the "content" dead-end that could be dissolved by concentrating on performance, but then they would have to give up their identities as "spiritual but not religious" evangelists and settle for being just pragmatists. If I wanted to be really cynical here I would write that based on what appears online Integralites neglect performance because they do so little of it and their AQAL/SD doctrine is likewise capable of little more, but I won't.)

In essence, if one isolates the Crick quote in terms of performance, the true distinguishing characteristic between You, bonobos, Fairlanes and Ferraris, two things are clear: 1) the "nothing but neurons" rhetoric invites little more than a "so what?" 2) One sees that the quote's own performance is nothing more than a fake profundity to bait the mystics, spiritualists and religionists but invites from those of us who are not scientists, mystics, spiritualists or religionists, "so what?...a mild little pox on both..."

The final piece of deconstructive evidence as to the nature and value of the Lane article is found in this line that follows the long (and slightly gooey) quote from Mister Wilber:

"Wilber wants us to still believe in fairy tales, even if dressed up in pseudo-scientific jargon"

One can see how that easily follows as the punch line from the set-up in the first quote I sited. But it takes a little more digging to find out that Lane shoots himself in the foot by stating it. One has to go back to Mister Wilber's original material (note 26) to see that not only did Mister Wilber start out by calling his goo "a myth" but after what seems like countless paragraphs of standard party line tedium, he concludes by reiterating, "As I said, this is a useful myth." Whether it is or isn't useful is not the point, the point is that Lane should comprehend that everyone who has a cursory knowledge of the English language knows that myths are myths, they are not literal truths, they are not gospel, they are not subject to belief.

Lane's dishoenst conclusion of what Wilber wants us to do was a cheap shot and taints his entire little project. If he were a lawyer and used that argument in court against Mister Wilber and purposefully left out Mister Wilber's own exculpatory evidence the essay would be tossed and the jury told to disregard.

[Grey Drane]

Hi Steven,

I think you've pretty much answered shaman sun's closing questions when you point out the author's "myth" oversight, but what you've written about "performance" interests me. Could you expand on that?

I ask in part because, based on what little you've written here, it seems to me that you're essentially substituting "performance" for "interiority", or perhaps equating the two, and I'm not sure how far I would agree with that.

~G

[Steven Nickeson]

Gray,
This is just a preliminary answer to your above reply:

You wrote: "...it seems to me that you're essentially substituting "performance" for "interiority", or perhaps equating the two..."

I don't think that anyone, Mister Wilber included, knows anything worth repeating about interiors because one can only perceive, in any way at all, surfaces. There may be interiors, but no one can know what they are. I am linking here to a long discussion about interiors and surfaces between myself and Bruce Alder (a.k.a. Balder) that took place beginning last October while I was hanging out on Aruba waiting for a visa. The site was Gaia's Integral Postmetaphysical Spirituality pod. It was mostly play, but I think it shows that the standard Integral party line on interiors/exteriors is essentially simple-minded and inadequate to deal with what is real. I would like you to read the entire exchange as preface to what I will be writing shortly on performance if only to disabuse you of the idea that performance for me has anything to do with "interiors" or interiority, whatever that is.

Also, in regards to my own perspective in contrast to the two-dimensional static rigidity of the AQAL, holonic interior/exterior, structuralist approach, I leave the following blog excerpt also as preface to what I will post here next:

"There is a stretch through the Grand Canyon where the river has sliced deepest into earth and running flat pushes swiftly through sheared strata that are a bazillion years old and have names like Vishnu Schist, solid, straight up, uncracked rock. There are no sand bars, no falls or rapids, or beaches, no gravel, no boulders and nothing sharp to slice the water so it sucks up air and turns white. The surface is flat and dark; from a distance it looks placid. These vertical walls narrow the channel so the passage of the river is like forcing a fifteen-amp charge through a ten-amp wire; things get ftritzy inside. The river has scoured and sanded the rock into polished deep undulations, tunnels, pockets, caves, ramps and corners that shape and push the water into too many conflicting directions; it tangles the flow for miles into a turbulent, multi-skeined knot of insane subsurface hydraulics: roils, eddies, backwashes, under tows, whirlpools and cross currents heaving against cross-current, against the walls and boats, boiling to the surface and sucking downward, forcing past each other with enough velocity to shear a wooden oar in two if it is caught between. Shallow fissures suddenly snap open between the currents, hiss across the surface like snakes and then as instantly disappear. It is a welter of over wrought, omni-dimensional ripples, reverberating at the power of 10. This simple landscape of dark flat water and black vertical rock is called The Inner Canyon.


"Of the various meditation techniques that rely on energetic movement, I lean toward the more subtle fringes of Taoist Spiritual Alchemy and these have a historically documented root in shamanic practices. Looking at the phenomena from either position, alchemy or shamanism, it does not take long to realize, apprehend visually, the finely wrought, omni-directional, eternally reverberating, multi-skeined knot of turbulent energy and information that is the Whole of It engulfing Ourselves, the universal Inner Canyon, where ambiguity resonates to the 10th power. Nowhere can one take a core sample or cut a cross-section that will dependably tell one anything except how that specific location used to look, nowhere is there solid predictability, nowhere is there anything that can be made discreetly identifiable as one's own, nowhere is there knowledge or experience or their feeble, schizoid cousin, memory, that isn't constantly mutated beyond the recognition of the day before. Anything other than the liberating reconciliation to the omnipresent hegemony of ambiguity is a fantasy."

I will be back shortly re: performance.

[Steven Nickeson]

I try not to write in the oh-so-earnest traditions of the Integral party line...this might wander but it will conclude.

Performance negates structure interiors exteriors holons all that feeble two dimensional mappiness that is obsolete the moment--if not before--it finds its negligible place upon our screens

if you need a map

even if you would just like a map, a theory, a metatheory, a toehold in the abyss, a still point for your cell phone's GPS

there is no need to apply with me or mine

we have no interest stumble on

Performance

is non-duel no exterior more than interior its inside and outside its all of that and thermodynamics too

it is what and how and the enveloping effect of clearing the quarter at 150
interior exterior same same same same always burning daylight always burning anywhere

if you need a map you need not apply

Read this, read it out loud, scream it into a street (you aren't going to do that are you gutless wonders)

I will not condone the what of F.D.'s R, but his whys will always have my vote

Performance changes all inside outside wrecks that simpering structure

wrecks scholastic simpering and never waits to hear the judge
wrecks the judge

wrecks that simpering civilization

wrecks that simpering civilization

do you get that Gray do you need some more

[Grey Drane]

OK, this is interesting and provocative, and certainly has its place in integral, but it seems to me that it's also awfully reductionist. It seems to me you're reducing everything to the upper-right (individual exterior) aspects, which includes our behavior/actions (and therefore "performance"?), or saying that nothing else matters.

But since we haven't engaged much with each other in the past, maybe I'm still not understanding all the implications of your philosophy here. Because it makes me wonder why you bother getting involved in integral communities in the first place, to be perfectly honest. And I mean that in the sense that I'd actually like to know more about you and your ideas, not as a polite (or "backhanded") way of saying I think you don't belong here.

~G

[Steven Nickeson]

Gray,
I'll post a longer reply to your questions later, but I wanted to point out that a similar discussion is going on in regard to the David Lane article beginning with this post and following at Integral Postmetaphysical Spirituality. You might be interested because it incorporates an entirely different perspective on the issue (including a discussion of this discussion).

[Grey Drane]

I'll check it out. Thanks!

[Steven Nickeson]

Gray,

Scattered throughout the Integral Province there are deviant subcultures in which people have somehow acquired, perhaps through nefarious scheming, an Integral Vision that--against all odds and all reason--does not incorporate the famous four quadrant map, I suppose you might have read on Integral Postmetaphysical Spirituality that the player known as Jim doesn't even think that Integral® is the Gold Standard. I know it sounds hard to believe, but there are even those who claim that AQAL is actually counter-productive in developing a clear perspective on Everything because it is a ridged, two dimensional, anal though inorganic mirror to a pre-given nature. Others who are more charitable in their assessment say AQAL is a beginners expedient that a student can transcend as data from the real world starts to eat away at its validity and begins shaping a more coherent picture. I tend to agree with the latter since I also had visions...40 years or so ago...literal vision that used numinous cubes of mysterious, truth embedded metal that symbolized the Whole Solid Picture of Everything. They were standard archetypal expedients, they they weren't even good material for theory, but then I have little use for theory and the decadent scholasticism into which it generally dribbles. I like what can be passed off as facts so instead of following my visions into a career as a pedant or pandit or whatever I worked 30 some years as an investigative journalist and private investigator ...careers that trash pre-given theory before it can even be stated and trash notions of The Truth even quicker.

My perception is that everything is moving and changing all the time...performance, infinitely interrelated performance. I would call it, for expedience, omni-intersubjectivity, but I think it is as difficult to define a subject and an object as it is to define interiors and exteriors. I deal with the world, on the ground, as an interrelated whole, as a moving Integral mass. I am not a theorist who scans a subject from 50,000 ft, like Mister Wilber says he does, and then minces it up along the lines that God reveals to him. You write that I put everything into the upper right, my integral world doesn't have an upper right. If you need one, fine you can reduce your performance down to that little grid. Whatever gets you through the night is okay, but try not to get any of it on me.

Steven

[shaman sun]

Hey Steven,

I think you hit the nail on the head with this response. "...that everything is moving and changing all the time...performance, infinitely interrelated performance." - This is a major part of what I am doing studies/research on in sociology. I gravitated towards Ken Wilber originally because I thought, maybe, his ideas were about this. But they inevitably seemed too boxy, fruitful and insightful yes, but again too restricted to ultimately be a mirror for "performance," or, ironically, the "flex flow" that Spiral Dynamics was talking about.

In my studies I've come across a number of other authors who have steered clear of the boxing-in, at the cost of seeming a bit too postmodern/relativistic. But... Manuel Delanda, and Deleuze describe the nature of experience, relation, flow, inter-relationships. DeLanda has tried to break down simplistic maps in sociology to reveal the dynamic relationship between many variables. To paraphrase, "Like a rain forest, any given social situation can be seen like an ecosystem, a rain forest - you can't just add water + trees + bugs and get a rain forest. In other words, reality is much more multiplicative than summative. More than the sum of its parts."

After reading Wilber I found that Deleuze, and Delanda were making a lot of sense. If integral is real, it's going to arise naturally, and without the maps, without AQAL - seeing the dynamic, complicated relationship between things is a big step. Evolution is a messy process, order on the edge of chaos. I don't think AQAL or SD really represent that. They are good stepping stones, but the real "integral revolution," is a very natural process, an unveiling of complex relationships or as you said "infinitely interrelated performance," - A moving, changing world will require a moving, changing map. These are the ideas I'm currently exploring in my research...