Integral Dissipation Theory
I am reprinting here the latest essay on my blog Integral Liberties
The tourist brochures that are endlessly pumped on-line from Integral Province are clear that most of the natural charm of this map-generated territory is the willingness of the Provincials here to lend their spirits to the cosmic course of healing and evolution, they give the known universe an integrated voice in the repetition of Emil Coue’s mantra, “Everyday, in every way, I’m getting better and etc.” They take their texts for this teaching from a literary genre that can be called The Levels of Human Development Theory: works of Gebser, Maslow and his student Graves and Graves’s students Beck and Cowan, and Lawrence Kolhburg, Carol Gilligan, Jane Loevinger, Robert Kegan, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson and on and on. Theirs is an all inclusive look at human psychophisiological to cultural processes that in its shortest form says “first you walk and then you run.” The theorists generally like to think that since running (for the short form example) is based on and grows out of walking that it is therefore “higher” and maybe even better. They’ve taken a lot of post-modern flack for their penchant to always order the ranks by gradation and quite often with more than just a slight hint of “to know an Alpha one must be an Alpha” sensibility showing; but it’s all part of the charm of this earnest little province where vanity has never been deemed a sin because: “Who knows? Maybe it has been earned.”
I don’t have any problem with the grades and gradations and the continual academic renaming and fine-turning of the obvious, for indeed—first you walk and then you run. To find another way of reaffirming that affirmation is always good work if you can get it—The Bright but Lazy Professor’s Fast Track to publications: cobble up a questionnaire for the undergrads, have the TA do the grades just like at mid-terms, and skew the definitions toward the politics of the journal to which one aspires. Nothing new or out of the ordinary there. Everything hinges on the definitions and if cleverly coined they can boost that one questionnaire and its subsequent reiterations into five or six articles, or a book, or a sub-school of the thought, or even a perpetual seat at the head table for every conference banquet from now to emeritus.
If I have a problem with the ever developing genre of Development, I find it rooted first of all in another charming and typically Provincial level of its own; a late adolescent, post-first-samadhi, arrière-goût among the Provincials that manifests in a deadly serious regard for Levels Literature, which in turn makes the lit itself not only humorless, fusty and over-precious but partial to the point of trifling, especially as other synthesizing literaturs in the province are attempting to bootstrap Developmental Studies and Theory past the Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny Fallacy, through higher orders of Spiritual Darwinism into a self-prophesying new Kosmic order. It ironic because the entire effort seems to leave out half of the final equation and so I must wonder why as much effort hasn’t been put into Degeneration Studies and Theory, Death Studies and Theory, Decomposition Studies and Theory, or Dissipation Studies and Theory; thus:
INTEGRAL DISSIPATION THEORY
About 30 years ago two men boarded a plane in Washington, D. C. Each was unknown to the other at departure, but they had two things in common beside their destination: 1) Knowledge of which row of seats in that generation of 727s had the most leg room, and 2) A close acquaintance with a well respected physicist named Dr. Charles Hyder, the now late crusading environmentalist and conservationist who at that time was in the middle of a 217-day public fast in an alley off Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. He was calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide before he broke the fast or died. The first of the two men’s commonalities put them in the last row of seats on the plane’s left side and the second sparked the conversation that is the basis of this essay.
I was one of the two, a young radical investigative journalist working out of Albuquerque, NM, USA, and D.C. The other was Dr. Stirling Colgate, an internationally known nuclear physicist, astrophysicist and later one of the several co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute. It was not long into the flight before we learned that Hyder was a mutual acquaintance, and on that point Colgate began a disquisition. He told me that he and Hyder had discussed Hyder’s environmental/conservational missions at great length—particularly his efforts to close down the coal burning power plants and gigantic strip mines in the Four Corners region. Colgate had given up on the man who would not be convinced that his scientifically based crusades to preserve the planet were not only bad science, but flew in the face of over-all evolutionary process and one of the few natural laws on which every scientist in the world could hang their hat: The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
I never had much interest in science—it was school work and I generally found it boring and void of good stories, but Colgate gave The Thermodynamics Story a compelling spin. What he laid out was essentially Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 “What is Life?” lecture series and book which coupled the Second Law with evolution by proposing that open, self-organizing, ordered systems (including living ones) created gradient equilibrium, not by falling into disorder themselves (as would be the case in a closed system like a steam engine) but by generating disorder (entropy) through feeding off the negative entropy (free energy) available in their environments. (In this study Schrödinger also proposed the existence of a living complex cell with a genetic code for replication, a proposal that inspired the research that led to the discovery of DNA.)
Based on that background, Colgate stated his argument against Hyder’s position: Every since it came into existence the Earth, everything on it, and its every process from the core to the outer edge of the atmosphere has been undergoing a metabolic dissolution in the re-cycling flow of energy from the sun’s heat to the chill of deep space, a dissolution absolutely enhanced with the inception and advance of ever increasingly complex forms of life. He said that from the replication of the first living cell to the highest levels of humanity’s technology and culture one thing about evolution has remained constant: with each higher level of evolved complexity there has been a concomitant increase in the earth’s overall efficiency in generating entropy. In fact it is the only consistantly directional activity that can be observed not only in the local solar system, but the entire known universe. Or, in other words, everything in the Kosmos is working to burn itself out; it is The Law—from the smallest known, shortest lived particle to the largest ongoing process. (Colgate was in a position to know because his proposal to the U.S. State Department (circa 1960) to monitor the ban on nuclear tests in space through the use of gamma ray detecting spy satellites led to his pioneering research into the mechanisms of supernovas and hypernova phenomena.)
Point: The supreme function of nature is nihilistic and all its life, all of Earth’s living systems, all of our humanity, every breath we take, is an integral part of that function.
The essence of Colgate’s argument to Hyder was that any well organized effort to save the planet would be accompanied by an equally efficient degradation of energy feeding the organization. Hyder’s public fast proved a micro-case in point. During the 217 days, he degraded away over half of the 300 plus pounds he weighed going into the fast. Additionally he caught the attention of thousands of people around the globe (the fewest of whom were in the USA) who sent him hundreds of pounds of mail which came into existence and organization through the degradation of energy from the fuel for chain saws, bull dozers, logging trucks, pulp mills; diesel, gasoline and jet fueled transports, electrical lighting systems, printing presses, broadcast facilities, not to mention the nutritional energy spent by the manpower that went into making all those things work. It was an equation that equals the nihilistic irony of the Universe. If one wanted to ascribe consciousness to the Kosmos one could imagine that it had structurally guided Hyder into his fast not to end nuclear proliferation (which a conscious Kosmos would resist since nuclear is its energy of choice and which Hyder’s fast failed to do) but to speed the rate of its own degeneration—which it did.
I should point out that open system thermodynamics are much more complex than what I am sketching here. In any given system, such as eco-systems found and studied in national parks from border to border, free energy circulates and recirculates throughout, like cash in a micro-economy, generating complexity and new organization. But nothing is free. Each time through the organizing energy generates the equalizing disorder in the system’s supporting environment until that environment is dissipated into weakness and general death.
It seems that this scenario tends to create certain levels of depression and denial throughout the citizenry. Inspired from Schrödinger’s seminal lectures, far more people have taken up careers in genetics than in biochemical thermodynamics. Research funding has followed the same trend. There is only one generally available book semi-geared to the layman on the thermodynamic side of the coin: Into the Cool by Schneider and Segan and one fairly comprehensive web site maintained by Rod Swenson. Evidently people don’t like to be reminded of death and decomposition on such a macroscopic scale, so I will try not to dwell on it further, besides, the end result—total entropic stasis and the literal Death of Time—is not so much the subject of this essay as the getting there, the process.
This is a “process theory” though certainly nothing like that of Alfred North Whitehead, the founder of field, in that he was a god-fearing fellow who took these things earnestly and seriously and I’m not and I don’t. So for for my requisite philosophic grounding for process I’ll backtrack past Whitehead to Nietzsche’s revelation of the obvious that all perceptions pivot on perspective. All writers have to follow this advice if they want credibility here in the death watch for Modernity. Bennita Roy was careful to do so in a recent Process Theory article that appeared in the on-line Integral Journal published by ARINA, one of the many management consulting groups that are headquartered in Integral Mall. The article put forth a process theory of integral for consideration by academia and if it had any solid human relevance beyond that, or at least a good story it might have been worth recounting at length, but I found it had neither, so I won’t. However, the article does start off on more or less the right foot:
“I hope to tease you, the reader, into a pure process orientation. This requires adopting a certain attitude—allowing one’s mental framework to release its grip on thinking in terms of things, and following me into a world of process or flow in a field of dynamic forces. It requires you to suspend structurally based perceptions to allow for new ways of orienting perceptions.”
What Roy failed to point out or follow up on, was since perceptions are perspective dependent, a process perception is almost impossible from the habitual perspective of a well educated, post-1945, American point of view in as much as most of the pilgrims treking through that category (those who would be reading articles such as hers) are not used to observing large-scale energetic and creative movements, day in, day out, or being in highly energized environments. By these I don’t mean simply frenetic places like PR firms that are pimping presidential candidates this Spring, but the ones that really count for the benefit of entropy—like the turbine galleries in Grand Coulee Dam or the raving chaos of a 20–man, steel fabrication shop anywhere in the third world, or huge railroad salvage yards where cutting torches are seven-feet long, crushers never slow down and neither do the magnetized front-end loaders that are three stories tall and careen through the waste to the peril of everything shorter. These aspects of existence have to a large degree been mediated for the sake of comfort out of the lives of Integral Journal readers. Theirs is not a world of high voltage flow or industrial strength fire, or bedlamized heat—entropy on demand—but of static structures that aim to render low energy, mediated calm. Roy’s readers had no point of reference from which to suspend habitual perceptions simply on the abstracted suggestion that it might promote understanding; so, because media brought the reader to this point, I will turn to it as a source for a few pointers toward generating those “orienting” perceptions.
A few months ago there was a TV commercial for Subaru Automobiles choreographed to the tune of the old folk-rock song “Dust in the Wind.” One sequence showed a semi-truck load of competitor cars literally decomposing and evaporating into the trailing draft; the air pressure gradient field created by the motion and heat of the carrier. That is the perceptual analogy and the perspective is from a Hubble-like telescope adrift in the Andromeda Galaxy and zeroed in on the Milky Way. Got it? Cue the time-lapse photography and there go Earth, the Sun and the rest of its little system and then the galactic mass itself dissolving into the mega-gradients of temperature, gravity, velocity and who knows what other forces. And there are no celestial Subaru plants out there minting new alternatives, just smaller and smaller models as the free entropy cycles through in ever weaker waves. Things will never be the same…again.
An optional media perspective is from the audience point of view on a sci-fi cliche confection wherein the curse of immortality is lifted from the support cast starlet who transmutes (transcends?) through the miracle of energy hungry Special FX from maid to middle age to crone to corpse to skeleton to calcium lace to dust to dust in the gradient draft. And like the well-deserved release of that world-weary, fictional form we, everything within us, everything around us is on the move, flowing outward, changing, disappearing. Everything is in the flux, even the illusion of structure. Everything is caught within a gradient, all the mythical turtles that go down, go up or go across flow in the currents. All the holons that the Holonic Nothing Butters say the Kosmos is nothing but are to open system gradients what Fun with Dick and Jane is to Of Time and the River; an analogy chosen not only for its disparate levels of complexity, but the words in the title.
Time, from the perspectives where the sense of process rules, is the flowing mirage created by joining the perception of movement to a supporting, secondary, open system process called memory. If one can imagine doing away with memory but keeping consciousness then coherence is totally lost, but then expand the span of memory from there at 0 to 0.5 seconds and coherence can be regained. (This is a meditation. Try it. It’s a kick) The sense of a moment is total and the perception of process is phenomenally acute. All is born, becomes integral to the perspective, the perception, the perceiver and passes into oblivion in 0.5 seconds. It is the integral moment: it is the omni-dimensional and all but dimensionless point where fuel integrates into fire, all the currently available and integrated potential degrades to waste, the universal razor thin rubber hits the universal, razor thin road, and the perceiver is riding on and integral to the absolute front edge of their life; nothing else is playing.
Who can ask anything greater of integral? All other models soon have to start incorporating into their concepts of The Whole deengergized, dissipated and disintegrated scraps, dregs and feces; litter, weight and inertia from the time that is no longer viable. Such a model might be entertaining to the mind but it isn’t actual or evolutionarily effective. It is a model built of dead ashes from a cold fire. It is only media, maybe even “Integral” media that can be trade marked and sold by the byte-size to expand the entropic moment into a marketable illusion of control.
Living at large in the entropic moment is not for those who need much control over, or security from, the occasionally furious wash of ravaging integration around them. But if the perceiver knows that inner security and control are the only kind there are, who knows that the concepts of external coherence and structural integration are probably best seen as projections from within, then such a moment is the perspective of choice; one is reconciled to the ride, comfortable in the heat, set for any event, and could give a rat’s ass if anything different is taught in the schools or sold on the net.
The tourist brochures that are endlessly pumped on-line from Integral Province are clear that most of the natural charm of this map-generated territory is the willingness of the Provincials here to lend their spirits to the cosmic course of healing and evolution, they give the known universe an integrated voice in the repetition of Emil Coue’s mantra, “Everyday, in every way, I’m getting better and etc.” They take their texts for this teaching from a literary genre that can be called The Levels of Human Development Theory: works of Gebser, Maslow and his student Graves and Graves’s students Beck and Cowan, and Lawrence Kolhburg, Carol Gilligan, Jane Loevinger, Robert Kegan, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson and on and on. Theirs is an all inclusive look at human psychophisiological to cultural processes that in its shortest form says “first you walk and then you run.” The theorists generally like to think that since running (for the short form example) is based on and grows out of walking that it is therefore “higher” and maybe even better. They’ve taken a lot of post-modern flack for their penchant to always order the ranks by gradation and quite often with more than just a slight hint of “to know an Alpha one must be an Alpha” sensibility showing; but it’s all part of the charm of this earnest little province where vanity has never been deemed a sin because: “Who knows? Maybe it has been earned.”
I don’t have any problem with the grades and gradations and the continual academic renaming and fine-turning of the obvious, for indeed—first you walk and then you run. To find another way of reaffirming that affirmation is always good work if you can get it—The Bright but Lazy Professor’s Fast Track to publications: cobble up a questionnaire for the undergrads, have the TA do the grades just like at mid-terms, and skew the definitions toward the politics of the journal to which one aspires. Nothing new or out of the ordinary there. Everything hinges on the definitions and if cleverly coined they can boost that one questionnaire and its subsequent reiterations into five or six articles, or a book, or a sub-school of the thought, or even a perpetual seat at the head table for every conference banquet from now to emeritus.
If I have a problem with the ever developing genre of Development, I find it rooted first of all in another charming and typically Provincial level of its own; a late adolescent, post-first-samadhi, arrière-goût among the Provincials that manifests in a deadly serious regard for Levels Literature, which in turn makes the lit itself not only humorless, fusty and over-precious but partial to the point of trifling, especially as other synthesizing literaturs in the province are attempting to bootstrap Developmental Studies and Theory past the Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny Fallacy, through higher orders of Spiritual Darwinism into a self-prophesying new Kosmic order. It ironic because the entire effort seems to leave out half of the final equation and so I must wonder why as much effort hasn’t been put into Degeneration Studies and Theory, Death Studies and Theory, Decomposition Studies and Theory, or Dissipation Studies and Theory; thus:
INTEGRAL DISSIPATION THEORY
About 30 years ago two men boarded a plane in Washington, D. C. Each was unknown to the other at departure, but they had two things in common beside their destination: 1) Knowledge of which row of seats in that generation of 727s had the most leg room, and 2) A close acquaintance with a well respected physicist named Dr. Charles Hyder, the now late crusading environmentalist and conservationist who at that time was in the middle of a 217-day public fast in an alley off Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. He was calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide before he broke the fast or died. The first of the two men’s commonalities put them in the last row of seats on the plane’s left side and the second sparked the conversation that is the basis of this essay.
I was one of the two, a young radical investigative journalist working out of Albuquerque, NM, USA, and D.C. The other was Dr. Stirling Colgate, an internationally known nuclear physicist, astrophysicist and later one of the several co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute. It was not long into the flight before we learned that Hyder was a mutual acquaintance, and on that point Colgate began a disquisition. He told me that he and Hyder had discussed Hyder’s environmental/conservational missions at great length—particularly his efforts to close down the coal burning power plants and gigantic strip mines in the Four Corners region. Colgate had given up on the man who would not be convinced that his scientifically based crusades to preserve the planet were not only bad science, but flew in the face of over-all evolutionary process and one of the few natural laws on which every scientist in the world could hang their hat: The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
I never had much interest in science—it was school work and I generally found it boring and void of good stories, but Colgate gave The Thermodynamics Story a compelling spin. What he laid out was essentially Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 “What is Life?” lecture series and book which coupled the Second Law with evolution by proposing that open, self-organizing, ordered systems (including living ones) created gradient equilibrium, not by falling into disorder themselves (as would be the case in a closed system like a steam engine) but by generating disorder (entropy) through feeding off the negative entropy (free energy) available in their environments. (In this study Schrödinger also proposed the existence of a living complex cell with a genetic code for replication, a proposal that inspired the research that led to the discovery of DNA.)
Based on that background, Colgate stated his argument against Hyder’s position: Every since it came into existence the Earth, everything on it, and its every process from the core to the outer edge of the atmosphere has been undergoing a metabolic dissolution in the re-cycling flow of energy from the sun’s heat to the chill of deep space, a dissolution absolutely enhanced with the inception and advance of ever increasingly complex forms of life. He said that from the replication of the first living cell to the highest levels of humanity’s technology and culture one thing about evolution has remained constant: with each higher level of evolved complexity there has been a concomitant increase in the earth’s overall efficiency in generating entropy. In fact it is the only consistantly directional activity that can be observed not only in the local solar system, but the entire known universe. Or, in other words, everything in the Kosmos is working to burn itself out; it is The Law—from the smallest known, shortest lived particle to the largest ongoing process. (Colgate was in a position to know because his proposal to the U.S. State Department (circa 1960) to monitor the ban on nuclear tests in space through the use of gamma ray detecting spy satellites led to his pioneering research into the mechanisms of supernovas and hypernova phenomena.)
Point: The supreme function of nature is nihilistic and all its life, all of Earth’s living systems, all of our humanity, every breath we take, is an integral part of that function.
The essence of Colgate’s argument to Hyder was that any well organized effort to save the planet would be accompanied by an equally efficient degradation of energy feeding the organization. Hyder’s public fast proved a micro-case in point. During the 217 days, he degraded away over half of the 300 plus pounds he weighed going into the fast. Additionally he caught the attention of thousands of people around the globe (the fewest of whom were in the USA) who sent him hundreds of pounds of mail which came into existence and organization through the degradation of energy from the fuel for chain saws, bull dozers, logging trucks, pulp mills; diesel, gasoline and jet fueled transports, electrical lighting systems, printing presses, broadcast facilities, not to mention the nutritional energy spent by the manpower that went into making all those things work. It was an equation that equals the nihilistic irony of the Universe. If one wanted to ascribe consciousness to the Kosmos one could imagine that it had structurally guided Hyder into his fast not to end nuclear proliferation (which a conscious Kosmos would resist since nuclear is its energy of choice and which Hyder’s fast failed to do) but to speed the rate of its own degeneration—which it did.
I should point out that open system thermodynamics are much more complex than what I am sketching here. In any given system, such as eco-systems found and studied in national parks from border to border, free energy circulates and recirculates throughout, like cash in a micro-economy, generating complexity and new organization. But nothing is free. Each time through the organizing energy generates the equalizing disorder in the system’s supporting environment until that environment is dissipated into weakness and general death.
It seems that this scenario tends to create certain levels of depression and denial throughout the citizenry. Inspired from Schrödinger’s seminal lectures, far more people have taken up careers in genetics than in biochemical thermodynamics. Research funding has followed the same trend. There is only one generally available book semi-geared to the layman on the thermodynamic side of the coin: Into the Cool by Schneider and Segan and one fairly comprehensive web site maintained by Rod Swenson. Evidently people don’t like to be reminded of death and decomposition on such a macroscopic scale, so I will try not to dwell on it further, besides, the end result—total entropic stasis and the literal Death of Time—is not so much the subject of this essay as the getting there, the process.
This is a “process theory” though certainly nothing like that of Alfred North Whitehead, the founder of field, in that he was a god-fearing fellow who took these things earnestly and seriously and I’m not and I don’t. So for for my requisite philosophic grounding for process I’ll backtrack past Whitehead to Nietzsche’s revelation of the obvious that all perceptions pivot on perspective. All writers have to follow this advice if they want credibility here in the death watch for Modernity. Bennita Roy was careful to do so in a recent Process Theory article that appeared in the on-line Integral Journal published by ARINA, one of the many management consulting groups that are headquartered in Integral Mall. The article put forth a process theory of integral for consideration by academia and if it had any solid human relevance beyond that, or at least a good story it might have been worth recounting at length, but I found it had neither, so I won’t. However, the article does start off on more or less the right foot:
“I hope to tease you, the reader, into a pure process orientation. This requires adopting a certain attitude—allowing one’s mental framework to release its grip on thinking in terms of things, and following me into a world of process or flow in a field of dynamic forces. It requires you to suspend structurally based perceptions to allow for new ways of orienting perceptions.”
What Roy failed to point out or follow up on, was since perceptions are perspective dependent, a process perception is almost impossible from the habitual perspective of a well educated, post-1945, American point of view in as much as most of the pilgrims treking through that category (those who would be reading articles such as hers) are not used to observing large-scale energetic and creative movements, day in, day out, or being in highly energized environments. By these I don’t mean simply frenetic places like PR firms that are pimping presidential candidates this Spring, but the ones that really count for the benefit of entropy—like the turbine galleries in Grand Coulee Dam or the raving chaos of a 20–man, steel fabrication shop anywhere in the third world, or huge railroad salvage yards where cutting torches are seven-feet long, crushers never slow down and neither do the magnetized front-end loaders that are three stories tall and careen through the waste to the peril of everything shorter. These aspects of existence have to a large degree been mediated for the sake of comfort out of the lives of Integral Journal readers. Theirs is not a world of high voltage flow or industrial strength fire, or bedlamized heat—entropy on demand—but of static structures that aim to render low energy, mediated calm. Roy’s readers had no point of reference from which to suspend habitual perceptions simply on the abstracted suggestion that it might promote understanding; so, because media brought the reader to this point, I will turn to it as a source for a few pointers toward generating those “orienting” perceptions.
A few months ago there was a TV commercial for Subaru Automobiles choreographed to the tune of the old folk-rock song “Dust in the Wind.” One sequence showed a semi-truck load of competitor cars literally decomposing and evaporating into the trailing draft; the air pressure gradient field created by the motion and heat of the carrier. That is the perceptual analogy and the perspective is from a Hubble-like telescope adrift in the Andromeda Galaxy and zeroed in on the Milky Way. Got it? Cue the time-lapse photography and there go Earth, the Sun and the rest of its little system and then the galactic mass itself dissolving into the mega-gradients of temperature, gravity, velocity and who knows what other forces. And there are no celestial Subaru plants out there minting new alternatives, just smaller and smaller models as the free entropy cycles through in ever weaker waves. Things will never be the same…again.
An optional media perspective is from the audience point of view on a sci-fi cliche confection wherein the curse of immortality is lifted from the support cast starlet who transmutes (transcends?) through the miracle of energy hungry Special FX from maid to middle age to crone to corpse to skeleton to calcium lace to dust to dust in the gradient draft. And like the well-deserved release of that world-weary, fictional form we, everything within us, everything around us is on the move, flowing outward, changing, disappearing. Everything is in the flux, even the illusion of structure. Everything is caught within a gradient, all the mythical turtles that go down, go up or go across flow in the currents. All the holons that the Holonic Nothing Butters say the Kosmos is nothing but are to open system gradients what Fun with Dick and Jane is to Of Time and the River; an analogy chosen not only for its disparate levels of complexity, but the words in the title.
Time, from the perspectives where the sense of process rules, is the flowing mirage created by joining the perception of movement to a supporting, secondary, open system process called memory. If one can imagine doing away with memory but keeping consciousness then coherence is totally lost, but then expand the span of memory from there at 0 to 0.5 seconds and coherence can be regained. (This is a meditation. Try it. It’s a kick) The sense of a moment is total and the perception of process is phenomenally acute. All is born, becomes integral to the perspective, the perception, the perceiver and passes into oblivion in 0.5 seconds. It is the integral moment: it is the omni-dimensional and all but dimensionless point where fuel integrates into fire, all the currently available and integrated potential degrades to waste, the universal razor thin rubber hits the universal, razor thin road, and the perceiver is riding on and integral to the absolute front edge of their life; nothing else is playing.
Who can ask anything greater of integral? All other models soon have to start incorporating into their concepts of The Whole deengergized, dissipated and disintegrated scraps, dregs and feces; litter, weight and inertia from the time that is no longer viable. Such a model might be entertaining to the mind but it isn’t actual or evolutionarily effective. It is a model built of dead ashes from a cold fire. It is only media, maybe even “Integral” media that can be trade marked and sold by the byte-size to expand the entropic moment into a marketable illusion of control.
Living at large in the entropic moment is not for those who need much control over, or security from, the occasionally furious wash of ravaging integration around them. But if the perceiver knows that inner security and control are the only kind there are, who knows that the concepts of external coherence and structural integration are probably best seen as projections from within, then such a moment is the perspective of choice; one is reconciled to the ride, comfortable in the heat, set for any event, and could give a rat’s ass if anything different is taught in the schools or sold on the net.
Comment
-
Comment by MetroPunk on July 14, 2008 at 11:32am -
i think the dissipation theory
is fab Steven...
only problem i see is that
it is a grumpy-old man theory...
slanted by cynicism and not
balanced by a humility of uncertainty.
if you think the world is ONLY
'running down'
you haven't done yer homework
re: human history.
we use (energy)
and abuse, yes
but human civilization has
become more complex over time
- the uni/multi-verse has
gotten more complex...
and how do you know energy
isn't spilling into the universe
somewhere 'out there'
maybe, just maybe
we are 'running up'???
no final theories right???
-
Comment by BrightAbyss~ on July 14, 2008 at 12:03am -
What I meant to imply was re: 'Self-Organization and Dissipative Structures'.
I truly enjoyed your whole IDT post! It was a great reminder of why flexibility AND complexity is what matters most.
Integral is only praxis for our little tribe (IRG) ... We seek that which unites and mobilizes Post-Provincialism.
You dig?
-
Comment by Steven Nickeson on July 3, 2008 at 1:22pm -
Justin,
If you are going to be successful in doing what you say you will be doing in five years, I will respectfully suggest that you start giving a great deal of time and energy toward the development of facilities in critical thinking and impeccable rhetoric. You demonstrate a little raw talent for the first and marginally less for the second. These are two things that I have been practicing for about 45 years; I have made my living at them. If you don't make a study of these two qualities you might be able to pull wedgies on some of the little brats, but you will remain an inert punching bag for the big boys and girls. I assume that is not what you want, but I might be wrong...who knows what freaky issues youngsters have with self-esteem.
I would leave my reply at that, but since you're here--
1. If you were familiar with the techniques and strategies of critical thought you would have known, or at least taken the time to do the research that told you: If you follow the thought behind your statement "(a)nnihilation is only half of the process of nature, perhaps even less," to its logical conclusion it would lead to the invention of a perpetual motion machine, or the discovery of a perpetual motion organism. So far in the history of this planet, the workings of every machine ever invented, or every organism or system ever discovered, have provided evidence that perpetual motion is a mythical element from Tall Tales for Children and nothing more. To overcome that you would have to do the science and math that would overturn the findings of, among many others, Nicolas-Leonard-Sadi Carnot, Ludwig Boltzmann, Jules-Henri Poincare, James Clerk Maxwell and Erwin Schrodinger; a list that only takes us to the 1940s . Are you up to doing that?
2. If you were familiar with the techniques and strategies of rhetoric you would have never written or ever said, "...you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet." That kind of cliche would be well below your dignity. The big girls go home with the dignified rhetoricians, the wedgie givers leave along.
3. If you were serious about making a difference in these matters you would have given the text what is called in critical theory a "close reading." There you would have discovered that the essay had very little to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics or entropic stasis, the two were only provisional tools for establishing a critique of the Structuralist tendencies of Integral Theory that are too heavily freighted with didactic minutia while the syncretic possibilities of an Integral Process Theory lie in absolute simplicity before all the players who are not paying attention to them. And it would have been clear that the entire little project was driven by the ideas in the last two paragraphs. In fact everything in the essay was a set-up for the last paragraph. Lets see you critique it.
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Comment by Steven Nickeson on July 3, 2008 at 6:24am
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Justin,
The operative word in the last paragraph of your comment is "postpone." Do you know what postpone means? It does not mean "infinitely delay" or "stop." This in turn means that the last two paragraphs of your comment do not support whatever it is you are trying to say in the first one.
Equating nihilism with a vacuum is a category error of staggering proportions
1. Nihilistic is an adjective that refers most often to something that destroys meaning.
2. A vacuum gives meaning to a non-vacuum--this is simple linguistics 101 where meaning is established by the establishment of difference. A vacuum, which is an area of low pressure, gives meaning to an area of high pressure because of the difference between them.
3. Nihilistic activity is not creative activity.
4. A vacuum creates. It creates what is called a gradient. This is the scale of the difference between the high pressure area and the low pressure area.
5. Yes, nature does abhor a vacuum. When any barrier between a high pressure area and a low pressure area is removed (which is something nature does everyday in the procession of weather systems for example) the area of high pressure flows into the area of low pressure (the wannabe vacuum) and the gradient between the two is destroyed and the meaning of each is destroyed as the two blend into one...no difference.
6. The Second Law of Thermodynamics describes the natural process of eliminating gradients...i.e. eliminating vacuums among other things.
7. The hypothetical state of complete entropic status is not a vacuum, it is everything as one, no gradients, no differences, no meanings, no identity, no flow; no-thing, a nihilistic result of a natural process.
Yes, life is good when one knows how to think.
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Comment by Steven Nickeson on May 25, 2008 at 7:33am
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BrightAbyss,
By definition entropy cannot create anything...the gradations (such as in temperature where there is an energetic flow of heat from a warm object into a cool environment) have been balanced out and there is no more creative movement. But the movement of energy toward stasis forms processional patterns such as the building in which you live or the patterns of contact and interchange among your circle of friends...call them a physical structure or a social structure. So let's look at process...
This is just off the top of my head, but--it appears to me that Integral is organized around a rather low energy core...the fact that you asked the question above is an indication that Integral is not a "movement" in a moderately strict definition of what sociologists call a "movement," in as much as movements have a well defined goal...eliminate alcohol or equalize educational opportunities and access to public office, or stop a war--processional patterns of higher energy. To find what patterns the Integral process can help form, or try to form, so as to become a "movement," it might be wise to take a genealogical look at Integral.
Integral has several roots...I think the oldest is a neo-platonic romanticism which on one hand can fertilize the seeds of social darwinism, or, on the other, spark the cultural evolutionary theories of Gebser. Then there is the root that goes back to Theosophy and runs through Sri Aurobindo to the up-welling of interest in eastern contemplative traditions that began 45 years ago or so. Then there is the root that goes back to traditional phenomenology's distrust of reductionist science and analytic philosophy and which grew one branch into existentialism and existential psych, which joined with Gestalt psych, and humanist psych to join with the contemplatives and more sophisticated druggies to birth Transpersonal Psych. And then one can trace standard European Romanticism through the American Transcendentalists of the mid-1800s into the Reformed Church of the Spiritual But Not Religious Religion that permeates much of Integral because it permeates much of educated middle class North America which has joined with the contemplatives to create a kind of analogue to humanistic inclined Liberal Protestantism with S. Guatama playing the role of Jesus and Nagarjuna featured as St. Paul. (All of these traditions incorporate various forms of "post-formal" cognition--Goethe was using post-formal cognition in his scientific processes and studies long before the phrase was coined--so I don't think it plays as much of a role in the process as it is given credit for. In other words it is just a new name for an old habit that lost some respectability to analytic philosophy. Some Integralites are insistent in trying to restore it to common academic processes such as making the contemplative traditions a legitimate subject for field science research. Add that to a plea for more cross-discipline studies plus a little more respect for those professors and students who prefer the broad view to reductionism, and one has pretty much the full Integral Academic agenda.)
So it would appear that Integral (right now at least) is a footnote to a long standing kind of transcendental liberal (as in non-nationalistic) romanticism which is great for inspiring social workers, management consultants, personal coaches, and humanistic shrinks and other service-worker/helping-professional, mid-to-low energy operations. Given the fact that Integral, almost by definition is a synthesizing kind of outlook, Integralites need to be reconciled to the fact they will always be relegated to the lower energy social applications because synthesis seeks to reduce gradients rather than create them. The majority of people will sniff around Integral for a time and then, bored, move along to something else because synthesis lowers energy flow but polarization increases it--the former is sleep inducing, the latter vivifying. (Is this why Ken Wilber occasionally has to pick a fight with someone? Is it because he has to take a break from perpetuating a pattern that in the long run is one of the most boring, plodding processional patterns around?)
Right now, after re-reading what I just riffed off your question, I don't think there are a lot of new patterns that Integral can create--a little curriculum reform here, a little inspirational consultation there, crank up a few more burnt-out social workers for another run at injustice. As Richard Rorty wrote here there aren't a lot of issues around that are crying out for radical philosophic solutions and even if there were, Integral just isn't that radical, its more of a soft, "circle up the chairs and let's share..." kind of operation. Circling up the chairs isn't a bad pattern, fewer people are hurt there than in a mud slinging fight for a seat on the school board. It is in the long respected traditions from which Integral is trying to be born and Integralites could do worse than just float along in the slower shallows of that flow, wait for an opportunity to take charge, and not be too disappointed when some higher-energy instigator beats them to it.
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Comment by BrightAbyss~ on May 25, 2008 at 12:45am
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Entropy creates new structures...
What kind of structures should 'integral' (post-formal cognition) create?
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