Comments on “A bridge to meta-rationality vs. civilizational collapse”

Can you recommend a good on-ramp for understanding Foucault? My background is basically all math/science/software, with some philosophy reading for fun. I tried to read vol. 1 of the History of Sexuality last year, but found it damn near impenetrable. Are there some prerequisites to following Foucault that I might be missing?

I don’t know if this fits the model, but here is the story of how I might have gotten (close?) to Stage 5.

I’ve always liked science, and I went on to get a BSc in Mechanical Engineering. At some point, I thought I had a complete view of the world. Consciousness seemed like a gap there, but I handwaved it away by saying ‘complexity’.

At some point, I began reading philosophy, and asking ‘Why’ to several assumptions I had been making. This ended up with me thinking that nothing was justified, and that every assertion was false. (e.g. ‘The Higgs Boson exists’ really says ‘Some guys say they did an experiment and said that it exists with 5sigma certainty, etc).

For the same reason positivism fail, this attitude ended up failing too. I came to read about foundationalism and about how conceptual analysis fails (e.g. you cannot even define ‘table’ with a definition such that every plausible table fits it). This crisis didn’t happen with pain, depression, and anguish, but perhaps just because I’m not the kind of person that has negative feelings in general.

Along the way, I developed some heuristics to be right (how to read papers, who to trust, how to pick experts ,etc), and end up seeing a bit childish the insistance in some corners of the net (e.g. Less Wrong) that there has to be one single step by step method to acquire knowledge about any knowledge field.

I still want such a method to exist, but right now I don’t think there can be.

Does this count as getting to Stage 5, or is there something missing?

To the extent that I understand either (not well), I get the impression that some magical orders may already support the 4->5 transition. I’ll have to do some research!

A possible component to a 4-5 bridge for STEM people might go through computability theory (one could also call it formalizability theory). What you learn there is that essentially every formal system is limited and has blind spots. A general method of producing knowledge is impossible. Formal system cannot have a complete self-reference and they cannot describe their own evolution. They are a-historical. On the other hand, human beings seem to be creative. They can move from one formalism to another. You can see here what creativity is (essentially the ability to compute non-computable functions). A quasi-formal (mathematical) argument of how such a creativity is possible is the notion of productive functions as developed by E. Post in 1944. Here one can see how one can extend every formalism but that it is impossible to integrate this extension process into the formalism without getting a limited formalism again. From within mathematics, you get a model for creative processes here that cannot be completely formalized. From here, one can get the insight that the project of AI and cognitive science to find the laws or cognition and develop a formal model of human cognition is infeasible in principle. There are no general laws of cognition. Human cognition is informal in this (quite exact and rational, non-woo) sense. Every formal model of humans is incomplete and hence any formal description of human culture is only partial. Humans are historical as are their cultures. You have to always operate with a multitude of formal models wich have to be viewed as partial, limited tools only. There is a trade-off between exactness and generality: any exact description is special, any general description is vague. There is no general and exact theory. If any formal description of humans (and their activities, like, e.g. science) is only partial, then any ethical system must also be partial and here as well, in the realm of values and ethics, we have to operate with partial, patchy systems. There is no Absolute. Reality, physical, cultural, mental and social, always has more properties than can be derived in any of our formal systems. A possible point of departure into such a direction is the insight that this incompleteness of all formalisms (systems, algorithms, procedural systems in institutions etc.) can be mathematically proven (and quite simply, with a simple diagonalization proof). That makes it palatable for STEM-people (like myself, I have a computer science/linguistics background - however I am currently studying history and philosophy as a hobby and I don’t find the department I am studying in so dominated by postmodernists and I am not sure the humanities are like you describe everywhere. Maybe here in Germany the situation is different from the US).

One thing that migt also help is through reflection of music and art (especially abstract art). I think the experience of beauty develops out of a mixture of pattern (order) and disorder, that the experience of beauty arrises from successfully discovering order. If there is too much order, this is no longer possible after a short time, the work of art or music is boring. If there is too much disorder, it is also not possible, the work is confusing. Between these two extremes there is a state of flow where we can discover new order repeatedly. The quality of a work here arises from the impossibility of describing it easily in terms of a single system of order, although some (limited) order can be found. Perceiving and practicing art or music and reflecting upon it can in this way lead to the insight that any fixed system is limited and that quality arises from a situation where order is present but not total. Where you have total order, you get kitsch (just like there seems to be a close connection between ideology and kitsch, both consist in a restriction of cognition (thinking or perception) to simple fixed patterns, reducing the fullnes of possibilities.

Great article. Thank you for your work. This was posted on the subreddit I admin, http://reddit.com/r/sorceryofthespectacle.

We are building just such a bridge community on Telegram. Contact me here if you are interested in seeing the ecosystem we have build :-). http://telegram.me/deicidus.

So David, how did you get to stage 5? Was it your Heideggerian AI research, Shambhala, Aro, some combination? Apologies if you’ve already written about that and I missed/forgot it.

I wonder (along with Andreas) if the standard undergrad STEM glossing of Godel and the “crisis of foundations” (frequently, I guess, mystified) might often be a kick onto that (unbuilt) bridge. “Mathematics and the Roots of Postmoderism” by Vladimir Tasic ( http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Roots-Postmodern-Thought-Vladimir/dp/0195139674 ) was a pretty lucid drawing of that link, I think. And out of the same stream: have you ever read Whitehead? His course from the Principia to Process&Reality might be the clearest one-man bridging that’s out there. “Modes of Thought”, I think, is a good place to start.

Many thanks David. This is a very lucid summary of thinking that’s been more vaguely rolling over in my mind for a while. There’s something very powerful in Kegan’s work when allied with a systems friendly worldview.

A formal approach that I’ve found useful in perhaps seeing the pathway is the Kegan derived work that Otto Laske has done in a) providing an overview of the movements in cognition that, to him (and I find it plausible), underpin stage transitions and b) providing a pseudo-handbook of, in his terms, dialectical thinking in which groupings of questions guide thought beyond what your Buddhist training sometimes refers to as the “is-is not” worldview which is typical of Kegan 4 (and 2 and 3, of course).

Andreas’ comments seem useful though I think he underplays the force of the realisation that, despite this ambiguity, incompleteness and slop in theories and models, stuff works. :-) We can work in and with the world despite not having a firmly and unshakeably correct grasp on it in all its detail.

To the extent that I’ve stumbled into a 5-ish worldview it’s been a combination of STEM training and work (coding designing and sys progging), Buddhism (w/meditation) and psychotherapy.

Really getting the implications of how/why therapy works and how to do therapy in ways which are both humanly and neuro-physiologically friendly is a powerful moon-pointing finger.

http://interdevelopmentals.org/

I asked to a friend who knows about this more than me, and he recommended this book about Foucault
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/foucault-a-very-short-introduction-9780192805577?cc=gb&lang=en&

Thanks for the hints and links.
I am currently developing the line of thought described (in a far too compressed form) in my first comment on https://creativisticphilosophy.wordpress.com/.

Artir asks if there’s something missing in his current state that would be present in stage 5. I’ll suggest a short answer but ask that it be borne in mind that stage 5 is indeed a construct whose concepts and relations are still in conversational development, perhaps partially through this very conversation and I’m not claiming defining rights.

So, one thing that might be missing is the active understanding that, as David points out elsewhere, the question that is asked itself conditions the domain in which an answer will be found. So: any “right” answer has to specify the domain (concepts, purposes, practice-community, …) in which it is “right”. There is a dynamic interplay between the question(ers) and the nature of the answers which are seen to “work”. As Michael Basseches points out in Dialectical Thinking and Adult Development, 19th century physics found the Newtonian f = ma entirely accurate and reliable. The requirements put on 20th century physics by newer data made f = ma a “right” answer only in domains in which Einsteinian effects were negligible. In plane geometry the internal angles of a triangle must sum to 180 degrees; in spherical geometry that is no longer true.

So: stage 5 includes an active awareness of the participation of the questioner in conditioning the answers that will become available and the reciprocal/re-entrant influence of those answers on the questioner, potentially leading to an evolving almost organic system of question<>questioner<>answer.

Comments?

David I am grateful for your post and am hopeful it can generate broader interest, metrics and education around these developmental issues. My approach to this topic has mainly been the result of my own work regarding the relationship between identity and memory, correlating stages of moral development to qualities of consciousness, my own experiences with meditation over time, and transitions in my own cognitive process that seem necessitated by all-of-the-above. My conclusions so far are that a few specific features of consciousness that facilitate the 4-5 transition also open a window into an additional altitude of development - what I might propose as Stage 6. These qualities or characteristics can be summarized in this way:

1) The development and honoring of all input streams (rational, emotional, somatic, transrational, etc.)
2) Creating a “neutral holding field” of consciousness that promotes equal and multidimensional consideration of all input streams.
3) Exercising multidialectical deliberation and conditional conclusions in this context, which is inherently open to continuous revision.
4) Refining all of these characteristics through a lens (a cofactor, if you will) of love-consciousness as the guiding intentionality.
5) Operationalizing and assessing outputs via values-based functional intelligence.

I am still in the process of developing these ideas and the language used to describe them, but you can get a glimpse of that development here:
http://tcollinslogan.com/code-3/images/ManagingComplexity.pdf

I hope you find this interesting. Regardless, however, I will look forward to where all of this takes you.

I’m not especially qualified to make this judgement, but it does seem to me that proper teaching of Stage 4 systems necessarily includes their inherent limitations. Andrea’s mentioning computability theory, Math Ed’s speaking of Godel - these limits inform the use of the Stage 4 systems to such a degree that I’m not sure one can be said to have truly learned them at all without them.

My very speculative guess is that proper Stage 4 education with the limits taught, would severely reduce the amount of people hitting a Stage 4.5 wall.

STEM without a deep foundation of understanding is like Feynman’s comments on Brazilian STEM education. “After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant.” I can’t help but think that this is something like a Stage 3.5.

I’m finding this series of essays and chapters very interesting and challenging to read. I’m STEM educated and count myself quite lucky. As you know I’m still working through the process of logically deconstructing the Buddhist traditional approaches to two myths in particular: the Myth of the Just-World (i.e. karma) and the Myth of the Afterlife (i.e. rebirth).

I’m acutely aware that some of colleagues will find my conclusions quite objectionable. I say that there is no Just-World and there is no afterlife. Many Buddhists already want to cast me out of the Buddhist fraternity as an apostate and heretic. I get that. But the application of rationality to these matters (and I’m just talking rationality, not even science) is highly destructive for doctrines and dogmas. On the other hand, the lack of application is destructive for people.

At the same time I maintain good relations with my mother who was for many years a fundamentalist Christian and has now converted to Catholicism. We talk about her experiences and views and it’s been very instructional for me to decide not argue with her. I just listen and accept that she is expressing values that I can appreciate, even if the ideas she uses to do that are irrational. I learned to tolerate the fairly strong cognitive dissonance of talking about God and see beyond the words to the person I love. Life is just too short to fall out over this stuff.

The knowledge that there is no Just-World and no Afterlife might easily have sent me into despair I suppose, but I’m so familiar with depression and despair after decades of it, that maybe nowadays I’m more robust when it comes to ideas (relationships with people can easily throw me back into depression, but ideas I find relatively easy). Talking with my mother recently about this stuff I explained my beliefs, but it occurred to me that they do not make life meaningless, if anything the opposite is true. If there is no afterlife and life is not inherently fair, then it is up to us to step up and live well right now. It’s more important in the face of the collapse of traditional beliefs, I find, and more meaningful also.

One question I have is this. At what stage does the stage that one is in become unimportant? Ie. if I set out stages to someone, what stage do they have to get to, to stop seeing it as a competition and/or commentary on their value as a human being. This seems important, because I cannot imagine some people I know reading this material and seeing themselves positively in relation to it. I’m sure most people immediately begin over-estimating where they are on the path :-)

I suppose my other concern is that, since Kegan wrote, not only might the stages be better defined, but rationality has been virtually redefined. I’m again referring to that paper by Mercier and Sperber. Maybe this relates to the stages? It’s now fairly widely accepted that under test conditions, most humans do much worse than random guessing at solo reasoning tasks (we routinely fall into cognitive biases and logical fallacies, the lists of which are surprisingly long). To me this suggests that the very concept of “rationality” needs looking at. M&S argue that reason does not even begin to function until we are arguing against an idea. This would seem to have consequences for how Kegan’s model articulates what is happening in stage 4 and 5.

Stage 3 math: We learn how to perform algorithms and solve simple problems in arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. We are learning useful techniques and “true” “facts” about things that unquestionably exist, like shapes and numbers.

Stage 3.5 math: We learn how to prove things about numbers and shapes deductively, starting from axioms that are “self-evident”.

Stage 4 math: Axiomatic systems and rigor expand to cover the whole mathematical landscape. We learn how to make even calculus formal and rigorous. We know what the “dx” in the integral really means. We learn how to make proofs formal. Proofs are no longer deductive prose about math, they are syntactically formal objects like computer programs that can be checked for validity by a computer. We yearn for the One True System under which all mathematics can be formalized. We learn ZFC. We are happy.

Stage 4.5 math: We learn Godel’s theorem. Not ZFC, nor any other can be the One True System. We try to make sense of this. We tell ourselves it doesn’t really matter but we don’t believe it. We are despondent.

Stage 5 math: We learn of more systems. We learn of NBG, and of CoC, and of the large cardinal axioms, and of a spectrum of systems astronomically weaker than ZFC, yet sill capable of formalizing most “real” math. We learn how category theory and logic come together at Topos theory. We learn that intuitionism, which we formally regarded as crazy, is actually the best logic for some jobs. As we learn more systems, and how they relate to each other, we become more at ease with the idea that none of them are The One. We start to really believe that maybe there’s no truth of the matter of whether or not the Continuum Hypothesis is true. But we’re still confident that there is a truth to the matter of whether 7 is prime. This no longer feels like a contradiction. Most of the time, we see theorems as being capable of being formalized into a spectrum of systems, rather than being shorthand for a overly-verbose formalization in The System.

I’m only writing this to keep up to date with comments. Fascinating topic, though. Will write my own conclusions on how to get people to stage 5, which may not be as difficult as it seems if the community support Dave hints at is present, perhaps even in the form of a council of ‘wise’ elders: stage 4.5 is pretty rough though. I share Dave’s concerns regarding the collapse of society so what worries me most is whether it is possible for a large enough contingent of folks to get to 5 and then creatively re-imagine society from positions of power and influence and help guide the direction our species takes. We’re pretty short on time. I guess we’re screwed but hey, it’s worth having a go.

Hello David,

I thought this deserved a fuller response than a couple tweets (@katherinetev).

I’ve always been a pretty extreme outlier. It takes a real weirdo to dedicate her whole youth to understanding reality, prioritizing it over relationships, sex, employment and even sometimes food! Nevertheless, I could still always find a few other cranks with whom I could meaningfully relate.

But since I recently overcame a long depression and illness and transitioned to a new way of understanding reality, it’s been impossible to find people I can relate to. It’s even difficult to describe this new way of understanding/being/thinking, but one of the most telling changes is that I’m always holding my tongue because I’m about to say something I know my rational-minded friends will interpret as woo. I don’t mean it that way.

The best explanation I’ve been able to come up with on my own is that I see the world from a level of abstraction that dissolves a lot of apparent contradictions, and what sounds like woo is simply the most efficient system available for referencing certain phenomena. My project of seeking is over, and my task now is to communicate what I’ve learned, which’ll be just as hard (but not as painful ;))

This essay provided a framework from which I can understand what’s happened to me and why I can’t connect to anyone. Basically, I’ve transitioned to Stage 5, completely on my own, with no help, and that’s NOT a good thing until I can tackle the monumental task of conveying my insights to others.

You say “It is probably still possible to reach stage 4 in some English departments, but you’d have to be smart, lucky, dedicated, and discreet—so I’ve made that a dotted box in the diagram. If you do reach it, the genuine pomo critique is still available; I’ve drawn it with a solid line. However, the critique leads only to ultra-relativistic nihilism. The logical next step, a positive non-eternalist stage 5 cultural and social vision, does not yet exist.”

So apparently I don’t exist, which would clearly explain why I’m not doing so well socially!

Seriously though…here’s how I reached it: I went to St. John’s, where non-geeks are systematically educated to Stage 4; I became fascinated with postmodernism; I went through nihilistic despair after encountering speculative realism and climate change realism; and then I simply spent such an ungodly amount of effort trying to read, think, and theorize my way out of my predicament that…I did. And then I saw I’d theorized my way out of society.

The very few others who understand the world similarly are of a slightly different cognitive phenotype and an extremely different social ingroup: mostly, as you say, STEM people. And you’re right, it’s extremely difficult to achieve this transition without help, but hey, if you’re a reasonably smart person and willing to ditch your life and forego basic needs for a few years, hey, it’s totally doable.

So I’m in a set that I’m sure has a couple other members but what’re the odds of meeting them? I’m very relieved to have encountered this, even though I’m not in STEM (well…did study neuroscience briefly), but I feel I have more chance to relate to STEM “post-rats” than to a stage 3 or 4 humanities major.

I’m not looking for help at this point, just to make some connections with others who understand this perspective, despite my different academic background. I see I’m not alone in finding this transition alienating, and hope we can connect more in the future :)

PS some more thoughts on the nuances of 4.5 to 5 transition: You’re correct, it’s more than an intellectual shift. There are degrees though…I doubt it’s possible to be solidly at 5 intellectually while remaining completely stuck in 4.5 emotionally and behaviorally; but one could develop asynchronously, certain parts of the transition could be less fully actualized, and that’s down to the lack of “bridges” to assist with the transition. In my case, I’m solidly at 5 existentially, yet I have catch-up work to do on communication skills, which accounts in part for my social issues. Again demonstrating the need for new social forms to accommodate this transition.

To Katherine: “relationships, sex, employment and even sometimes food” are NOT (aspects of) reality? Uh oh! I’m in trouble! ;-)

To Jayarava: [paraphrased] When does one stop caring about what stage one is at? My guess is about the same point at which one stops caring about enlightenment. Which isn’t an answer—>

The discussion here has been focussed very much on the cognitive aspects of our supposed stages. Katherine’s last point about not being able to be fully 5-ish while still emotionally pre-5-ish is exactly on the mark in the Laskean/Bassechean schema (Kegan doesn’t explicitly differentiate cognitive and socio-emotional dimensions).

The cognitive insights of 5-ishness (no RIGHT answers but that doesn’t matter) lead one into the corollary understanding that my view, however useful, is not privileged and I have to give up a reliance (self validation) on being right. To be more right (?LessWrong?) I must consult and cooperate with others to get their perspective so we can build a shared concept of the world (the mosaic of STEM knowledge which is the work of many minds). Socio-emotionally (?spiritually?) I must value others and their values, opinions, quirks as I do my own (as with Jayarava’s appreciation of his mother’s humanity) regardless of the cognitive and conceptual gulfs between us.

In partial answer to Jayarava’s question, I see that reduced reliance of my self-appreciation or self-validation as at least a necessary precursor of not caring at what stage I am. In typing that sentence I typo-ed “what sage I am” which seems symptomatic. :-D

Thanks to Jayarava for pointing out Mercier and Sperber’s work in his blog a while back. That work is typical of the research (cf Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Antonio Damasio, Alan Schore, Joseph LeDoux, …) that is pointing out the utter contingency (buddhist emptiness) of the substrate of our embodied emotional/cognitive selves.

Strayed back into cognition again - it like a magnet with language as its field. The emotional orientation of 4 might be tolerance; that of 5 might be an increasingly inclusive compassionate engagement.

(Apologies for a ridiculously long comment. Maybe I should start a blog.) I’m sort of flying blind here as I don’t really understand what Stage 5 is supposed to look like. Nonetheless, some promising leads from the world of Western magic:

In an alternate timeline, you got into Druidry and ceremonial magic instead of Buddhism and started calling yourself John Michael Greer. You went on to write a series of blog posts about Consensus Paganism, developed a version of kabbalah with monism as one of the Big Three klippot, and are now explaining Druid philosophy in a series of horror novels. It’s weird. You two should probably team up somehow.

There are at least two Greer-world analogues of the current post. His framework is similar enough to yours to be relevant, and different enough to be interesting.

Producing Democracy is about the decline of “dialectic” (≈ systematic thinking) in America, what that means for democratic institutions (SPOILER: bad things), and how to go about fixing it.

The Clenched Fist of Reason is about going beyond Stage 4, especially the bit starting around “As the charisma of Greek rationalism faded…”

Attempted summary: These problems are actually not new, and most civilizations have gone through a similar cycle. First, the educated elite gets really into some form of “rationalism” (related to your “systematic mode” and “rationalist eternalism”), and casts aside all sorts of useful and important things as too “irrational”. Eventually they discover the problems and limitations of their particular rationalism and start wringing their hands about how everything is meaningless. Finally, they figure out how to work with both systematic rationality and irrationality (maybe related to Stage 5, I’m not sure). Civilization normally collapses anyway. But in the best-case scenario, it handles its decline gracefully and/or plants the seeds for future interesting civilizations.

Elsewhere, he mentions an exercise from the Druid tradition called “ternary thinking”, which is about noticing and challenging false dichotomies. Seems probably related in that (1) it’s a way of breaking out of a specific kind of patterned thinking without defaulting to nihilism and (2) your whole blook is structured around ternaries.

Greer has written a book about running a magical order which I’m hoping has some things to say about the community support angle. He also has an order of his own, The Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn, which I don’t know much about yet.

David, thanks for stopping by, I do find this a fascinating discussion!

Simon: Aargh! Haha, of course…eh…uh…careers and sex? Part of reality? But, this actually raises an interesting point: to a pre-5 worldview, stuff like careers, relationships, whatever do tend to appear different from “Reality.” When I set out on my search, I saw the two as separate. Hence the Zen mountain climbers, the Hindu sannyasins, and people like me all stop our worldly lives thinking we will find truth that way. And maybe we do, but with a catch.

It almost seems that, at least without our hypothetical Stage 4.5-5 bridges, there’s a necessary delay between cognitive and social arrival at Stage 5, as this illusion that truth and everyday life are separate does tend to delay truth-seekers’ development in social aspects of life. So when they come down from the mountain, it’s oops…I forgot how to do this.

The discussion here has been pretty universalized. But we all know that STEM folks have a bit more trouble on average with social and communication skills, and that can exacerbate the tendency of asynchronous development across stages. In my case as well, despite my humanities education I’m nowhere near neurotypical, so it can be quite a challenge to bring social/communication skills in line with cognitive and existential understanding. And I’d go even further to suggest social and emotional development are also modular. One could be, for example, full of the compassion Simon describes, but clueless trying to express it :P

If you go to the right school and are intellectually curious, an Economics PhD can be a good bridge to both Stage 4 rationality and Stage 5 meta-rationality. First you learn, in great detail, a system of thought that is accepted as truth. You master it, make it part of your identity, and learn to use it. Many economists never get beyond this, but with experience and good mentoring, you learn that all models are wrong but some models are useful. You see that different economic theories and systems are better in different situations, and learn to move between them. The best economists, like Tyler Cowen, are clearly Stage 5 thinkers, and their blogs are good guides to this thought.

I suspect that the better law schools also enable a 3 to 4 to 5 transition. Lawyers learn the legal system very well, and learn that, while essential for society’s functioning, it is an evolved happenstance rather than an ultimate truth. I am fairly sure that most of our competent technocratic politicians are Stage 5 thinkers, and most of them are lawyers.

Successfully managing a large organization will also require a Stage 5 mind, and raising through management ranks, dealing with all of the different and often contradictory systems required to make an organization run, may also enable this transition.

Stage 3 people will distrust Stage 5 people for the same reasons they distrust Stage 4 people, although Stage 5 people tend to be much better than Stage 4 people at controlling and manipulating the Stage 3s. As you have described, Stage 4 people also distrust and misunderstand the Stage 5s, interpreting their system-switching as devious duplicity, scientific incompetence, and/or Stage 3 thinking.

As Kegan described, Stage 5 thinkers are pretty rare. Mastering this stage makes one quite powerful, when combined with practical, technical, and/or leadership skills. And as you mentioned, Stage 5 people absolutely essential to prevent civilization from collapsing.

However, power corrupts. When you combine the corrupting influence of power with the inability of Stage 3 and 4 people to fully understand or communicate with them, much less monitor and control their activities, you have a world where the few Stage 5s in positions of power barely manage to keep civilization functioning, usually in spite of considerable opposition the 3s and 4s, while extracting most of the value they generate in doing so.

The only solution to this is to train a lot more Stage 5s, to make them less scarce and therefore less valuable and powerful.

They seem to have an unhealthy obsession with formal logic , Godel, Lob’s theorem, Cox’s theorem, and now apparently type theory.

All of which are awesome, but I don’t think any of those things are at the crux of the AI value-alignemnt problem.

Iit sure looks to me like they’re still trying to find a way around Godel. Like if they could just find the right approach formal logic then the value alignment problem would somehow be easy. Like somehow incorporating probability into logic will defeat the incompleteness theorem. Like swallowing whole E T Jayne’s “probability is the logic of science” in it’s most indefensibly strong and literal form.

It’s possible I misunderstand their research agenda but it looks suspiciously like stage 4.5, “make the incompleteness theorem didn’t happen” wishful thinking to me.

Great post! I see some potential parallels between the communities being built to support the growing freelance/cloud worker community and what an employment-based path to stage 5 could look like. Unfortunately, at least for now, it seems this bridge will also mostly be accessible to STEM people…

@Howell: I found the Foucault Reader good. Read Foucault’s commentary on Kant’s “Was ist Aufklarung?”. You need to set Kant side by side with Foucault. Foucault is replying to Kant. Whilst Kant was trying to delimit the use and rationale of reason, Foucault insists on opposing it - reason as from the Aufklarung not only failed to liberate humanity, it became a primary instrument of domination.

He furthers this by assuming everything is contingent. Reason depends on necessity. The burden on proof lies on those claiming absolutes. Foucault historicises supposed absolutes as human episodes.

(Also, I humbly suggest “Against Method” by Feyerabend. It is the same as http://meaningness.com/going-down-on-the-phenomenon but with added history)

Awww, I wanted to be the smartypants to recommend Feyerabend. I’ll take sloppy recommendational seconds then. I’ll say that I take his work to include much more than that Going Down article.

It seems to me that people who clearly see the limitations of S4 will have developed S5 ways of being, at least in some respects. Then, even though as you say we don’t have a clear positive S5 vision, we might be able to piece together a sense of it from the lives and work of the S4 critics. Indeed, all the recommendations in this comment thread seem to be pointing in this direction.

As Whitehead was mentioned I’ll add another ‘current’ that’s similar,
Whitehead -> Korzbski -> Robert Anton Wilson -> Discordians/Chaos Magick

With a nod to Andreas comment above I’d add the Dadas and Surrealists.

Let’s compile a plausible S5 reading list. This commend thread is a start

Gen Y is primed to develop a unique problem - blazing through stage 3 to 5 while only barely skimming stage 4. I propose there will be soon(or there currently are) stage 5 individuals who acknowledge the inherent limitation of systems, but aren’t formally educated enough to properly apply enough systems with enough power to reap the benefits of stage 5 thinking.

Though maybe this will be an exciting new perspective, with some potential benefits:

1. Their most practised system being one they chose specifically for its strength in stage 5 implementation, requires access to higher education or extreme self discipline.

2. Jack-of-all-trades approach to lower-level problems proving more useful than ham-fisted single-system approach to lower level problems. Having a lot of tools you don’t know how to use very well(but you can google that), compared to having a pretty sweet hammer.

3. Ad-hoc systemisation from formal atoms, slapping together parts of different systems into ugly, brutally functional machines either out of necessity for survival, thrills, or both, like mad max cars. Prone to violent explosion without expertise.

@ Duckland - second is good enough. I haven’t read Feyerabend beyond. AM. AM reflects the attitude of “going down on the phenomenon” or vice-versa. I’m confident Feyerabend’s work is not resumed to that, and am interested in knowing what else you like from him.

I’ve now skimmed Greer’s Inside a Magical Lodge and unfortunately it doesn’t talk about anything obviously 5-ish. He does, however, say quite a bit about lodges as a Stage 4 institution (“leadership is a function of office, not of personality”) and how the ritual trappings help support that.

Really enjoying this conversation :-).

Kris, I think there are already people like that, and they are people in the New Age movement who have those obtuse woo-woo sounding organizations. They produce very complex text that sounds like word salad to outsiders. However, I think that in at least some cases, these are Stage 5 thinkers who just happen to not share any discursive traditions with us, so they had to reinvent a few wheels.

Kegan's own writing demonstrates profound appreciation and concern for individuals wherever they are at. His interest—not just intellectual, but human—is in the overall process of development. I find this very appealing and right. What developmental stage one is in has no implication for one's human worth. (In Over Our Heads was mainly concerned with the needs of those in stage 3, and those making the 3-to-4 transition, and practically dismisses stage 5 as irrelevant to most people.)

David, I have worked very hard in my own theorizing to flatten this illuminati hierarchy and make it compatible with poststructuralism. One way I speak of this is as a map of “cognitive-development pathways” between “loci of subjectivity”. The routes/pathways between nodes could be composed of “media trails” in a shared curricular space, such as a website designed for this, so people could trade and rate their favorite paths, and paths would be ranked, discovered, and developed like ant trails. This allows people to start with fragments and gradually discover bigger and better currents of media (e.g., going from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to The Perennial Philosophy by Huxley). It also creates a non-authoritarian peer structure of media and wisdom distribution which nevertheless allow non-authoritarian “wisdom hierarchies” to develop naturally based on the empirically valid observation of hierarchic developmental stages.

Dan, that book on magical orders looks interesting, thank you. Dan and David, I happen to part of of a peer-to-peer meta-organization called the Transliminal Earth Alliance Metanarrative, or TEAM. Our primary focus is producing a set of sociolinguistic protocols which allows travel and/or mutual understanding between the five stages discussed in this article. In other words, the TEAM is an open-source secret society which will appear to you in the form most suited to communicate with you, and help to bring you into communication with others at other levels (dialectical thinking).

There are about 18 of us in our cluster, and we just bumped into a stigmergic sister cluster called Ceptr that is a bit further along and more focused on implementing the software needed to move beyond Facebook and centralized currencies. You are welcome to come join us in our Lobby; joining the “inner circle” chat requires filling out a brief application about your purpose in life and your favorite books/media.

Sorry to proselytize, but we have a lot of ideological and curricular tech already under development that we’d love to share :-). And we’d love to hang out with you guys.

Enjoying reading the comments and especially the ongoing writing here. Seeing your background in STEM and the yet to be written humanities 5 stage, it would be very interesting sketching it out here (together with a few other commenters). I agree with you’re view on the difficulty getting past post-modernism within current educational system or with proposed historical arrow alone.

I watched several people sidetrack the barrier via phenomenology and post-colonial writing (which I find invaluable to read, yet a dead-end to follow) and simultaneous immersion in entry & mid-level mathematics and programming. Noted, on own initiative and over several years after the humanities studies.

Both phenomenology and pc writing might be useful tools with their demand of very nuanced (re-)thinking of the body and its orientation. And out of which they develop a concept of history open to interaction, sidetracking the (3,5?) 4.5 wall.

I do wonder though how increased mobility might affect different paths to reach these levels.

However, I think that in at least some cases, these are Stage 5 thinkers who just happen to not share any discursive traditions with us, so they had to reinvent a few wheels.

This is very likely a huge blind spot to us here, being limited by background, geography and language.

David,

Thanks for this post. It’s inspired me to re-read in more depth many of the other posts here.

I was a systems thinker before going to law school (which didn’t hurt, and now I’m studying math). Richard Rorty, Venkat Rao, and Yuval Harari have all pushed me past stage 4, and intellectually stage 5 makes sense to me.

Emotionally though, stage 4.5 resonates with me. If all meaning is ultimately a necessary fiction, it’s a little hard to get emotional traction on any proposed source of meaning!

On your page on the pitfalls of nihilism, you suggest that a sort of nihilistic depression results from denying one’s natural feelings in response to the presence of meaning, out of fear that it will all break down again, or anger at past breakdowns.

In this telling, recovering the drive of meaning is as easy as letting yourself respond naturally. Do I read you correctly here? I look forward to any other thoughts you eventually publish on pushing forward to stage 5 (the first step is recognizing there’s a problem…).

See the work of Gregory Ulmer:
https://johncraigfreeman.wordpress.com/ulmer-tapes/
http://www.amazon.com/Gregory-L.-Ulmer/e/B001IZX5US/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

Thanks for the reply and the William Gillis essay - both are helpful.

“Meaning is not fictional, I think.” This, and number 26 on this page), is pretty spot on to where I am (to my surprise!).

Yuval Harari, for instance, has this fun swashbuckling account of history in Sapiens , and he emphasizes that modern civilization is held together by intersubjective fiction, by collectively-constructed myths: human rights, corporations, and so on. On a personal level, our life-stories are similarly constructed. But if constructed, then somewhat arbitrary, and so fictional.

This leaves us building the best stories we can, at personal and societal levels, so as to successfully suspend our disbelief. That is a little hard to sustain.

New Atheist types tend to answer the challenge with “but reality is magical - Science!” or “I am a decent person and also find meaning in living.” Which are all right answers but pretty limited.

You and Gillis seem to be saying that the non-eternalist (the one who gives up belief in superhuman sources of meaning, whether that’s divine agency or some Kantian grounding) can have richer, not poorer, accounts of meaning, than eternalists. Which sort of makes sense: why shouldn’t a more accurate worldview open life up, not close it down?

I’ll keep thinking about the ontology of it all. Meaning can’t be completely humanly constructed, else it’s basically a fiction, yet it’s just us humans walking around the world, so we aren’t talking about a Platonic source of meaning, in its many guises.

Any odds, it is kind of hopeful to now have this idea of meaning actually out there (pattern), yet tougher to grasp than most philosophies get (nebulosity).

I’ve found this really quite helpful. I stayed up till the wee hours the other night working through all this. Your description of the confused stances that can happen in stage 4.5 was such a good fit that I realized I’ve been stuck there for several years, without knowing it.

As a result, without falling into one of the “this is the answer for real
this time” cycles of the past few years, I find myself energized, ready for action, in a way I’ve not allowed myself to be since I got all nihilistically discouraged.

You’ve really helped me build on what I learned from Rorty, and I’m very pleased to have gotten this much closer to a complete stance.

I’ve read through this website and most of your other materials on Buddhism, and I’ll probably use much of it as I practice building meanings skillfully.

Thanks very much indeed.

“The logical next step, a positive non-eternalist stage 5 cultural and social vision, does not yet exist. (I do plan to try to sketch one in Meaningness and Time—but that’s not what this post is about.)”
Yes it does exist. It’s contemporary systems theory, which was first developed in the “hard” sciences: physics, mathematics, chemistry; and the life sciences: biology, evolution and ecology. It is now combining with the social sciences (but NOT post-modernism, which is all but dead in soc-sci). New systems theory is beyond level 4 rationality; it is a Level 5 meta science that is logical, dynamic and yes, relativistic, yet it still describes functional systems and networks. It includes chaos theory, but describes how chaos creates structure (and how structure allows chaos). There are many more conceptual components that I can’t get into in a blog comment. But it is the basis of my Ph.D. thesis in sociology. And it most definitely is the conceptual model that is being deployed to confront our most catastrophic problems: climate disruption, environmental degradation of all kinds, global economic collapse and the end of the nation-state.

Shaun, could you add some references or links pointing to what you describe as ‘contemporary systems theory’?
Interested to read more, thank you.

Is anyone here familiar with Susan Haack? She has several books out aiming squarely at this problem, especially Defending Science—within Reason: Between Scientism And Cynicism (blurb: ‘Haack takes readers beyond the “Science Wars” to a balanced understanding of the value, and the limitations, of the scientific enterprise’) and Evidence and Inquiry: A Pragmatist Reconstruction of Epistemology. Some lightly-abridged quotes:

Even as I was dutifully ploughing through the literature of analytic epistemology, a startling new hostility to the whole epistemological enterprise was on the rise. Postmodernists of every stripe were announcing, with barely-concealed satisfaction, that talk of better and worse evidence, of well- and poorly-conducted inquiry, even of truth itself, was nothing but a rhetorical smokescreen disguising the operation of the interests of the powerful. Though mainstream epistemologists seemed largely oblivious to the rise of this New Cynicism, I found it impossible to ignore; for I saw questions about what makes evidence stronger or weaker, about what makes inquiry better or worse conducted, about disinterestedness and partiality, etc., not as merely academic concerns, but as questions of real, daily and sometimes (e.g., in the justice system, in medicine, in military intelligence) life-and-death consequence. Science has a distinguished epistemic status, but not a privileged one. By our standard of empirical evidence it has been a pretty successful cognitive endeavour. But it is fallible, revisable, incomplete, imperfect; and in judging where it has succeeded and where failed we appeal to standards which are not simply internal to science.

Oh, and also:

I wasn't greatly surprised that some mainstream epistemologists thought I was just wilfully blind to the epistemological power of Bayes' Theorem.

^_^

Apparently both she and Fernando Zalamea (mentioned in the “Robots That Dance” comments) are building on “Peircean pragmatism”, which I’ve never heard of—sorry, not very philosophically literate!

Hi David,

I just discovered your site. A lot of what you write rings true to me. I agree with your critique of rationalism, and I find very enticing your call for building a bridge to the land of post-rationality - if only because it’s easiest to agree about something that’s still largely beyond the horizon :)

I’m not sure, though, that I fully understand what you (and Kegan) mean by saying that in the humanities, the bridge between 3 and 4 has been destroyed. Was it there to begin with? What were the bricks it was built of, can we reuse them now? The old - pre-postmodernist - humanities were complex, rigid, and authoritarian, but that doesn’t mean they were very rational. What was it that we used to teach young people to guide them from 3 to 4 but don’t teach anymore - Aristotelian logic? Classical Latin? Ancient history according to late antiquity authors and Renaissance compendiums? I don’t think it was such a big loss to shed all this; we have much better replacements for these bricks now (mathematical logic, modern linguistics, modern evidence-based history, etc.). I think that bridge withered and crumbled under its own weight, even if many people cheered its crumbling.

As for me, I am quietly building my own bridge into the future - it is a (still unfinished) book called Everday: http://everday.wikidot.com. It is poetical and fictional more than philosophical, but I hope you may find it interesting - and I would very much appreciate your comments.

Kai, you ask what the bridge in the humanities was made of. Have you read any modern-era philosophy? Perhaps Hume, or maybe Mill? The old humanities tradition taught thinking clearly, which might seem more wishy-washy than logic is fundamentally the same thing. Plato and Aristotle are considered great philosophers because they carefully separating thoughts that would otherwise run together, avoid logical leaps, and carefully point out what evidence needs to be supported.

From what I know (too little) of mathematical logic, logic doesn’t directly apply to most real-world sentences. The real skill one needs to learn isn’t the rules of logic but how to turn ordinary thoughts into logical statements. Hume’s famous claim that you can’t make an “ought” from an “is” isn’t a derivation of logic, because “ought” statements aren’t logical propositions (logic only covers “is”). (Please correct me if I’m wrong about logic; I don’t have a STEM background.) It turns out that this skill can be taught (though maybe more slowly) without actually translating to formal logic, but just to more-careful English.

(This was going to be an email until I realised you don’t publish an email address, so it’s a little unfocussed. Which is probably exactly why you don’t publish an email address, but well, I’ve written it now.)

I just wanted to say that I’ve been reading your writing over your various sites a lot lately and getting a lot out of it. I originally got here via Slate Star Codex and the people of rationalist-adjacent Tumblr, which I’ve been hanging around the edge of. This post in particular has got severely stuck in my head, and I keep rereading it.

I have to admit that I’m not convinced on the ‘civilisational collapse’ framing. For example, I’d definitely like more context for your claim that ‘major institutions seem increasingly willing to abandon systemic logic: rationality, rule of law, and procedural justice’ - are there any concrete examples you’re thinking of here? But I find the broad outline of the stages and the paths between them really inspiring, and I’m really looking forward to seeing where you go with it.

I’m particularly fixated on that figure you drew with ‘past, current, and potential future ways beyond stage 3’… it makes a lot of sense to me. Just as a bit of context, here’s a description of my own paths through that diagram.

My parents studied languages at university in the sixties, back before pomo got its claws into the curriculum, and ended up with something very like your ‘Stage 4 via humanities education’. I never got much of an arts education at all outside of music, but what I do have is mostly from reading their books, and so I think I have some understanding of what this is. The bit I picked up was heavy on analytic philosophy and the New Critics - up-to-the-minute stuff like Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer, I. A. Richards, William Empson, T.S. Eliot, L. Susan Stebbing. And I got a lot out of it - there’s a lot that’s plain wrong (logical positivism! the objective correlative!), but they all wrote so clearly that at least you can tell where they’re wrong. I’m still in love with their writing style. And I don’t know, I’m really grateful to the New Critics for giving me some framework for enjoying literature, even if it’s a limited one and my tastes are still more shaped by it that they maybe should be.

So that’s my experience of the top line of your diagram. For the bottom line, I did get a really decent science education - my science and maths teachers were great at school, I did a maths degree and then a physics phd. I’ve definitely managed ‘Stage 4 via STEM education’. And then also as a student I read a shit-ton of pop science, Pinker and Dennett and Penrose so on, and drank in plenty of the New-Atheism-and-laughing-at-homeopathy atmosphere that the internet was filled with ten years ago.

All this is kind of a long-winded way of saying that I really went to town on Stage 4. And was insufferable about it to exactly the level you’d expect - pomo was obvious nonsense, Sokal had shown them all up as charlatans, religion was a pointless source of woo, all the usual. It’s probably good that I didn’t get a modern arts education because I’d just have been obnoxious and argued all the time.

Obviously by now I’d like to move on. I guess I have been for at least the last five years or so, but not in a very organised way. I haven’t managed any full-blown nihilist STEM depression (don’t really have the temperament for it) but I did have a good line in aimless confusion for a while. I probably do have just enough of a background for the ‘genuine pomo critique’, and actually I’ve been vaguely intrigued by postmodernism and earlier continental philosophy for a while, but I never really know where to make inroads - Foucault sounds interesting and some of the suggestions above are excellent. Whitehead sounds like a particularly good path for me, but one I’d never thought of myself. And a native STEM bridge beyond stage 4 would be wonderful - I’m definitely up for tagging along on that project!

Anyway thanks very much for writing it all!

And as soon as I posted this, I realised you have a new post on politics which may help with my request for concrete examples. I don’t have time to read it now, but I will do tomorrow and see if it makes things a little clearer.

Thank you very much for your response (and sorry about the duplicate - that was a silly mistake on my part, getting confused with too many tabs open.) The concrete examples you gave here help me understand your view much better, though I’ll have to think a bit more about it, and then I may have some more questions.

I did read your ‘Judging whether a system applies’ post (and just reread it), it’s a very nice first step. Most of it seemed pretty obvious, so I’m either already a little beyond what it’s trying to point out, or missing something major. Looking forward to seeing where you go with it all!

While I remember, though, I wanted to mention one more thing. A couple of years ago I read a book called The Educated Mind, by Kieran Egan - I think Bret Victor mentioned it in one of the talks he’s put online, and I was curious. I have to say that I didn’t get a whole lot out of this book, but it has a very similar set of five stages, and the last three (Romantic, Philosophic, Ironic) match up quite nicely with Kegan’s ones (e.g. see the short descriptions on the Wikipedia page.)

I’d never heard of Kegan before and have no knowledge of the field, so I have no idea what the connection between them is - maybe one influenced the other, or they share a common influence? (“K. Egan” and “Kegan” are also confusingly similar, so I thought it was the same person for a bit.) Anyway I can’t see him mentioned in the comments so far, so just throwing this out as another interesting reference.

Thank you for your responses. I certainly never denied that clear thinkers existed in all ages, and that some things they were saying sound amazingly prescient and modern - mostly by being plain right. Yes, Hume, Mill; yes, the traditions of classical liberalism and scepticism; of course Darwin (an amazing example of a 19th-century thinker who seems to have written nothing, or at least very little, that would sound silly today). Note however that most of these people that we admire today, and build upon, and search for quality epigraphs and quotations, were not notable for adhering to the traditions of humanities as they then existed. On the contrary, most of them date from after the scientific revolution and are notable for applying science methods and insights to the study of man and society. They were not philosophers but natural philosophers - a very different thing.

As for Plato and Aristotle? Not so much. They may have taught people of their ages to think, but it would be torture to do the same to kids of this age. Yes, they are profound and prescient in places, but that is buried in way too much wishful thinking, arbitrary errors, and just plain baloney. Knowing what they taught won’t help you if you want understand how the world works - only if you’re interested in the history of how people were trying to figure that out.

And yes, mathematical logic is not the magical key to all doors, no one ever claimed that. But at least it fully covers what was called “logic” in the humanities - Aristotelian logic - and presents it all (and much more) in a much more flexible, consistent, and easy to understand fashion. Thank heavens we no longer have to learn by heart the 24 syllogism forms - our Venn diagrams are so much easier!

I think I can understand whence the impression of a “broken bridge” may be coming. Postmodernist philosophy of the “continental” variety has long ceased to be exciting but only got more muddled and pretentious with age. But it’s not the only game in town; if you need philosophy, analytic philosophy (the British/American tradition) is alive and well. If you are more directly interested in applying modern science’s insights to human affairs, in the tradition of 18th and 19th centuries’ natural philosophers, then we do have modern thinkers of this kind too who write deeply, clearly, and engagingly (Steven Pinker comes to mind).

David: I think I share your scepticism about analytical philosophy, and I think its biggest problems are the same as in the rationalism movement of the lesswrong variety. Basically, these are the people that have one very good tool in their hands, and they love it and perfect its use to no end, without noticing that there are whole worlds around that are inaccessible to this tool - or, worse, denying there’s anything of value outside their tool’s domain. And yet - oh irony - I would any day prefer these rationalists and analytical philosophers to the modern continental philosophers who also have a kind of a “tool” they’re perfecting but whose work bears much less semblance to an intelligent activity at all.

Still, I disagree that the old humanities succeeded in teaching thinking in some fundamentally more successful way than the modern humanities. Every age teaches what it considers important; a century ago it was important to learn by heart, to classify, to discern and distinguish, to remember the correct terms, to deduce specifics from generics, to quote in Latin - and teaching was built around these skills. Nowadays we consider it more healthy to be creative, to think outside the box, to see generics behind specifics, to spot analogies and deep-lying causes, to explain things in plain and engaging language - and that is what we’re trying to teach. Whether the old skillset is genuinely better than the new I don’t know; at the very least that is debatable.

And of course each of these paradigms produces its own dogmas that, with time, become idols and obstacles. Your example - “because oppression” - actually started as a fresh and valuable insight, and only with time it turned into a tyranny; same with the continental philosophy that started as an inspired poetry-like activity that greatly stimulated thinking in its age, but devolved into pretentious status-supporting gibberish. But then, don’t you think that the age of old humanities had plenty of tyrannical dogmas of their own - religious, philosophical, social? Wasn’t it against these dogmas that the great intellectual rebellion of the first half of 20th century arose? We now really have no idea of how stuffy, rigid, and unforgiving the atmosphere was back then.

Insight always gets routinized into mediocrity.

Exactly. Entropy eats out every living system unless it learns to die and get reborn - that’s another science fact that needs to be recognized as universal. Being right is no protection from becoming pompous, irrelevant, and outright harmful with time.

That’s why Everday (the world of my book) is so obsessed with rejuvenation, artificial forgetting, unlearning, rediscovery. There’s still no magic bullet but Everday is more entropy-proof than we have ever been. It’s one of the major topics of the book.

And to return a little to the main topic of your post, that of building a bridge to a post-rational (more-than-rational?) worldview, let me propose that a major tool for this task can be poetry. In my experience, those who inhabit what you call “stage 5” are usually those who can recognize and enjoy top quality poetry - the correlation is so high that it might as well be causation. Of all arts, poetry is the most “hardcore” in that it has the least amount of loopholes that allow people to enjoy a piece of art without expending much intellectual energy: it is the least rational and much less predictable than music, visual, or narrative arts. Quoting Everday, poetry is the “summity of language - which is the summity of mind”; in that world, poetry plays a different and larger role than in our society.

I’ve been thinking a little bit recently about the employment route to Stage 4. I’ve had a few low-level admin temp jobs in the bowels of various bureaucracies - data collection for the NHS, sorting post for a big law firm - and some of these are really good exposure to the systematic mode. They barely pay over the minimum wage, but when you’re confronted with the details of, for example, how hospitals order their equipment and keep track of their stock, you realise how much has to be done to keep a complex economy running. So I actually learnt something important from doing this type of job, which is that all this stuff only happens because someone works on it! Which is blindingly obvious really, but somehow easy to miss if you never have to do it yourself.

(Some of these jobs are getting automated, but I think many will stick around for a while for the reasons Venkatesh Rao outlines here: they often involve lots of annoying little bits of data cleaning and one-off special cases that are awkward to automate. I like the description ‘intestinal fauna in the body of technology’, that’s exactly what it felt like.)

On the other hand, there are a lot of much better-paid jobs that either don’t give you that exposure or actively pit you against it. As a rule, ‘jobs that might appear in a children’s book’ - teacher, doctor, builder, baker - are focussed on actually doing a job whose basic purpose is clearly visible to anyone, and have little patience for all the administrative nonsense that piles up around the sides. (For good reason, most of the time! My family is full of teachers, and I’ve heard endless rants about the latest misguided government education schemes.) This exposes them to the worst of Stage 4 and can probably put you off it for life.

I’m working at a software consultancy now that also does a lot of work in the depths of various complicated infrastructure-y things, so I’m seeing interesting examples of that same tension there, too. But this comment is long enough already!

Anyway thanks again for writing this - I hope you don’t mind all these long-winded comments. I’ve now read the whole Meaningness metablog and the book as it currently stands, and it seems to have triggered a lot of thinking for me. I may write more on my blog when I allow myself back to Tumblr in August.

Unfortunately my mother decided to have me socially exiled by the fundamentalist Christian church and wider community for differences in sexual taste at age 4. Socially maladapted bla bla. Then a teacher tried to get me executed for a promotion after I reported psychic harassment and told me to read Richard Dawkins. Peers sensing stigma dumped me at stage 2 and I was tortured in exile.

After receiving my 1st BSc in Mathematics from an Edinburgh slaughtegouse, still in solitary confinement at stage 2 I was ejected to Oslo to study under strict confinement.

A magic alien prostitute busted me out of jail for social democracy and some stage 3 socialization under strict lobotomy conditions.

I was quickly regressed to stage 1 again upon returning home to Scotland by a member of Whores of the Northern Buddhist Order.

I am tortured now at stage 2 with full mind body dismemberment no earthly contacts feeling nihilism quite much.

How do you transition?

Thank you for this article. It was illuminating and useful.

Forgive the length of this comment. These are a few scattered notes, some related to your meaningness.wordpress site. I’ll try to start with those most related to those posts and move out from there. Feel free to skip points three and four if you’re pressed for time or just find me boring.

1) I come from the dread humanities but I definitely think I got through the 4-4.5-4.7? or something stage through my experience in college. I grew up Mormon, I was a good student, I was in a very hierarchical structure within Mormonism (that made me hate myself and everything about my brain and body.) I eventually found the anti-Gay stuff and racist stuff unacceptable and left it, then fell into a hardcore nihilistic spiral partly on the back of a deep reading of King Lear. This continued for a while but some of my English and philosophy classes taught me to analyze texts and arguments very, very systematically. I don’t know if these things made me FUNCTIONAL on a stage 4 level but they’ve definitely made it easier for me to engage with certain things in the world. Reading Chogyam Trungpa helped too.

2) I’m going into public school teaching in Oakland and I’m in grad school right now studying education. You might actually be surprised at the rigorousness of much of what we study. We do read some critical theory deconstructing the patriarchal, capitalist, racist power structures at work. Some of this stuff is laughably badly written and argued but some of it contains reasonably illuminating and coherent. From there, though, we have to look at how to help our students navigate a world built with these systems without being consumed by rage and hopelessness. As a for instance: Many of our students come in disinclined to learn how to speak “proper/standard/white”, whatever you want to call it, English. The starting point for dealing with that is acknowledging that their way of speaking is valid and should be cherished. We can study the evolution of their language development through their genealogy, through the media they intake, through study of where they’ve lived, so they can understand and take pride in their way of speaking. This analysis should be very academically rigorous. From there, though, we have to reinforce the cultural cachet and force that learning and understanding how to speak standard vernacular English opens up. If they want access to this power, they do have to learn how to manipulate it, and so we’ll have to study its structure and manifestations in-depth.

From a STEM perspective, Math talks , where different students show different ways they can mentally solve math problems and share those different ways with the class, give students a chance to show off their uniqueness and add to the community’s cognitive tool kit. This way, they don’t have to see any one approach to solving a problem as wrong and can get more comfortable switching from one approach to another when necessary. And we can talk about how they use math day-to-day, maybe without even noticing it, and how we as their teachers use math to navigate our world. This dispels some of the sterility surrounding the multiplication tables (which certainly need to be learned.)

I had feared that my time in grad school was going to be totally rigor-less nonsense, and again, there is trash thrown our way from time to time. But maybe because this particular field of study is directly attached to a demanding profession, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised more often than not, and this in a program very skewed left ideologically. Virtue signaling is not really encouraged by our professors–if we have the “right” political opinion but don’t know how we would teach our students to read, write, or calculate, we will get chewed out.

I don’t know what all this has to do with the humanities as a whole though–i.e. whether the shift from deconstruction to rigorous practical applications of multiple systems is taking root in other humanities departments. Still, interesting I think.

1. I think the stage three thinking is about as pervasive on the right as it is on the left in this country. You seem fairly wary of making broad political pronouncements (not a criticism), but especially when we’re looking at the alt-right type communities, MRAs, neo-reactionaries, GamerGate/whatever, these things are all coming out of a place of wounded feelings and wanting to lash out. The world has stopped being rational or fair to them, so they are relieved of the obligation to be fair or rational back to it. I hadn’t thought that this type of thing was overtaking the entire movement… but then this election cycle started. At this point I think it’s hard to argue that this thing is as much of an influence on the left as on the right (though you may be distinguishing liberals from leftists, in which case I guess I’d agree.)

4) I live in Oakland, I have engaged with and do engage with leftist politics, and the stage 3 thing is definitely fairly pervasive (though there are honestly plenty of exceptions.) However, probably the most tiresome, frustrating, and dictatorial organization I’ve investigated was thoroughly Stage 4–The International Socialist Organization. EVERYTHING has been figured out, and all you need to do to find out what the real deal is is to
a. Read Capital (ideally all three volumes).
b. Study the Russian Revolution and admit that it is the highest point in the history of human struggle (whatever that means.)
c. Never vote for a Democrat, no matter how dire would be the consequences of the Republican running against them getting elected! They placate the left, and we need to heighten the contradictions comrade!
d. Submit to a Leninist centralist structure and accept the results of any up-down vote as your new opinion henceforward.
e. Accept that Trotsky figured everything out a hundred years ago and the entire subsequent history of mainstream economics has been a long Bourgeois fart (even guys like Piketty who largely agree with your analysis).
f. Spend all your free time selling newspapers to people even though the format became obsolete a decade ago. Hey, it worked in the 20s, why shouldn’t it work now?

Pretty systematic! You won’t lack for dumb answers to your questions.

P.S. I really like your writing, thanks for doing it and for the introduction to Aro.

A sort of analogy of mine: stage 4 requires proving your point from first principles, from the axis of the frame of reference, or from the axioms. Stage 5 allows you to use the iterative method: starting from an arbitrary point, and knowing some pattern, you can get a reasonable good solution to the problem.

So, on daily life, stage 5 wisdom allows you to know how to react to whatever circumstance you end up standing by noticing the most important patterns.

I’m rather late to the party here. This piece is my introduction to Kegan’s 5 stages. I need to study more about it.

But mean time, the fact that this concept is accessible to me happens to correlate to me seriously looking into Taoism lately. I think there’s a strong connection there.

You see, I’m Chinese-educated. Ever since ancient-time, there’s a recommended (but not strict) sequence of adult education: study Confucianism first until your 30’s, Taoism in your 40’s, I-Ching in 50’s. I-Ching happens to be the root of all Chinese philosophies, including Taoism.

What I find interesting is Stage-5 and I-Ching both emphasize the this (to my shallow understanding): both opposites are true, both sides are one and the same, the struggle of yin/yang is the natural order.

Taoism attempts to embrace this quality. While recognizing truly evil people do exist, it foregoes the simplistic concept of good and evil.

Sounds like stage 5 to me. Perhaps the East has something worthy here.

Yeah western rendition of Taoism tends to focus on wuwei, which is really a demonstration of the yin of non-doing to the yang of doing, both are true. So I understand if it’s hugely inaccessible in English. I-Ching is even worse.

But together I think they have more to say about nebulosity than what Buddhism has to offer.

There’s a Chinese-saying (isn’t there always one?): use Confucianism when dealing with people, Taosism when dealing with matter/truth, Buddhism with oneself.

So in the pursuit of truth, I think it’d resonate very much with you.

In fact, the very first line of Lao Tzu is humble enough to have this disclaimer: “The Tao exist, but if I can tell you what is it, it’s not Tao”.

I can’t tell if you’re alluding to Susanne Cook-Greuter or not, but her Nine Levels (pdf) paper is pretty good.

On the plus side, she at least mentions the sampling bias that plagues the more business-oriented side of the field. For example, Torbert has focused entirely on business development and business leaders and so his statistics of development levels are derived from CEOs. Keegan’s got a fair amount of this too, I think, although as you say, he tends to roll his ideas up to a vaguer level that obscures any empirical work. Cook-Greuter says she’s surveyed a wider swath of the population, although I suspect it comprises Ivy League undergrads and those able and willing to pay the arbitrary-sounding amount of $1000 for the test.

On the negative side, she uncritically cites Wilber.

On the negative side, she uncritically cites Wilber.

As I’ve written in at least one other comment on this blog (although I may have spelt his name wrong, oops! ;), there are multiple Wilber’s (at least 3). I think the Wilber of ‘Brief History …’ and ‘Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality’ has at least some value, both as a popularizer of some otherwise obscure ideas from a range of sources, and for synthesizing them into a framework on which to hang the sorts of developmental ideas Keegan proposes, as presented here by David. Wilber’s model may be wrong (like all models) but I’d argue it’s still elegant and useful.

So much of what David wrote in this piece reminded me of ‘A Brief History of Everything’. What David calls the “fluid mode” seems very similar to the “integral worldview” proposed by Wilber and others. As David notes, the two of them come to very different conclusions about how a fluid/integral mindset can be stabilized, but they agree that it is neither wholly rational, nor pre-rational. I value what I read of Wilber, warts and all, for being the first writer that helped me crystallize that insight.

Hi David,
I’ve just re-discovered your site (my last visit was before you started posting on meta-rationality). It’s a delight to find more writing about vertical development and how to utilize some of the concepts beyond rational/systems thinking. I hope to comment on other posts as I finish getting through them, but I wanted to share something I haven’t see here yet. There is another great source on vertical development which I haven’t seen you mention (I’ve only skimmed your posts on this topic so I may have missed it). I’ve found it to be more insightful than Kegan in some ways:
http://www.cook-greuter.com/Cook-Greuter%209%20levels%20paper%20new%201.1%2714%2097p[1].pdf
Her work seems to be the most recent, and she explores higher stages of development beyond stage 5. While I can’t really grasp the higher stages, they provide some perspective on the entire development arc.

I have to admit I haven’t read anything by Ken Wilber yet, although he seems to have the most influence on other authors I’ve run across. There is a distinct lack of humility in his sector....

I also read a book some years ago about organizations at different levels. I think you may find the descriptions of those at level 5 (or whatever their color/number scheme) useful.

Thanks, I’ll read those references you linked to (I have a lot of catching up to do!).

I think one of the biggest differences is that Cook-Greuter seems to see the mid stages such as 3.5 and 4.5 as stable stages (although slightly less comfortable) than 4 and 5. I feel I’m somewhere in 4.5 myself, and I’m certainly not mired in nihilism -life feels rich and meaningful (mostly) where finding new perspectives is a source of ongoing delight and discovery. I can see that nihilism is a risk associated with the world view of “absolute relativism” in which you can’t make any judgements, but I’ve never found that point. Perhaps it’s more of an issue for those who jump into 4.5 in response to some major life change or tragedy?

Given your writing, I’m not surprised that you are skeptical of the descriptions of stage 6, as they many references which could be interpreted as monism. I suspect that’s a limitation of those writing about them, and in reality they are more of a state where individuals more readily experience the fluidity of boundaries between their sense of self and other. (But that’s purely speculation on my part!)

Back to your post… while I’m not a fan of deconstructive post-modernism, I tend to think Kegan over estimates the risk that it will cause systematic breakdown of society for a couple of reasons. One is these is that I see a clear tendency for those at a given development level to be harshly critical of the world view of each level directly below them. So those at 3.5 or 4 see the conformity of stage 3 as a great threat and insist everyone must learn to think for themselves. Those at 4.5 harshly criticize the systems and thinking of stage 4 as limiting and oppressive. And those at 5 clearly see the shortcomings of post-modernism. I actually use it as a marker to tell that a writer/speaker is firmly in stage 5! So I tend to believe that those at 5 will often over exaggerate the potential risks of 4.5 while downplaying similar “risks” associated with thinking at lower stages.

I’ve also come to believe that the concern seems to miss the mark of how people move out of stage 3 (and this is based mostly Cook-Greuter’s descriptions of 3.5). The focus there is thinking for yourself, developing individual beliefs, and moving beyond the values of your family/peers. I think we don’t realize how blind they are to the debates at stage 4 and above (and how meaningless post-modernism’s attack on systems and hierarchies is to them). A bit like telling a fish that there are too many limitations to living in water when the fish can barely conceive of water in the first place.

This became painfully clear to me last year. I shared a video with my son (recently turned 15) which was essentially a metaphor about choosing your own path in life over doing what is expected of you. His response: “I understand all the words he is using, but nothing he says makes any sense” - at which point he promptly tuned out. Wow! This from a smart and surprisingly responsible freshman in high school! I guess that’s what stage 3 really looks like.

Anyway, to wrap things up, I’m not happy about the current situation in education, and it could certainly do a much better job of helping people develop. However, I have a hard time believing it’s so severe as Kegan portrays.

My “work” used to be technical (engineering, product development, project management etc), now I’ve turned a hobby into a business so I can spend more time pursuing my interests (happily outside corporate structures!)- although I have a vague dream of growing it into a “real” business with employees so I can try implementing a business structure based on higher development level world views. That would be deeply satisfying, but I don’t feel ready for it.

As for noticing the tendency of stage 5 to be hyper-critical of 4.5, it just sort of came to me. Possibly when I was watching many of Jordan Peterson’s lectures on personality, symbolism, and meaning. He has some fascinating insights from the psychology perspective - but the point is that he is passionately outspoken against post-modernism and speaks in stage 5 language and complexity. He makes statements like: “its self evident that any hierarchy is inherently oppressive” (I doubt that’s self evident to most of his students!) and go on to make some point on why hierarchy is critically important despite its flaws. He brings such a rich level of analysis to his subjects and clearly accepts and integrates the limitations of systems and hierarchies - so his fairly intense passion against the post-modernists (and his subsequent dive into political discussions) seems rather out of place. And then I read Kegan’ book and the similarity was hard to miss. And then I see it in your writing etc.....

Of course all of you have much more contact with the academic world while my experience is primarily in the business world where post-modernism effectively doesn’t exist (at least in the industries I worked in).

I wonder if Taoism and Buddhism are so similar-yet-different because they’re ways of getting to the same place from opposite sides of it. According to their origin stories, Buddhism was developed by a sheltered prince of a prosperous kingdom, while the Tao Te Ching was written for a society on the verge of collapse. Maybe Buddhism has armed itself more against eternalism, while philosophical Taoism has armed itself more against nihilism, but both try to get you beyond both.

(It also seems like while the Tao is in some sense an eternal ordering principle, it kind of refuses function as one.)

James:

It also seems like while the Tao is in some sense an eternal ordering principle, it kind of refuses function as one

If you understand the Tao as the contact interactions of yin and yang, it’s a pretty good metaphor for nebulousness ;)

I read through most of Meaningness last summer and it did really help me on my way from 4.5 to 5, so thank you for that! I really appreciate these posts for helping me orient to a different way of thinking and being. At the very least they give me hope that there is something very real and tangible there if I work towards it.

My experience differs a bit from how you describe the path from 4-5. When I started college I had no real framework for understanding the world, and when I started studying math and cognitive science my conceptual frameworks were overwhelmed. The scientific worldview was so totalizing – it claimed authority over all the important questions and I made several major updates like, ‘I don’t have a soul’, ‘when I die I stop existing’, ‘morality is just game theory and everyone only acts based on their incentive landscape’, ‘there is no fundamental good, value is subjective’, etc. I became very depressed, anxious, and nihilistic, but it felt impossible to think any other way – it was so obviously correct.

Then, after completing degrees in cog sci and math, I went on to live in a rationalist house for three years and needless to say that didn’t help in opening up any fundamentally new ways of thinking :p In fact, it ended up making me more depressed because now I had an entire social structure supporting these beliefs.

Fast forward to a year and a half ago, I read Kuhn, Kegan, and Meaningness, I started meditating more seriously, and I left the community. I began to genuinely see that there was a possibility for a new way of being. I also had a very sharp reaction to thinking that the rationalists were so narrow and just plain wrong about a lot of things. I really was quite mad for a while about all of my experiences there. Recently, it has dialed back a bit and I can appreciate more of their strengths.

Anyways, this is all to say that for me the nihilism came about because I felt so constrained by a particular worldview which gave me unacceptable answers to major questions of meaning in my life, e.g., morality, goodness, etc. And when I finally saw that this might not actually be as True as I had previously thought, it was so freeing that my nihilism abated. My stage 4 was marked by depression and anxiety, but 4.5 was rather liberating.

In some ways it might seem like I was at 4.5 the whole time, but I really did believe in rationality. It seemed and felt fundamentally True, and the depression and nihilism was a result of really taking in what that meant. It certainly had a flavor of wanting a different alternative (while still believing this to be impossible), so perhaps you would still characterize it as 4.5. But I wouldn’t say that I had acknowledged its limitations in any way at that point.

I feel deeply grateful for you and your work. I found this website looking for a “way out of nihilism” a few days ago. I’ve been working my way through it and after reading this post I realize that I’ve been moving out of the 4.5 nihilistic depression gap and into fluidity, and your work is catalyzing that transition. I can’t thank you enough, finding this website has brought me so much clarity and I am beginning to understand the depression, anxiety, and increasingly sparse lapses into nihilism in a way that is helping me grow.

I am 20 years old. I was very into science and tech in high school. Throughout the last four years I’ve also been learning of the failures of civilization, culture, technology, etc., most acutely in the last two years. Interestingly (and with your insights here, predictably) the last year brought me into the deepest nihilistic depression of my life, even brought me to active suicidal contemplation. Luckily I didn’t carry out the act, found my way back to stability, and now I’m leisurely passing the rest of this summer until I go to college in the fall and get a degree. So intriguing how this whole thing unfolds.

You’re doing good work! May it reach all who are ready to hear it. I know for sure that those I recognize who may benefit from your work will be sent your way.

Thank you for creating the perfect blog to beat impostor syndrome and enjoy learning and all things life of the mind. So glad not to be the only undergrad reading this blog! I’m from a well-known public research university pursuing my passion for art and engineering research(specifically in a computer vision/physics/deep learning-focused lab).

I ran into your blog from a link to “Upgrade your cargo cult for the win” from Michael Nielsen on Twitter. Reading your posts as a study break helped me release and recover after a challenging adjustment to college, I began to appreciate how many varied interests in art, writing, engineering, research, philosophy, and cultural traditions have shaped my analytical mind. So instead of trying to fit in and get perfect grades like a typical engineering major, I’ve been able to explore a variety of fields through projects, most of which are still in progress.

I’m super excited to see how Meaningness will evolve in these complex and challenging times, and in the coming years.

We must creat mentors to help others make way to step 5 on the bridge. Our world is lacking greatly in mentors in general.

Context for reaching it has been created only rarely, idiosyncratically, by exceptional individual mentors

STEM departments do not explicitly go beyond that. However, at least some professors understand the limitations of formal methods and the inherent nebulosity of their subject matter, and may teach that informally. They may also teach some stage 5 cognitive skills informally, implicitly, or by example.

Could you please point out some such mentors and/or professors please?

Thank you

@C’mon - I’m currently reading Narrative Coaching by David B. Drake, PhD and see some interesting parallels in thinking in meta-rationality. I have a sense that a Narrative Coach could act as a powerful guide if you’re unable to find a mentor.

Chapter 6, How We Change and Transition talks a lot about this “nebulous” state of transition. Perhaps coaching could be the scaffolding between 4.5 and 5?

I briefly got confused when you wrote “One needs to become disillusioned and disappointed with rationalism”, even though it was introduced as a specific concept only one paragraph earlier. There is some amount of disorienting recursion in the design of this meta-book, at least if you drop into an article without reading in order.

The confusion was that it is easy to mistakenly think that the problem is rationality, as opposed to rationalism. By the first I mean just the technique of reasoned argument, in contrast to the promise that rational thinking is the magic solution to all of life’s problems.

Anyway, maybe the problem is with the reader, not the text, but there are places where the text seems to assume that the reader already knows everything in the text, which, again, is a bit disorienting.

Hyper-text is great, but sometimes, you have to encounter ideas in the right order.

The call for more help, for those ready to transition, makes me wonder: have fluid thinkers established sufficient networks to recognize one another? Do they have a common language for communicating? Are they sufficiently organized? It seems to be a critical super-power when trying to achieve collective goals. Not to mention actually choosing and defining those goals. But definitely for growing.

Stage 4 and 4.5 people (I think I am the latter) need mentoring. That would be the bridge you are talking about, wouldn’t it? But most of us are not looking for ethical mentoring. Most are unsure how to get technical mentoring, outside academia. We mostly read a lot.

The chance of stumbling on insights seems low, and highly accidental. How many people in STEM decide they need to learn more philosophy because this rationalism thing isn’t reliably making the world better? There are a lot of impediments, not least of which the general opinion of philosophy as being a waste of time.

This brings me back to rationalism vs rationality. Despite its failings, rationalism—as a colloquial, unrigorous idea that system thinking is essential to solving problems, and even that “problem” is the best way to conceptualize a desire for change—at least offers a positive, tangible, realistic reward. If civilization is in danger, most rationalists still believe that rationalism is the means to avert that danger (despite the fact that rationalism mostly created that danger while trying to deal with other problems created by systems 2 and 3).

The bridge to stage 5 not only has to exist: it has to support a high traffic flow, sufficient to make a material difference to the world. It’s really difficult to see how it scales, especially in light of the war for attention and the finite human lifespan. The adoption rate is too low, and the attrition rate is too high.

Is the difficulting of building this bridge as the Great Filter?

Sorry if any of this is redundant, meandering, or otherwise time-wasting. Thanks for your efforts, as always.

Let us do some magic. I mean, MTG: Pick a card. ANY CARD. Now.. https://scryfall.com/card/aer/47/take-into-custody Look at the back. This is hard online, so let me help https://www.wayfair.com/decor-pillows/pdp/vandor-llc-magic-the-gathering-card-back-throw-ubdv1336.html .

Now. 5 colors. 5 elements of personality. Corresponding to the 5 levels of keegan. Let’s start. I’m level 5:

Stage 1 — Impulsive mind (early childhood)
Stage 2 — Imperial mind (adolescence, 6% of adult population)
Stage 3 — Socialized mind (58% of the adult population)
Stage 4 — Self-Authoring mind (35% of the adult population)
Stage 5 — Self-Transforming mind (1% of the adult population)

I’m not even 1%. I’m 0.01%… I’m not that special… there’s just too many humans. Why am I top percentile? I am a student, cum laude in highschool with 2 extra subjects, cum laude in 2 EU bachelors in 3 years. (math + CS), I saw that AI was silly before I began doing a PhD in it, I had a masters in CS with cum laude and a free SODA paper, I’ve published a bit, and made basically all the mistakes, yet recently I saw the light and did 15 years of lost development (I blame the high modernists. They ruined not just me, but the entirety of youth. My education… is not forced. It is nebulous. It makes people think with their body, not just their mind (If you think this is silly, what do you believe about homunculi? The myth of the brain as the only part of your body that thinks is just the homunculus all over again....), it is scaleable, it actually has existed for 30 years without anyone finding it, and is mostly used to make the inventors rich. In every game of chance, it is the house that wins. Seeing the potential. I… am not the start. I’m simply the bleeding edge in the quest for the soul. I… had the STEM nihillistic depression in highschool. The doctors diagnosed me, correctly, with being a nerd. However, they didn’t see nor think that I should understand myself. And my creativity. The latter is what saved me… From the aftermath. Of terrible decision. I… simply didn’t learn anything important at the university. I mean, in class. I.... simply couldn’t live an unascended life So I had to keep banging on the door even if it didn’t budge. And eventually, it opened, after a very primal and personal emotional experience. The part where it all began…) Perhaps there is a level 6? I mean, what would that even be? Perhaps it is someone who is not only fluid in the mind, but also in the stages. I say that my naivite, tribalism, rationality, social mind, societal mind, transforming mind… are all useful aspects, instrumentally at least. Why limit your mind? I’m level 6. The level people couldn’t even imagine. Fluid over all 5 levels. Impossible to percieve, unless you look very carefully....

Of course, the master of 6 is the best teacher for 5. And like any good teacher, I have a scaffold. The 5 colours. https://eu-browse.startpage.com/av/anon-image?piurl=https%3A%2F%2Fmiro.medium.com%2Fmax%2F2000%2F1%2AsQcpHoGupN6w7l9NzthoQg.png&sp=1636971235T170c5b29ff9169160e84b257103bbd969ff4876588502b0089dbd1f9322e97e3 Fucking magic

This will be all. The rest… Is an exercise for the reader. No need to thank me. Your development is thanks enough. Good bye. Don’t let me tell you about magic. Ask me about magic.

I have a tentative hypothesis to contribute here: perhaps the elite of Russia is currently, tenuously, in Stage 5?

Hear me out here…

I am thinking in particular of this quote from the essay:

“Stage 5 entertains multiple systems, and is comfortable with contradictions between them, because systems are not absolute truths, only ways-of-seeing that are useful in different circumstances. Stage 5 is uniquely comfortable with value conflicts, since (unlike both 3 and 4) it does not take any value as ultimate.”

The country of Russia is, due to its tumultuous ideological history, currently chock-full of people holding irreconcilable values and historical interpretations at all levels of society. Despite this, it’s going through a period of relative peace and prosperity. The approach of the government for the past 20 years has been to carefully avoid provoking any of them needlessly, even the ones that seem to have little power. The INTERNATIONAL approach is similar. Through careful diplomacy, Russia manages to be on good terms with every country in the conflict-riven Middle East, despite being itself involved in many of the conflicts.

Listen to many of the major statements that the top officials make, from Putin on down, and it’s variations of “there are many ways to develop, there is no single model that is a good fit for all societies - we don’t agree with yours but we’ll leave you to it, but don’t try imposing your system on us or on anyone else who doesn’t want it.”

And while many countries respond well to that, the response from American and EU officials is typically something like “no, there ARE universal values that are good for everyone, WE represent them and spread them, YOU are standing against them, and we WILL keep trying to make you and everyone else behave in the one true, righteous way.”

So from this general impression, I’m getting the sense that at the state level, the Russian state is at Stage 5 (perhaps the Chinese state as well, though they’re more risk-averse so it’s harder to tell), while the West is at one of the lower stages, either Stage 3 or Stage 4.

If the above conversation was happening between two people, is that not the conclusion we would come to?

Like many others, I mostly came to developmental theory by way of Ken Wilber’s take on Spiral Dynamics. But I knew of some basic developmental theories before reading Wilber. Anyway, I’ve had a couple decades of interest, combined with skepticism about linear models. That is what brought me here. I’ve read through the article and all of the comments. It’s a good discussion that does help me think through the difficulties that we are holding back society.

First off, it just occurred to me how much different is my experience than others. It seems I was basically raised in 4.5. That was my starting point. My father was educated in engineering, became an officer in the army, started his career in factory management, and then became a professor of business management. Growing up, he taught me how to think, argue, and write in a rational and orderly manner. And he regularly talked to me about systems thinking, which he studied and taught. Also, like my mother, he is a conservative and so very rule-oriented, that is to say some grounding in 3.

But, at the same time, my parents were going through a more open phase when younger and so raised me in a socially liberal, pluralist, egalitarian, and woo woo new agey church. And some of my most influential years were spent in a liberal college town. Even though, I dropped out of college and have worked entry-level jobs since, the mix of the 4.5 worldview feels natural to me. Even though I see the problems of 4.5, I’ve never been able to hate on it as I learned young what was of value in it. Some of my fondest early memories are of 4.5.

As a curious-minded autodidact, I gave myself a well-rounded humanities self-education with some postmodernism thrown in. Yet, even as I developed criticalness towards rationalism, I’ve retained rational capacities of analysis. And, though depressed for many years (largely for health reasons), I never fell into all-out depressive cynicism and that probably has to do with my 4.5 being informed by idealistic and optimistic religion that modeled emotional health. This helped me to more easily transition into 5, if it is ever easy for anyone in the world right now.

That relates to a point another commenter made. Many people who hit 5 become unduly critical of 4.5. And that commenter seems to have given the right explanation. It’s common for people to see exaggerated faults in the stage directly prior to their own. Your view is that college age is too early to introduce 4.5, but my suspicion is that it’s too late. A college course is not enough to build healthy 4.5. It needs to be part of a cultural and social context that gives support for developing it in terms of not only thinking but also of values, identity, and relating well. The bridge between 4 and 5 is 4.5. The problem is that 4.5 is too new to be well established, excepted in some rare places.

There is another issue that has been on my mind. I’m not sure that developmental theories are all that helpful for where we find ourselves. People so easily get obsessed with higher development when the reality is that most people are still struggling with lower development. Even among those who gained some purchase in 5, they often have only partial, distorted, and dysfunctional development. If Jordan Peterson is genuinely at 5, the dark bent of his reactionary politics shows how wrong it can go. It could be noted that he has dealt with many health issues and, as the brain is part of the body, neurocognitive development is only as healthy as the body. That is concerning considering rates of physical and mental illnesses are on the rise.

When I speak of lower development, I’m also partly referring to another line of development, that of physical health. Some have noted that WEIRD populations, at least in the US, have quite stunted motor development compared to that of many non-WEIRD or less WEIRD countries (see link below). That is probably an indicator of neurological and nervous development issues. There are many contributing problems: standard American diet, sedentary lifestyle, modern technology, chronic stress, toxic exposure, hormone disruptors and mimics, etc.

https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/10/we-agree-its-weird-but-is-it-weird-enough/

I actually think diet might be one of the most important factors. Nutritional deficiencies remain surprisingly common, particularly the fat-soluble vitamins and B vitamins as intake of many animal foods has decreased. For example, seed oils replaced animal fats as the main source of fatty acids back in the 1930s and the intake of seed oils has continually increased since. Those seed oils are oxidative, inflammatory, and mutagenic. Also, carbs have increased greatly as well, which also are inflammatory and so much else; with 88% of Americans having one or more conditions of metabolic disorder (obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, non-fatty liver disease, etc).

There is also high inequality that causes immense havoc, including the close link between status hierarchies, social dominance orientation, anti-egalitarianism, and psychopathy. In a high inequality society, SDOs drawn to high status will be concentrated at the top of cognitive development because they have the most access to resources. Like SDOs, psychopaths are also concentrated in both positions of power and in prisons. So, in promoting higher development among the few, what mostly happens is one gets some highly and unevenly developed deranged individuals. As the data shows, even wealthier people in high inequality societies have higher rates of social, mental, and health problems.

We need to focus on the basics of individual and public health; and lowering inequality might be the most powerful leverage we have, as that affects almost everything else — such as more equal access to nutritious food, clean air and water, healthcare, education, etc. I suspect we are getting ahead of ourselves in talking about the meta-rational, integral, and such. Our biggest problems are much simpler than figuring that out, I suspect. Research shows that chronic stress from poverty and inequality increases the amygdala while stunting growth of the brain structures required for higher cognition (prefrontal cortex, neocortex, and anterior cingulate). How are more people supposed to develop greater cognitive ability when unhealthy environmental conditions are negatively affecting their brain?

In case anyone is interested, I really liked the discussion in the comments section of an old Beams and Struts article. Jeremy Johnson participated, but I really appreciated the view of T. Collins Logan.

There was much debate about integral thought requiring discernment where transcend involves both inclusion and exclusion. To integrate means to take what works and leave the rest behind. Not everything is equal and so we should avoid false equivalency.

That seems related to what is being talked of here. Discernment, of course, requires genuine understanding. We need to know what is 4.5 before we decide to dismiss or discard it. That is the challenge, if many at 5 tend to use straw man arguments against a caricature.

Some argue that it is problematic to equate 4.5 with postmodernism. That is because 4.5 has been taking hold for centuries, long before postmodernist writings. It has much more significance than that, specifically as it has played out in the larger world outside of academia.

http://www.beamsandstruts.com/articles/item/1143-eightperspectivespolitics.html

I understand why stage 5 would be neither monist nor dualist in your definitions, but I wonder if stages 3-5 could be considered both monist and dualist (in perceptual-scientific terms).

People in stages 1 and 2 (kegan) are literally experiencing monism described by James Gibson. There is no abstract mental representation, but rather indexical-functional (concrete). Once they reach formal rationality, can’t they now look at things in terms of their literal affordances for action (concrete-monism), as well as their symbolic affordances for action (abstract -dualism)? I know this is not exactly what this page is about, but I’m wondering what you think of this.

Thanks!

Was Ezra Pound perhaps talking about the control of language not the control of money ? For instance “In the beginning there was the Word & the Word is God”; now that sounds very restrictive.

Thank you for your writings on stages 3, 4 and 5. Now I see clearer an aspect that happened to me: Gotten “traumatisesed” (not in the PTSD-sense) that a natural part of mine (logic) is bad. With your writings, I can now rephrase it as: While stage 4 functioning was a natural part if mine, stage 3 people told me that it is destructive and not-wished to be in stage 4. Thus did lead to an inner wound within myself.

People in stage 3 tend to misunderstand stage 4 as being stage 2

Which help do you see that can help stage 3 people to see and understand that there is something else (“stage 4”) that is different to what they are afraid of (“stage 2”)?, and that is not through Science, Technology, Engeneering or Mathematics (“STEM”), and not through a formalised education programme at all?

It does not need be a bridge to cross, but enough to see that there is something else which in fact is not stage 2, so that there is some ground for stage 3-people that acting and communicating from stage 4 is not attributed as stage 2-behaviour.

Where do Kegan’s stages come from?

This piece seems to contain the assumption that Kegan’s stages are universal and simply given. And this violates the author’s disputation of the “meaningness” of “eternalism.”

Is moving “up” a stage merely a matter of developing into a more complex form of brain wiring, requiring only neural plasticity as the ontological ground for this hierarchy of consciousness? Is it simply comparible to patterned stages of learning to play the violin? It seems to me that there must be more to it than that.

I think Chapman needs to do some more “ontological remodeling” to better include a “fluid” intersubjective ontology wherein these universal stages can be more systemically grounded.

Thanks for your quick and thoughtful reply.

I came across this piece of yours while doing research for an article I’m working on about the evolution of human nature—expanding the idea of “nature” to include the evolution of consciousness. My article includes an appreciative critique of developmental psychology: I appreciate Kegan and the neo-Piagetian school he represents for clearly framing “stage 5” in psychological terms. But I critique developmental psychology for inadequately integrating the evident impact of cultural evolution on psychological development—i.e. the relationship between the emergence of modernity and the growth of stage 4 cognition. Reading around in your larger body of work on meaningness has been stimulating.

Relatedly, for the past 10 years I’ve been working to build a stage 5 cultural institution (or perhaps just “a bridge to stage 5”) in the form of a think tank—the Institute for Cultural Evolution. We have recently received a new level of funding and are in the process of building up our staff. Perhaps we can find a way to engage you in our work, and promote your work in the process. This might take the form of us interviewing you on our soon to be launched podcast, or perhaps republishing excerpts from your work on our fledgling political magazine, “The Developmentalist.”

But whether you have any interest in collaborating or not, I salute you for your ongoing contribution to the evolution of the noosphere.

Too bad Vygotsky died young. But his focus was limited to the development of children and thus more closely tied to the biological development of their bodies. Kegan’s focus is on “adult development,” which is much harder to tie to biology or otherwise pin down empirically. This is why, in the realm of adult development, developmental psychology is woefully incomplete due to its lack of engagement with social ontology.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy contains a fairly recent article on social ontology …

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-ontology/

… pointing out the downward causal influence of “joint commitments.” But due to the SEP author’s apparent metaphysical allergy, the aggregation of joint commitments into larger structures such as historically significant worldviews is not addressed.

Anyway, when it comes time to invite you on our podcast, should I post that invitation here, or is there a way to correspond with you outside the comments section? My email: steve@culturalevolution.org

David, thinking about Brent’s comments from 2001, which you responded to by talking about the need for apprenticeship. Are you familiar with the system of Permaculture Design Certificate training?

David Holmgren and co designed this as a way to introduce people to the basics of the design system, in a short course (or a series of shorter ones). In a way that gives students a solid conceptual basis for lifetime learning about the application of the design principles, choice of material techniques to implement designs, and so on. Anyone who has completed a PDC is considered capable of teaching one.

First, I wondered if this could be a model for introducing people to meta-systemic thinking and practice. Then, I wondered if it might already be an example of doing exactly that? The approach that many of the “systems thinkers” often referenced by permies, eg Donella Meadows, author of Dancing With Systems, seem to me more akin to stage 5 than stage 4.