Visser on Wilber’s Views of Evolution

From Integral World:

The 'Spirit of Evolution' Reconsidered: Relating Ken Wilber's view of spiritual evolution to the current evolution debates

by Frank Visser

“In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious.” - John Stuart Mill

How should Ken Wilber's stance on evolutionary theory and neo-Darwinism be evaluated? Evolution is a central concept in Wilber's oeuvre as evidenced by expressions such as: "The Spirit of Evolution", "Evolution as Spirit-in-Action" and "Evolutionary Spirituality". For Wilber, evolution is a spiritual phenomenon, both guided by as well as heading towards Spirit. Yet, in mainstream evolutionary theory, the term "evolution" has quite different connotations. Does integral theory have a substantial contribution to make to the subject of evolutionary theory or is it merely producing metaphors that provide meaning and significance for those in search of an uplifting philosophy of life?

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Cultivating Postformal Adult Development

Cultivating Postformal Adult Development: Higher Stages and Contrasting Interventions

By William R. Torbert

As this chapter will discuss, the practice of action inquiry and the Vedic/TM method are the only two educational interventions that have empirically been shown to facilitate adult developmental transformation beyond formal operations. The primary concern of this chapter is to present experiential tastes, theoretical outlines, and empirical findings of the action inquiry approach to adult learning, adult development, and leadership.

The Vedic/TM approach and the empirical research relating to it is well discussed in Alexander's chapter in this volume and will be reviewed only briefly later in this chapter in order to compare its educational process and documented outcomes to the action inquiry approach.

The action inquiry approach to adult learning, development, and leadership is to integrate inquiry into action, rather than separating them into reflection, on the one hand, and action, on the other hand-into "ivory tower" vs. "real world." On a personal scale, this implies an attempt to widen and deepen one's awareness meditatively in the very midst of one's workaday action. On an interpersonal scale, integrating action and inquiry implies speaking in ways that simultaneously assert, illustrate, and inquire into others' responses.

On an organizational scale, integrating action with inquiry results in the creation and re-creation of liberating structures that simultaneously increase participants' awareness, empowerment, and productivity . On all three scales, the action inquiry approach is intended to invite reframing of assumptions and developmental transformation at appropriate moments.

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SOURCE: In Miller, M. & Cook-Greuter, S. (Ed.s), 1994. "Transcendence and Mature Thought in Adulthood", Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 181-203

Chalmers on The Singularity

The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis
By David J. Chalmers

What happens when machines become more intelligent than humans? One view is that this event will be followed by an explosion to ever-greater levels of intelligence, as each generation of machines creates more intelligent machines in turn. This intelligence explosion is now often known as the “singularity”.

The basic argument here was set out by the statistician I.J. Good in his 1965 article "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

The key idea is that a machine that is more intelligent than humans will be better than humans at designing machines. So it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than the most intelligent machine that humans can design. So if it is itself designed by humans, it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. By similar reasoning, this next machine will also be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. If every machine in turn does what it is capable of, we should expect a sequence of ever more intelligent machines.

This intelligence explosion is sometimes combined with another idea, which we might call the “speed explosion”. The argument for a speed explosion starts from the familiar observation that computer processing speed doubles at regular intervals. Suppose that speed doubles every two years and will do so indefinitely. Now suppose that we have human-level artificial intelligence designing new processors. Then faster processing will lead to faster designers and an ever-faster design cycle, leading to a limit point soon afterwards.

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