New tools for understanding a turbulent world - Thomas Homer-Dixon

Today's social sciences have difficulty providing conceptual, analytic and predictive tools that help policy-makers and the public address contemporary global problems such as financial crises, energy shocks, food price spikes and climate change. In his Big Thinking lecture at Congress 2012, Thomas Homer-Dixon provides some guideposts to understanding complexity science and its potential relevance to practical social science. He suggests that policy advice from the social sciences often assumes individual rationality, an aggregation of individual rational choice into group behavior, the progression of social systems towards equilibrium, and, ultimately, calculable risk. Homer-Dixon argues that humankind's most critical problems arise from emergent complex social and natural systems marked by deep uncertainty, positive and negative feedbacks and frequent instability.

 

Thomas Homer-Dixon holds the CIGI Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. He is Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and Professor in the School of Environment, Enterprise, and Development in the Faculty of Environment. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, he received his PhD from MIT in international relations and defense and arms control policy in 1989. His books include The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (2006), which won the 2006 National Business Book Award, The Ingenuity Gap (2000), winner of the 2001 Governor General's Non-fiction Award, and Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (1999), which won the Caldwell Prize of the American Political Science Association. His recent research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change.

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?

Read More: Here

Gebser, Origins and the Mutation of Consciousness

Awakening to Origin

by Jeremy Johnson

Not too many people are familiar with Gebser, including the integral folks who only receive his philosophy through Ken Wilber's plotted maps and points. I'd like to take a few minutes to share with you a few poetic insights Gebser was able to share through his life's work.

For anyone totally unfamiliar with him, Gebser was a prolific intellectual mystic. His writings give you a sense of urgency and awakening, as if every fiber of his being was compelled to put to paper something that only his soul had received by illumination.

I'm writing this blog not so much to make an intellectual case or argument for his ideas, but only to show you the theme he wished readers to consider. His life's work, Ever Present Origin, invites us into a new mode of perceiving the world. It takes the reader through hundreds of pieces of literature, artwork, and poetry throughout the ages, marking the transitions in thinking and relating to the world. We become immersed in a book about the evolution of consciousness, which can't easily be disconnected (if at all) from the evolution of culture.

Gebser was able to note that we have undergone at least 4 major mutations: archaic, magic, mythic, mental-rational. These categories, however, must be understood in context of their content. One cannot simply look at the list and understand it, they are best understood by reading the cultural artifacts themselves. Each of them pertain to how we relate to space and time.

Read More From: Single Eye Movement

An Approach to Integral Consciousness and Politics

An Interview with Steve McIntosh

By Russ Volckmann

Excerpt: “Integral philosophy is primarily a philosophy of evolution. And as we come to better see and understand evolution, when we see it in cosmology, biology, consciousness and culture, we can begin to detect certain things about the overarching master system of evolution, or how evolution works overall, especially in the realm of consciousness and culture. This reveals the process that is being enacted by evolution. And it exists across scale; that is, it is a process of development that acts at the micro and macro levels of development. Of course, this process is the well-known dialectic of development.

The term “dialectic” can be found in Ancient Greek philosophy, where it was more about a dialogue between people. However, since Hegel, the dialectic has been understood as a process whereby conflicting systems overcome themselves through a kind of transcendent synthesis. Most people are familiar with the terms “thesis,” “antithesis” and “synthesis.” But those terms have been criticized as a kind of vulgarization of the dialectic. There is a danger when you break this process down into its parts that you could lose the essential truth of the dialectic—that it is more of an integrated process as a whole rather than a series of steps.”

Read Full Interview from the Integral Review (PDF): Here