In a nutshell, Integral Theory is a systematic combination of reductionism, systems theory, critical theory (including postmodernism) and transpersonalism: the knowledge of the self taught by religious movements and Eastern philosophy. I was attracted to Integral Theory because, as readers of this blog have probably noted, I champion postmodernism while frequently falling back on modernist analysis.

I say Integral Theory is a “philosophical system”, but I’m actually not sure exactly what it is. Is it making a falsifiable claim about the way the world is? Or is it just a metaphor with greater explanatory potential than alternatives? “If you apply Integral Theory to this problem, you will understand it better than if you apply reductionism.” Without knowing what kind of claim Wilber is making, I don’t know how to evaluate the strength of his claim.

Integral Theory has the modernist concept of progress as a central belief. Specifically, progress of belief systems: Integral Theory is the next step after postmodernism. But postmodernists see progress as specifically modernist and ask “what makes you so sure it’s progress and not just change?” Integral Theory feels like a synthesis of modernism with some premodern and postmodern ideas but it doesn’t step past modernism.

Wilber’s technique is to analyze hundreds of philosophical systems and abstract them to their core structure. For example, he sees all Eastern religions as describing the same basic development of the self. This strikes me as incredibly reductionist and I suspect believers in those specific systems would say that he’s missing a lot of important details.

The Take, which you can watch all of starting with part one of nine here, is a Naomi Klein documentary about groups of anarcho-socialist workers who are reinventing the political economy of post-economic-collapse Argentina.

The film makes the implicit case that the state monopoly on violence exists to suppress protest and direct political action in the name of protecting private property.

This is the “everyone’s a consultant” economy I’ve dreamed of, that I want to exist here, actualized. Except let’s call it a “cooperative” economy, or, better, a “bossless” economy.

Because a house divided against itself cannot stand*, and once you divide management from production you create an us-versus-them dynamic that, eventually, will ruin everything. Best to just keep the people that actually do the work.

* This is my liberation theology talking — it’s not very anarchist of me, and the film takes an explicit “no kings, no saviors” anarchist stance.

One of the key beliefs of systems theory is that evolution tends toward higher complexity. Humans aren’t the end product of evolution, nor has evolution been building towards humans specifically, but something like humans is seen as inevitable.

In fact, biologists will tell you that evolution tends toward diversity. Over time, you’ll end up with organisms that are both more and less complex – both humans and prions. There are far more species of single-celled organisms than multi-celled organisms (although “species” is a fuzzy concept without sex), presumably because many more combinations of single-celled DNA are viable. Natural selection has, in some cases, resulted in lower complexity, like how simians can’t synthesize vitamin C. (This argument is based on Wikipedia’s page on evolution of complexity.)

From a postmodern perspective, systems theory is the modernist metanarrative of progress in a sciency wrapper. But even reductionist science has been infected by the progress metanarrative – scientists frequently give support to things like social Darwinism.

Systems theory is not really criticism of science itself, it’s a criticism of the paradigms governing many scientific disciplines (an overarching paradigm or a metaparadigm?). Like any scientific paradigm shift, it’s more of an evolution of the worldview than the revolution that I originally mistook systems theory for.

At the time, optical theory was not advanced enough to explain how telescopes worked. So Galileo had to trust on faith that his instruments were measuring what he thought they were measuring. It’s not scientific, but Galileo was supported by a consensus of astronomers, including Jesuits.

Observations of planets do not distinguish between the Tychonic system, where the sun orbits the earth and all other planets orbit the sun, and the heliocentric system. The only way to determine if the earth is moving is by stellar parallax: the triangulation of stars from opposite ends of the earth’s orbit. Galileo predicted stellar parallax but it was not observed for 115 years*, so his theory was falsified until then.

In fact, under relativity it is impossible to determine whether the universe has a centre, so it is a theological rather than scientific statement.

The proper way to consider Galileo’s work is not as a scientific result, but a shift to a new paradigm: astronomy based on telescope evidence with no reference to scripture. You might find this more elegant, it might be better at landing people on the moon, but there’s no basis for saying it’s more truthful.

* And even then it wasn’t stellar parallax, it was the unpredicted steller aberration. Parallax wasn’t observed until 228 years after Galileo’s prediction.

“We feel it’s incumbent on us as an agency to attempt to reinterview them and establish whether this is [an] actual event,” Larimer County Sheriff James Alderden said Friday.

And then Wittgenstein rotated along his subterranean bilateral axis. I love it when people struggle with terminology in a way that sounds philosophical. The Sheriff’s “was this an actual event” investigation reminds me of Rumsfeld’s unintentional poem, dubbed Happenings. Rumsfeld’s news briefs were avant-garde, a kind of ready-made, or “found”, poetry that I didn’t think could exist (they were, perhaps, an “unknown known” — punctuation mine):

Happenings

You’re going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day,
That don’t happen.

It doesn’t seem to bother people, they don’t –
It’s printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.

Everyone’s so eager to get the story,
Before, in fact, the story’s there,
That the world is constantly being fed,
Things that haven’t happened.

All I can tell you is,
It hasn’t happened –

It’s going to happen.

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

The poor Sheriff is suddenly faced with an Epistemological problem for which he has received absolutely no training. Hopefully Rumsfeld’s poetry will help him wrestle with the absurdity of his duties:

“We believe, at this time, that it was a real event.”

I’ve got CBC radio’s acclaimed (but feature-poor) iPhone application. I just used it to listen to the first half of The Biology of Mind. It starts out by setting up dualism as the dominant paradigm of contemporary psychology and philosophy. Are Ideas listeners really that uneducated?

The bulk of the show is an aging mollusk researcher with a hobby in psychoanalysis speculating on reductionist philosophy of mind: that every mind thing can be explained in terms of a brain thing. There were a few points where he jumps to conclusions that make me think either the editing was really bad or the guest simply doesn’t care about scientific standards. Is Ideas usually that anti-science? (I know it’s not Quirks and Quarks but still…)

It makes me worry about the Ideas programs on history that I’ve enjoyed but am unable to critically evaluate…

He’s done a couple more posts in the last few months to pimp his new book co-written with 50 Cent, The 50th Law, ostensibly about how fear controls our lives. “50 bled his fear out into the gutters of the New York ghetto — now u can 2!”

The book, which just came out (there’s an interview with Greene in the Globe today), strikes me as a naked exercise of the laws. It helps build 50′s personality cult while convincing people to depend more on Greene. The 48 laws, for example, are all good strategies for things like complicated games (poker, chess, go, Avalon Hill games, German games, business, etc). But telling people that a book will help them defeat fear might just be creating a need and then selling the solution.

That said, the times in poker and life when I’ve acknowledged my fear and implemented a strategy anyway have, without fail, been fulfilling.

“Fuck this guy, it’s time to raise him with air.”

“Fuck it, time to eat a bunch of mushrooms and hand out flowers to strange women.”

“Fuck it, time to walk out on this job.”

Or, you know, blogging. There’s fear here too. There’s fear pretty much everywhere, but you just deal. That’s humanity. I’ve been heckled while public speaking — it wasn’t that bad. I even met my own personal fear demon once. Again: Not too terrible.

I don’t want to come off as an expert, writer’s block is a kind of fear too, but I know the basic strategy. I asked an actor once, just after he read Gordon’s part in Jaded for me, how being a professional creative person was possible for him, how he sheltered his ego from the constant rejection that’s simply the name of the game.

“You just do your best,” he said, “and sometimes it works.”

Wise words. In poker they say, “there’s no point in being results-oriented.” Same thing. You gotta be in it to win it, but success itself has a large random factor susceptible to multiple retries. You gotta accumulate that expected value.

Digressions aside: You have to meet and murder your fears. A book probably won’t help. You “just” need to do it (though to be fair The 50th Law is billed as containing meditations on fear, which sounds interesting in a sith-zen way).

All-in, I will be getting the book because I’m a fan of both Jackson and Greene. Actual review to follow.

The Baron Black of Crossharbour admonishes the parasites: Don’t hate people because they’re beautiful.

Carla Bruni Sarkozy and Princess Letizia of Spain are guilty of the crime of making others feel uncomfortable, but — and here’s the hard thing for parasites to understand — that’s not actually a crime.

These are not Stepford Wives. If Canadian feminism clings in a bear hug to humourless, joyless, anti-glam spartanism, it will fizzle, deservedly.

I’ve always supported Paris Hilton for largely the same reason. People who criticize her business success because she’s pretty and uses sex to sell are oppressing women. How puritanism is supposed to liberate people entirely escapes me.

The parasites, the haters, try to close off every avenue of success by calling it immoral in order to assuage their own failings. When you complain about women being too pretty for feminism* you reveal more about your own insecurities than anything else.

* Warning: The linked article is extremely ridiculous.

I suppose the biggest appeal to me, so far, is recognition. Reading it is like that moment on a hike when you’re not sure if you’re on a deer path or the trail. You round a corner, the trees break, and you see the path ahead clearly marked: Go this way.

I have met one, perhaps two, kindred souls in the world of business. I have met more painters with the qualities of successful entrepreneurs than I have self-styled businesspeople.

Atlas will help these few of us — and maybe some artists — move forward more quickly, with less second-guessing of our motives. It provides a framing argument for why what we do is moral that is otherwise non-existent in Canadian society.

Second, Gecko. Note that this speech is a perfect application of the laws of power. Gecko frames his corporate raid in terms of toppling corrupt management and helping the little guy. This speech skirts Rand so closely that I’m tempted to say it only differs by synonym:

Rand in her own words. Her insistence on the objective nature of reality is interesting, because her ideas apply equally well, or better, if you assume (as I do) that reality is totally subjective:

Ed Snider, the owner of the Philadelphia Flyers, the Philadelphia 76ers, the Wachovia Center, the Wachovia Spectrum, Comcast SportsNet, and some other teams and companies, on the effect Atlas Shrugged had on him. He starts with a good joke about employment:

Here’s part two, and here’s what he means by “the mystics of spirit and muscle”.

I agree that capitalism needs to be taught in school: High school though, in addition to university.