And then we rethink what we're mining history for. Not their assumptions and certainly not their conclusions that were shaped by the limitations of their knowledge and culture. We stop mining for answers and look for their observations.
And then, when we refine the observations to their basic elements, like consciousness exists and relation is the means of dialogos in the universe.
And then we compare those observations to more modern observations like relativity and quantum probability, dismissing the assumptions and conclusions of those that were shaped by that era's limitations of knowledge and culture.
And then we look at the current observations, like the behavior of Michael Levin's zenobots when removed from their normal skin environment and the discovery of entanglement, and dismiss their assumptions and conclusions shaped by the limitations of current knowledge and culture that is inevitably a product of the assumptions and conclusions of history.
And then we start from scratch and look at the observations that we have accumulated and find the commonalities and the interactions of those observations and form better, tentative conclusions without assumptions where possible because the assumptions are shaped by the conclusions of history.
Each of us lives in a context. One writer suggests our experience of reality “a reality posit” is produced from the dialectical dance of consciousness and culture –always on a historical and material stage.
Our stage in the present is crazy. How does one compare and judge ideas and concepts. What is the good. I could suggest that a quality of the good is that the good is timeless. It doesn't do violence to itself.
I think Musk knows that humans will not survive on Mars, that is why he is building Optimus and developing through Neuralink a way to integrate our wet computer with Silicon, and of course SpaceX to get there.
"When we’re done with those imponderable projects, we can begin to work on ourselves, on the soul. That was Jung’s vocation."
Humbly, and based on personal experience, as well as on Jung's own words, "Jung" - not just minimal psychological health, but psychological excellence, accepting and integrating the shadow etc., not only each of us personally, but us as a humanity as a whole - belongs at the top of the list, not just "when we're done" with metaphysics, because until we - again, as individuals and as a global community of human beings - have confronted our shadow/s, we are doomed, and nothing else that we do - whether scientific research and speculation or philosophical speculation, but also any spiritual inner work - is of any value, because it will inevitably be tainted and will not bring forward what we desperately need.
However, that too is an unreachable ideal, so we must pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, even a three-pronged process, as you suggest, with our two hands, juggling between one and the other. But the point I'm making is where to put the stress, and I guess that is for each of us to figure out where we are on the path and what we need to do right now, but most importantly, never put "Jung" last, and always assess everything through that lense.
I take your point that psychological integration must precede higher speculation. Still, I’m not sure that makes Jungian work a substitute for metaphysics. It seems to me they address different dimensions of the same search — one interior, one ontological. If we collapse the metaphysical into the psychological, we risk mistaking self-knowledge for knowledge of being.
I did not at all say, and certainly did not mean to say, "instead of, "rather than," nor to collapse the metaphysical into the psychological, but that if humankind is to survive and to thrive into the future, there must be a large enough mass movement of individuals who are working on self-knowledge rather than projecting onto others to bring about the needed deep change. And that is Jung in my own words.
Thanks for clarifying, Josh. I see now that you’re not collapsing metaphysics into psychology, but emphasizing that meaningful societal and spiritual progress requires a critical mass of individuals engaged in self-knowledge. That makes sense — inner work doesn’t replace metaphysical inquiry, but it creates the conditions for it to matter in the world.
Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas, Hegel, Whitehead--the signs of those "desiderada" are everywhere. One needn't look far. Segall, however, is more illusive. It's nice to catch a glimpse of him from time to time. I look forward to future sightings.
Thank you. This morning I was contemplating the muchness of biographies and cosmographies I can engage with these days. Each one of us has a concrete biography and a subtle cosmography. The story of what we do with and in Life, the report on the roads we have been traveling. And more and more of us will articulate a story that is cohering in our mind all that we see, believe, feel passionate about, orient towards as a preferred future. Each cosmography tends to has its own language, its own use of old words and creation of new words.
These days I find it not only a challenge to stay coherent steeped within the digesting mush of oldness, but also in the cloud of newness, a nebulous field where new stars are birn as bright insight. A cosmic cocoon in which imaginel cells are spontaneously converging to create new forms of beauty. New stages of coherent consciousness. 'New' relationships with Wholeness 'again'.
Wonderful piece. I've been following for a while now and I'll be honest that I don't agree with much of your philosophy, but I love your metaphilosophy. Your manner in which you approach these questions we ask, your meta-metaphysics in this case, is beautiful. And now you've left me with some reading to do and the task of capturing your meaning in the last paragraph.
This is beautifully written and clearly steeped in the metaphysical tradition. But I’m not sure what new work it intends to do. It seems less an argument than a mood — a kind of poetic rehearsal of themes we already know from Plato through Whitehead. Perhaps that’s the point: to revive the tone of wonder rather than advance a claim. Still, I’m left unsure what, philosophically, is being added to the conversation.
Most all of my life I have struggled with how to understand science from a holistic perspective. When the Santa Fe Institute began work on complex adaptive systems the assumptions were of reductionist not holistic framings. That has changed over time. Now a real holistic science of relationships may indeed be possible. I have been an admirer of William James going back to the 1960s. When I heard your expositions of Whitehead I was stunned. Why had I missed out on his ideas all these years? I have spent some time very recently and I believe I have found the reason. It is so embarrassing I really don’t want to say why. But if confessing my idiocy helps someone else, maybe the embarrassment will be worth it. My younger brother, though above average intelligence, he was no match for his three brothers. We treated him poorly, a shameful truth. He tried to introduce Whitehead to me and since my less gifted brother thought highly of him, Whitehead was probably a waste of my time. The horror of my foolishness knows no bounds. All that time wasted. Well at least I am still breathing and my cognition is still fairly functional. Better late etc. Damn, it still irritates the hell out of me that I was such a fool. I do want to thank you for being such an excellent teacher. I really think looking at complexity and systems thinking from a pluralist and pragmatist perspective is a gold mine. Michael Levin just published a paper using ingression that Iain McGilchrist mentioned on Substack. Real patterns in structural realism seems to be opening minds to holism but it is still a scary jump. I see panpsychism as a cheesy rear guard action to protect their holy holy reductionism. Maybe it is a personality thing. I revel in mystery. Having all the mystery taken away would leave me depressed. The quest for surprise is what makes life fun. Minimizing free energy in a cyborg is dull. Michael Levin in a discussion last December with Mark Solms and two others mentioned strange behavior with algorithms. I have studied Flajolet’s analysis of expected execution time of algorithms but never heard anyone make the claims that Levin made. I would like to see the code and data. Also, why he is so mystified by the bubble sort is strange. I wrote a bubble sort subroutine decades ago. Now recursive function theory, that is damn seriously complicated stuff. I am a geometrical thinker so all that heavy duty algebra and mathematical logic gives me vertigo.
Charles, your post reads like a parable of discovery through humility. You start with science and end with a confession of pride — and that mirrors the journey science itself must take to rediscover metaphysics. Reductionism mistook dissection for understanding; now, complexity and systems thinking are showing what Whitehead and James intuited long ago: relation, not substance, is the grammar of reality.
Your story about dismissing Whitehead because your brother admired him captures the same bias at the human level — we reject ideas because of who presents them, not what they reveal. That honesty is the point: humility is the prerequisite for seeing reality more fully, both personally and collectively.
And then we rethink what we're mining history for. Not their assumptions and certainly not their conclusions that were shaped by the limitations of their knowledge and culture. We stop mining for answers and look for their observations.
And then, when we refine the observations to their basic elements, like consciousness exists and relation is the means of dialogos in the universe.
And then we compare those observations to more modern observations like relativity and quantum probability, dismissing the assumptions and conclusions of those that were shaped by that era's limitations of knowledge and culture.
And then we look at the current observations, like the behavior of Michael Levin's zenobots when removed from their normal skin environment and the discovery of entanglement, and dismiss their assumptions and conclusions shaped by the limitations of current knowledge and culture that is inevitably a product of the assumptions and conclusions of history.
And then we start from scratch and look at the observations that we have accumulated and find the commonalities and the interactions of those observations and form better, tentative conclusions without assumptions where possible because the assumptions are shaped by the conclusions of history.
Metaphysics. I agree with your thoughts.
Each of us lives in a context. One writer suggests our experience of reality “a reality posit” is produced from the dialectical dance of consciousness and culture –always on a historical and material stage.
Our stage in the present is crazy. How does one compare and judge ideas and concepts. What is the good. I could suggest that a quality of the good is that the good is timeless. It doesn't do violence to itself.
…🙄It’s tuesday…☯️
I think Musk knows that humans will not survive on Mars, that is why he is building Optimus and developing through Neuralink a way to integrate our wet computer with Silicon, and of course SpaceX to get there.
"When we’re done with those imponderable projects, we can begin to work on ourselves, on the soul. That was Jung’s vocation."
Humbly, and based on personal experience, as well as on Jung's own words, "Jung" - not just minimal psychological health, but psychological excellence, accepting and integrating the shadow etc., not only each of us personally, but us as a humanity as a whole - belongs at the top of the list, not just "when we're done" with metaphysics, because until we - again, as individuals and as a global community of human beings - have confronted our shadow/s, we are doomed, and nothing else that we do - whether scientific research and speculation or philosophical speculation, but also any spiritual inner work - is of any value, because it will inevitably be tainted and will not bring forward what we desperately need.
However, that too is an unreachable ideal, so we must pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, even a three-pronged process, as you suggest, with our two hands, juggling between one and the other. But the point I'm making is where to put the stress, and I guess that is for each of us to figure out where we are on the path and what we need to do right now, but most importantly, never put "Jung" last, and always assess everything through that lense.
I take your point that psychological integration must precede higher speculation. Still, I’m not sure that makes Jungian work a substitute for metaphysics. It seems to me they address different dimensions of the same search — one interior, one ontological. If we collapse the metaphysical into the psychological, we risk mistaking self-knowledge for knowledge of being.
I did not at all say, and certainly did not mean to say, "instead of, "rather than," nor to collapse the metaphysical into the psychological, but that if humankind is to survive and to thrive into the future, there must be a large enough mass movement of individuals who are working on self-knowledge rather than projecting onto others to bring about the needed deep change. And that is Jung in my own words.
Thanks for clarifying, Josh. I see now that you’re not collapsing metaphysics into psychology, but emphasizing that meaningful societal and spiritual progress requires a critical mass of individuals engaged in self-knowledge. That makes sense — inner work doesn’t replace metaphysical inquiry, but it creates the conditions for it to matter in the world.
Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas, Hegel, Whitehead--the signs of those "desiderada" are everywhere. One needn't look far. Segall, however, is more illusive. It's nice to catch a glimpse of him from time to time. I look forward to future sightings.
Thank you. This morning I was contemplating the muchness of biographies and cosmographies I can engage with these days. Each one of us has a concrete biography and a subtle cosmography. The story of what we do with and in Life, the report on the roads we have been traveling. And more and more of us will articulate a story that is cohering in our mind all that we see, believe, feel passionate about, orient towards as a preferred future. Each cosmography tends to has its own language, its own use of old words and creation of new words.
These days I find it not only a challenge to stay coherent steeped within the digesting mush of oldness, but also in the cloud of newness, a nebulous field where new stars are birn as bright insight. A cosmic cocoon in which imaginel cells are spontaneously converging to create new forms of beauty. New stages of coherent consciousness. 'New' relationships with Wholeness 'again'.
Mar
Wonderful piece. I've been following for a while now and I'll be honest that I don't agree with much of your philosophy, but I love your metaphilosophy. Your manner in which you approach these questions we ask, your meta-metaphysics in this case, is beautiful. And now you've left me with some reading to do and the task of capturing your meaning in the last paragraph.
And then there was this:
http://www.consciousnessitself.org
http://www.integralworld.net/reynolds16.html
http://www.dabase.org/up-1-7.htm
http://www.dabase.org/Reality_Itself_Is_Not_In_The_Middle.htm
http://www.dabase.org/illusion-weather.htm
and then we see
We are the branches of the tree of life
reaching into novelty
as well as
the roots of being
digging ever deeper into becoming
sometimes expanding into evolutionary advance
blossoming, ripening the fruits of wonder
sometimes contracting, snapping under the weight of hubris
shedding away the old,
reconfiguring
learning.
We are life emerging,
responding to the call of being,
engulfed in the process of becoming.
Even small wonders are magnificent
when held in relation to the efforts of the whole.
The greatest tragedies become beautiful
as they inspire an equivalent transformation,
a stunning response to the possibilities of existence
⸻
This is beautifully written and clearly steeped in the metaphysical tradition. But I’m not sure what new work it intends to do. It seems less an argument than a mood — a kind of poetic rehearsal of themes we already know from Plato through Whitehead. Perhaps that’s the point: to revive the tone of wonder rather than advance a claim. Still, I’m left unsure what, philosophically, is being added to the conversation.
That's not what metaphysics is. Here's most of the answers: https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/metaphysics-in-a-nutshell
Most all of my life I have struggled with how to understand science from a holistic perspective. When the Santa Fe Institute began work on complex adaptive systems the assumptions were of reductionist not holistic framings. That has changed over time. Now a real holistic science of relationships may indeed be possible. I have been an admirer of William James going back to the 1960s. When I heard your expositions of Whitehead I was stunned. Why had I missed out on his ideas all these years? I have spent some time very recently and I believe I have found the reason. It is so embarrassing I really don’t want to say why. But if confessing my idiocy helps someone else, maybe the embarrassment will be worth it. My younger brother, though above average intelligence, he was no match for his three brothers. We treated him poorly, a shameful truth. He tried to introduce Whitehead to me and since my less gifted brother thought highly of him, Whitehead was probably a waste of my time. The horror of my foolishness knows no bounds. All that time wasted. Well at least I am still breathing and my cognition is still fairly functional. Better late etc. Damn, it still irritates the hell out of me that I was such a fool. I do want to thank you for being such an excellent teacher. I really think looking at complexity and systems thinking from a pluralist and pragmatist perspective is a gold mine. Michael Levin just published a paper using ingression that Iain McGilchrist mentioned on Substack. Real patterns in structural realism seems to be opening minds to holism but it is still a scary jump. I see panpsychism as a cheesy rear guard action to protect their holy holy reductionism. Maybe it is a personality thing. I revel in mystery. Having all the mystery taken away would leave me depressed. The quest for surprise is what makes life fun. Minimizing free energy in a cyborg is dull. Michael Levin in a discussion last December with Mark Solms and two others mentioned strange behavior with algorithms. I have studied Flajolet’s analysis of expected execution time of algorithms but never heard anyone make the claims that Levin made. I would like to see the code and data. Also, why he is so mystified by the bubble sort is strange. I wrote a bubble sort subroutine decades ago. Now recursive function theory, that is damn seriously complicated stuff. I am a geometrical thinker so all that heavy duty algebra and mathematical logic gives me vertigo.
⸻
Charles, your post reads like a parable of discovery through humility. You start with science and end with a confession of pride — and that mirrors the journey science itself must take to rediscover metaphysics. Reductionism mistook dissection for understanding; now, complexity and systems thinking are showing what Whitehead and James intuited long ago: relation, not substance, is the grammar of reality.
Your story about dismissing Whitehead because your brother admired him captures the same bias at the human level — we reject ideas because of who presents them, not what they reveal. That honesty is the point: humility is the prerequisite for seeing reality more fully, both personally and collectively.