A Case Study in Sensemaking:
A Thesis submitted to the faculty of graduate studies at the University of Calgary
Note: This document has been reformatted from its original format,
The purpose of this chapter is to delineate the key aspects comprising the epistemology that informs my research. It is written as a conversation between myself and three scholars, Ken Wilber, Max van Manen, and Humberto Maturana, each of whom has greatly influenced my thinking regarding the nature of knowing, knowledge, and reality in relation to human science research. An additional character, Q, is included in the conversation primarily as a literary device for enhancing the flow of the conversation. Except for direct quotes, the content of each speaker's comments is based on my interpretation of their work and reflects my understanding of how their ideas interrelate to form a comprehensive epistemology.
Gathering at the Fire
Jim: Beautiful evening, isn't it. Q: Yes, it is. Jim: The perfect place to contemplate--to stretch, to extend, to open the full mind (conscious and unconscious) to that which lies beyond what is known to that which is unknown. Q: To know is the great temptation, is it not? Jim: That it is. Ever since man and woman first ate from the tree of knowledge, we have struggled with knowing, with understanding ourselves and the world we inhabit. Eating the apple brought with it awareness of our existence; thus, we became Homo sapiens, or as Ernest Becker prefers Homo poeta--meaning maker.1 We began to question. We began to know, to seek knowledge. Q: What question tempts your mind to tonight? Jim: Questions‚my mind is filled with questions. What constitutes reality? How do we come to know things? How do we come to be knowers? What does it mean to be a knower? What is the nature of knowledge? How does knowledge evolve? The list is endless. Q: Have these questions not been answered? Jim: It is true that they have been answered, but the answers formulated in one culture have been rejected and replaced by those of another. Answers accepted by one generation are repeatedly abandoned by the next generation. Answers, which proved satisfactory for some, are deemed inadequate by others. My task is to answer them for myself in the present context of my life. Q: Yes, but that's a life's work. What is your question, the one at the core of your research? The one that will be the focus of tonight's thinking, of tonight's conversation. Jim: It is difficult to say as questions are never simple, nor do they travel alone. They are always embedded one within another. However, having said that, the question that is core to my research can be stated as follows: "How does what occurs on a scientific field trip influence the evolution of knowledge within a community of scholars?" However, before I tackle this question, I must first come to an understanding of "What counts as knowledge?" With this in mind, the topic of tonight's conversation is to explore the evolution of what counts as knowledge. Ken: To do so my friend, you must first consider "Schelling's burning question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?'"2 Jim: Good evening. Ken, allow me to introduce my longtime friend and confidant, Q. Ken: Glad to meet you. Q: My pleasure. Jim: Q, this is Ken Wilber, American writer and philosopher. Ken is considered to be one of the foremost thinkers in the field of consciousness. His work integrates Western psychology and the Eastern spiritual traditions. What I appreciate most about Ken is his ability to synthesize the diverse teachings of religion, psychology, physics, mysticism, sociology, and anthropology.3 Besides reading the four thousand books in his personal library and writing one book after another, Ken, like you Q, enjoys lifting weights and drinking beer. Q: There's beer in the cooler Ken. Grab one and come join us by the fire. Ken: Thanks. Q: But Schelling's question has already been answered. Everything "from positivism to scientific materialism, from linguistic analysis to historical materialism, from naturalism to empiricism" informs us that the universe is "ultimately accidental or random, it just is, it just happens."4 Nothing else need be said. Right! Ken: Wrong! There is an alternative answer: "something else is going on."5 And that something else is Spirit, that which is unknowable, that which is the driving force behind the evolution of the universe‚the deeper order or universal intelligence manifest as the Kosmos.6 There you have it, the two alternatives. Your "philosophy of oops,"7 as I call it, in which the world is seen from a strictly external point of view denies the internal existence of experience (mind or consciousness) as separate from external observable experience. Consequently, all experience is reduced to objective domains of reality. This position, dominant in Western culture, seriously limits our understanding of the nature of knowledge and reality whereas the something-else-is-going-on perspective acknowledges that the internal dimensions of mind or consciousness have a validity of their own which cannot be reduced to external objective dimensions.8 Therefore, the internal subjective and external objective components of experience are seen as important dimensions of reality. Jim: From this perspective, with which I agree, any discussion of knowledge or reality can be seen to arise from the philosophical premise that there is an underlying order to the events of the universe, and it is this underlying order (Spirit) that drives the evolution of the Kosmos in the direction of higher consciousness (more Spirit).9 In other words, the evolution of consciousness is the underlying ground that gives shape to the evolution of what counts as knowledge. Q: So how will you go about examining this question of what counts as knowledge? Jim: Because I ultimately must create an extensive and diverse epistemology, an integrated one that is a synthesis of ideas concerning the composition of reality, the knowing of reality, and the domains of reality, I will adopt a generalist's approach. The advantage of this approach is that it reduces the chances of becoming overly theoretical and thus detached from the context of lived experience which is the basis of knowledge and reality.10 Max: Did I hear "lived experience?" I must be at the right place. Jim: Hello, Max. Gentlemen allow me to introduce Max van Manen. Max is originally from the Netherlands. Currently he is a professor of education at the University of Alberta. In the field of human science research, he brings a Dutch and German as well as a North American perspective to our discussion. He is also the founding editor of the human science journal, Phenomenology and Pedagogy.11 Q: Welcome. Would you care for a little schnapps? Max: Please. Jim: Max, we were just discussing taking a generalist's approach to research. Q: A generalist approach must cause some problems. Isn't doctoral research supposed to be original and therefore don't you, by default, have to be a specialist? Jim: Original yes, but not a specialist, at least not in the sense of having to concentrate on a single concept divorced from other related concepts. Take ecologists for example. They don't study individual species in isolation; instead they study whole systems‚the relationships between species within the system. Consequently, an ecologist may develop understandings of the relationship between a particular insect and a certain plant but not have the in-depth understandings that either the entomologist or botanist might have. Thus, in taking the generalist approach, I, like the ecologists, will inevitably gloss over issues that others have considered in greater detail; however, the generalist's position allows for a synthesis of ideas from a wide spectrum of specialists' work, which is what I am after in developing an integrative epistemology. Ken: Whenever one takes on the task of synthesizing the works of other researchers there is the problem of oversimplifying. I'm sure that could be said of my work. Jim: Agreed. I see your work as similar to that of Jean Piaget's in that both of you focus on the epistemic person rather than the living person. Max: We must be careful not to let our generalizing and simplifying "prevent us from developing understandings that remain focused on the uniqueness of human experience."12 Q: Explain what you mean by an "epistemic" person. Jim: The epistemic person is a theoretical or idealized person. For example, Piaget's study of structural formation of knowledge focused on what was "common to all subjects at the same level of development independent of individual differences,"13 not on the unique cognitive development of individual subjects. As such his model of cognitive stage development is epistemic rather than phenomenological. This doesn't negate his work. Rather, it situates it in a different context. Max: Yes, a theoretical context apart from lived experience. While theoretical constructs are important in human science, we must remember that theory is generated through lived experience not the other way around. Theory in and of itself misses the meaning of life. Theory needs to be integrated with life experience. The role of phenomenological human science14 is to discover "what a certain phenomenon means and how it is experienced."15 "The question of knowledge always refers us back to our world, to our lives, to who we are,"16 and, as we all know, "knowledge is like living: things are always more complex."17 Or to quote Alfred Korzybski: "A map [theory] is not the territory [lived experience]."18 Jim: My goal in creating an integrative epistemology is to make explicit the theoretical notions that will inform me in my analysis of sensemaking as the process of imposing order and attributing meaning to the randomness of lived experience. My field research involved taking part in a paleontological field trip as an observer participant. My intent as a researcher was to pay attention to what occurred on the field trip in relation to the sensemaking processes for myself as well as for the other participants. I intentionally approached the field trip without a preconceived theoretical framework in order to maximize attending to the experience as lived rather than theoretically predetermined. In other words, my research process is one that moves "not from already proven theories to newly proven ones . . .[but rather] from an awkward fumbling for the most elementary understanding to a supported claim"19 about sensemaking. Q: Wait a minute. What kind of research is that? How can you do scientific research without a hypothesis? Jim: Start with a question, but not with a preconceived answer to the question. Given that the purpose of my research is furthering the understanding of how a scientific field trip paves the way for the extension of knowledge, it is important that I select a methodology which allows me to discover the meanings of the activities to the participants as well as to observe their behavior during the activities. A case study using ethnographic techniques facilitates both of these demands. By doing a case study my focus is on what is happening and what is important to the participants rather than on my hypothesis of what is happening and what is important. A case study, being a bounded system, allows me to organize data in a way that preserves the unique character of the phenomenon studied while at the same time make naturalistic generalizations from commonly occurring patterns of meaning arising within the particular case of the field trip.20 The beauty of a case study is that it occurs in a real-time lived experience rather than in an artificial experimental setting.21 As such, it allows me as a researcher to develop a more natural relationship with the people I am working with22 and thus develop deeper insights and understandings into the meaning of their experiences of the field trip. This is particularly important when "the boundaries between phenomenon [sensemaking] and context [field trip] are not clearly evident."23 The underlying assumptions to this approach are that human behavior is best understood within the social framework in which it occurs and is largely based on underlying meaning structures.24 Therefore, the purpose of the research is to "discover what these meaning structures are, how they develop, and how they influence behavior."25 The more effectively this is achieved, the more likely my thesis will be "in harmony with the reader's experience and thus to that person a natural basis for generalization."26 Q: Tell me more about these ethnographic techniques and how they play out in your research? Jim: After selecting a case study as my primary research methodology, I joined fifteen paleontologists on a pre-conference field trip in the Rocky Mountains. I choose observation participation "as a way to understand what their experiences and activities mean to them."27 During this six-day field trip, in my role as observer, I was able to engage participants individually and collectively in interviews and discussions regarding the processes of accumulating knowledge within their field of expertise. Throughout the trip, as an observer participant, I was privy to numerous conversations, discussions, storytellings, and other social interactions that provided information as to the meanings participants gave to the field trip. Along with my own field notes and those provided by participants, I took photographs of the places visited and collected fossil specimens where permitted. Thus interviews, discussions, written resources, non-written sources, and artifacts were the basic ethnographic tools used to conduct my research.28 After the field trip, I interviewed several of the participants regarding the themes and meaning structures that arose from their actions and comments during the field trip. The purpose of these interviews was to clarify the connections between my observations, speculations, and interpretations, and the meanings the participants gave to their experiences. After completing the interviews and analysis, I began the process of writing, which in itself is an extension of the research process. Q: And this counts as research? I don't get it. I thought research had to be objective and empirical. Ken: Maybe I can help. Empirical science tells us what is, not what should be. Its focus is representational knowledge or truth. As such, it does not concern itself with values, worth, or meanings. What counts as validity depends upon the domain of reality with which you are concerned . . . Q: . . . Let's not go there just yet; I'm still trying to figure out what counts as research. Max: What counts as research depends upon the nature of the research question. Jim's question, "How does what occurs on a scientific field trip influence the evolution of knowledge within a community of scholars?", deals with the clarification of a specific lived experience. The understanding of lived experience is based on shared meanings of common experiences. To achieve this type of understanding, Jim must participate in the experience as well as converse with the participants regarding the meaning of their experience. But this alone is not enough; he must also reflect upon his own experience and then write. It is through writing and rewriting that he will come to understand the meaning of the experience. In human science, the researcher is expected to write in a manner that brings forth the meaning of experience, that shows experience as a part of the lifeworld, that reflects his desire to know the essence of being human. It is this expectation of how to write that will influence what Jim writes.29 And what he writes will concern itself with the mutual understanding of a shared life experience. From this perspective, "research is a caring act."30 Humberto: A loving act, if I may say so myself. °Buenas noches! Jim: Bien venidos. Come, sit down by the fire. You must be tired after the long walk from the road. A glass of wine? Humberto: Please. Jim: My friends, this is Humberto Maturana, professor of biology and cognition at the University of Chile in Santiago. His work on perception has led him to some very interesting and profound ideas regarding the nature of knowing and reality. Along with his colleague Francisco Varela, Humberto introduced the scientific world to the concept of autopoiesis. Humberto: My apologies for arriving late. Please, continue. Q: I don't get it, research a loving act? Humberto: Allow me. Human research as Max explains it involves an intimate interaction between researcher and subject. This intimacy, as a social process in which there is a mutual understanding, "lets us see the other person and open up for him room for existence beside us."31 Jim: To use R. D. Laing's words, research is "an authentic meeting between human beings."32 Humberto: Speaking from a biological point of view, love is the emotion that allows this intimacy, this authentic meeting, to occur. "Without acceptance of others, there is no social phenomenon."33 Love, as a biological process, occurs in the domain of relational behavior when "another arises as a legitimate other in co-existence with oneself."34 Given then, as Max would say, that the aim of phenomenological human research is to "become more fully who we are,"35 it follows that research is a caring act, a loving act. Max: Human science research, to use Humberto's terminology, is the legitimization of self and other. It can be argued that "because descriptions involve issues of perception and interpretation, different descriptions of 'the same' situations and events are possible."36 Thus, from my own unique perspective I may interpret the data in one way and you from your uniqueness may interpret it differently. Accordingly, each of us "selects and emphasizes certain features and actions, ignoring and marginalizing others."37 Q: If people have their own opinion, their own interpretation of reality, explain to me how you come up with any valid results to your research. Jim: Before getting into validity, it might be best to first discuss what we mean by reality, knowledge, and knowing.
Q: Isn't reality more or less "what you see is what you've got?" Humberto: Imagine this: We are all walking back to our vehicles after our discussion by the fire. As we come around a bend in the trail, Ken sees a bear up ahead. Jumping back, he warns the rest of us. We all jump back. Bunched together, one by one we peer up the trail to make what we can of the bear. With little hesitation, we agree that it is too dangerous to proceed given the presence of the bear. We decide it is best to turn around and find an alternative route to our automobiles. As we begin to retrace our steps back along the trail, Jim, a seasoned outdoorsman, has second thoughts about our interpretation of the situation. He steps forward to take a closer look at the bear, and in doing so, he realizes that the bear is actually an old stump. He calls to us to stop and take a second look. Due to the dim light, it is difficult to really discern what we see. At my urging, we decide to stick with our plan of finding an alternative route. However, Jim is persistent; he informs us that more than once he has mistaken an old stump for a bear, especially at night. Finally, after much discussion we accept his argument, and cautiously follow as he leads us up the trail past an "old stump". As we pass, we breathe a sigh of relief. The point of the story is this . . . Jim: . . . if at any given moment we stop and ask ourselves what is the reality of the situation, we have no absolute way of determining the accuracy of our observations. Max: We only have interpretations embedded in a cultural and historic framework. As such, lived experience "can never be grasped in its immediate manifestation but only reflectively as past presence."38 Humberto: Exactly my point. Throughout Western history the ontology of explaining the nature of reality has separated into two exclusive explanatory paths. The first is the path of objectivity-without-parenthesis in which "the observer assumes that existence takes place independently of what he or she does, that things exist independently of whether he or she knows them, through perception or reason."39 As my former student Fransciso Varela and his colleagues point out, the dominant view among cognitive scientists is that cognition is simply mental representation in which a rule-based manipulation of symbols represents the world.40 The second path is objectivity-with-parenthesis in which the observer "finds him- or herself as the source of all [knowable] reality through his or her operations of distinction in the praxis of living."41 Q: Are you saying that each of us creates our own reality? Ken: Only "psychotics create their own reality."42 Q: Isn't it obvious that things exist independently of the observer. Just look around; notice the stars, the trees, the moon on the horizon. Am I making them up or do they exist without my presence? I mean, if I wasn't here, wouldn't you still be able to see them. Ken: What you are talking about is the representational paradigm, Humberto's objectivity-without-parenthesis, in which knowledge is seen as a representation of a pregiven world independent of the observer. From this perspective, truth, that is propositional truth, is located in the accuracy of the match between the map and the territory, between the observer's representation of the observed object and the observed object in and of itself. This paradigm is not wrong, just incomplete. It has, after all, served us well in many regards. Many ignore the fact that representationalism, as a key component of the Enlightenment paradigm, brought with it a great many human freedoms that never existed before. First and foremost, it ended the domination of the Church and its stranglehold on knowledge thus allowing scientists to discover the nature of reality independent of religious mythology. The dignity of modernity was that it differentiated the cultural value spheres: self, culture, and nature.43 However, having said that, the representational paradigm is severely narrow and limited.44 Laszlo states it quite clearly: "In short, reductionism generates a multiplicity of limited-range theories, each of which applies to a small domain of highly specific events but says nothing about the rest."45 The disaster of modernity is that scientific modernism, with its representational way of seeing the world which led to the dissociation of the cultural value spheres, and because of its great success in dominating and controlling nature . . . Jim: . . . as fostered by Francis Bacon46 . . . Ken: . . . has become the only way of knowing the world.47 Humberto: "In the explanatory path of objectivity-without-parenthesis the search for reality is the search for conditions that make an argument rational and, hence, undeniable."48 The rational view of reality is valid in and of itself as it reveals truth; therefore, all else is false and thus to know is to act in relation to a pregiven world, that is to say, the rational view demands obedience.49 Ken: The belief in a single reality, besides leading reductionists to confuse their maps with reality, has totally negated the role of the map maker thereby collapsing the dialogical subjective and intersubjective domains of reality into the monological objective domain of reality. Jim: And as Fritjof Capra reminds us, "All the concepts we use to describe nature are limited, that they are not features of reality, as we tend to believe, but creations of the mind; parts of the map, not of the territory."50 Ken: Reality from the objectivity-without-parenthesis perspective has no depth; all of reality is reduced to objective flatland as is evident in Galileo's famous dictum: "Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured."51 The upshot of all this being that empirical science covers the exteriors of reality while denying its interiors.52 Max: The task of phenomenological human science, of interpretive inquiry in general, is the acknowledgement of the dialogical domains of knowing. Q: I don't get it, dialogical and monological domains of reality? Jim: In order to understand the domains of reality we first must determine what constitutes reality. Two traditional positions concerning the constituents of reality are the atomistic view and the holistic view. The atomistic perspective as exemplified by the Cartesian-Newtonian mechanistic view of the world, in which "things are real by virtue of location‚nothing exists without location in time and space,"53 places emphasis on the properties of the individual parts that make up matter rather than on the relational properties which constitute the whole object itself. From this perspective, the key to knowledge of a whole is in reducing it to its fundamental parts. Thus, through understanding the nature of the fundamental building blocks of matter, the complexity of the universe can be understood. Counter to this is the holistic view in which emphasis is placed on the whole object and the interdependence of its parts rather than on properties of the individual parts themselves. From this perspective, as Fritjof Capra explains, "the essential properties of an organism, or living system, are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. . . . [Consequently], the nature of the whole is always different from the mere sum of its parts."54 The complexity of the universe is seen as a network of interconnected and interdependent wholes. The focus of the holistic perspective is on principles of organization rather than on fundamental building blocks.55 Humberto: As I claim, at the biological level "the life of a multicellular individual as a unity goes on through the operation of its components, but it is not determined by their properties."56 Jim: In other words, all living systems including human beings, as individual entities and as members of social systems, are defined by their organization57 and are explained by the relationships in which they take part, not by the properties of their components.58 Or put more simply, a watch, whether composed of mechanical or digital structures, tracks time. When it stops tracking time, it stops being a watch and becomes jewelry. Ken: I should point out, however, both the atomists and the holists are reductionistic. The holistic crowd, with their subtle reductionism, denies the interiors of holons the same as the atomists with their gross reductionism.59 Q: Holons? What are holons? Jim: The term holons,60 which Ken discusses in great detail in both Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and A Brief History of Everything, was coined by Arthur Koestler in an effort to resolve the conflict as to whether emphasis should be placed on the parts of an entity or on the whole entity. As such, holons represent a third perspective concerning the constituents of reality and are key to the development of my integrative epistemology. Koestler maintained that absolute parts or absolute wholes do not exist anywhere in nature; rather, all entities "behave partly as wholes or wholly as parts, according to the way you look at them."61 A whole cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts nor can its characteristics be predicted from its parts. "The hierarchy concept of 'levels of organization' in itself implies a rejection of the reductionist view that all phenomena of life (consciousness included) can be reduced to and explained by physico-chemical laws."62 Accepting that the world is composed of nothing but holons and that the interiors of holons cannot be reduced to exteriors, Ken has developed the four quadrants of holonic existence which consist of the interior aspect (what holons look like from the inside) and exterior aspect (what holons look like from the outside) of the individual and collective realms.63 The beauty of Ken's synthesis of the four developmental dimensions of all holons is that it provides a framework for acknowledging and integrating the objective and phenomenological aspects of reality without negating either or without reducing one to the other. Ken: Let me draw you a diagram here in the dirt beside the fire:64
This diagram represents a hierarchical ordering of the four major aspects of each and every holon. Briefly, the Upper Right quadrant is the exterior behavioral or structural aspect of individual holons. It ranges from atoms to cells to organisms to triune-brained65 neural organisms. The Lower Right quadrant is the exterior social aspect of holons, which includes at its higher levels families, tribes, villages, empires, nations, and planetary social structures. The Upper Left quadrant is the internal or intentional aspect of individual holons. It ranges from sensation to emotion to concepts to concrete operations to formal operations and on to vision-logic. Finally, the Lower Left quadrant is the interior collective or cultural aspect of holons. It includes at its higher levels the archaic, magic, mythic, rational, centauric, and mystic worldviews of human populations. Now, let us return to Q's earlier question regarding dialogical and monological domains of reality. The right-hand dimensions are described in "It" language. "It-language is objective, neutral, value-free surfaces. This is the standard language of the empirical, analytic, and systems sciences. . . . It is monological . . . [in that] your presence is not required."66 "I-language, on the other hand, is your presence, your consciousness, your subjective awareness. Everything in the Upper Left is basically described in I-language . . . . This 'I' or self or subjectivity becomes greater with greater depth‚there is more subjectivity in an ape than in a worm‚but the point is, this I-component in any case cannot be described in it-language. That would convert the subject into a mere object. . . . Subjects are understood, objects are manipulated."67 To understand subjects you must talk with them. Thus, I-language is always dialogical. Jim: As holons evolve, they gain depth. For example, a cell has more depth than an atom because the cell is composed of atoms and molecules. With greater depth there is less span, that is, fewer molecules than atoms‚fewer holons relative to the number of holons in the previous level68 . . . Ken: . . . We'll come back to that later. "The we-language, is the Lower Left, the cultural or intersubjective dimension. . . . The Lower Left is how 'we' see it. It is the collective worldview that we of a particular time and place and culture inhabit."69 Like the I-language it too is dialogical. In other words, "the interior dimensions, can only be accessed by communication and interpretation, by 'dialogue' and 'dialogical' approaches, which are not staring at exteriors but sharing of interiors. Not objective but intersubjective. Not surfaces but depths."70 It is important to keep in mind that the Big 3, "I," "We," and "It" domains are present in each and every holon and that the Kosmos is composed only of holons. Humberto: In human terms this means "that art [the "I" domain] intertwines with our social existence [the "We" domain] and our technological present [the "It" domain] at all times."71 Ken: Absolutely! Max: The I- and we-languages are the languages of phenomenological human science research. The research always seeks to capture the individual and collective internal meaning of lived experience, the depth of lived experience. This is the human science researcher's way of acknowledging up front that the description of any given phenomenon is only one possible interpretation out of many possible interpretations. Humberto: Which brings us back to objectivity-with-parenthesis, or the domain of constitutive ontologies. As living beings, we, with our organizationally closed nervous system, are structurally determined organisms structurally coupled to our environment.72 Q: That's a mouthful. I didn't understand a word you said. Jim: You're not the first.73 "These concepts [organizational closure, structural determination, and structural coupling]. . . have led to considerable misunderstanding,"74 which is unfortunate as they are key to comprehending the notion of objectivity-with-parenthesis. Humberto: Allow me to explain. I'll start with structural determination. Change in behavior and its accompanying change in structure,75 is determined by, but not predetermined by, the current structure of an organism. "Since the structure is in ongoing change, its structural domains will also change, although they will be specified at every moment by their present structure."76 Hence, the range of possible changes in structure an organism can make is limited to its present structure. An organism's current structure is a result of its genetic history as well as its ontologic history.77 Thus, "it is never the case that an environmental action (be it physical or communicational) can determine its own effect on a structure-determined system."78 For example, if you punch someone in the nose, it is not the punch that determines the breaking of the nose; it is the structure of the nose that determines the extent of the breakage. Or, what is food for one organism is poison for another. Jim: In other words, the effect of the environment on an organism, while triggered by an external interaction with the environment, is determined not by the environment but by the internal structure of the organism. Furthermore, whether or not the environment can or cannot act as a trigger is determined by the structure of the organism. And this is what is meant by structural determinism. Humberto: Correct. Ken: From a holonic perspective, any changes we make physically, mentally, or socially are determined not only by our biology (Upper Right quadrant), but also by our individual developmental (Upper Left quadrant) and cultural histories (Lower Left quadrant), or by both left- and right-hand quadrants, by the "I" and "We" domains as well as the "It" domain. Humberto: Virtually all systems are structurally determined. However, there are some systems that are also organizationally closed. "A system is organizationally closed if all its possible states of activity must always lead to or generate further activity within itself,"79 which is the case for the nervous system. "In other words, the nervous system functions as a closed network of changes in relations of activity between its components."80 Hence, there is no transfer of information from the environment to the organism, or between organisms, as understood from the representational paradigm.81 Q: Are you saying that the nervous system has no inputs or outputs and as such doesn't interact with the environment? Humberto: Not at all. While the nervous system is organizationally closed, that is no inputs or outputs, it is interactively open; it interacts with the environment through its structure.82 That is to say, "the nervous system does not 'pick up information' from the environment. . . . On the contrary, it brings forth a world by specifying what patterns of the environment are perturbations and what changes trigger them in the organism."83 All "the nervous system does as a component of the organism, is to generate in it sensory/effector correlations that will give rise to the behavior of the organism in the course of the latter's interactions with the medium."84 Hence the role of the nervous system "is only to maintain constant the set states of the receptor surfaces, not to act upon an environment."85 Jim: The implication of this is that the nervous system, as a closed system, has no intrinsic structure in its organization for determining the possible internal or external nature of the causes of its changes of state.86 For example, both imagined (hallucination) and perceived experience of encountering a bear trigger internal changes within the nervous system and thus within the organism. Humberto: Most definitely. Furthermore, given the plasticity of the nervous system, every interaction results in some structural consequence. Our nervous system is thus modified by every experience. The adaptive value of the nervous system is that it allows for new dimensions of interactions between the organism and the environment, and between organisms through structural coupling87‚structural coupling being the "history of recurrent interactions leading to the structural congruence between two (or more) systems."88 Let me draw you a diagram:
Notice that over time with a series of recurrent interactions there is a reciprocal structural coupling in which both organism and environment adapt to each other. Thus, the path of change for both systems is dependent upon the history of interactions. For example, during the first million years of cellular life on earth, various cells dispersed oxygen, which led to significant changes in the atmosphere. In turn this oxygen-rich atmosphere led to the rise of new life forms capable of using oxygen.89 Hence through recurrent structural coupling, organism and environment co-evolve. The same is true between organisms. Ken: This "means that the 'unit' of evolution is not an isolated holon (individual molecule or plant or animal) but a holon plus its inseparable environment."90 Max: If this is true for systems in general, then it must also be true that social systems are made up of a network of reciprocal structural couplings between any given group of individuals.91 Humberto: Yes. And the consensual coordination of reciprocal structural couplings is what we call communication.92 From what we have already said, it follows that "each person says what he says or hears what he hears according to his own structural determination. . . .[As such] the phenomenon of communication depends on not what is transmitted, but on what happens to the person who receives it. And this is a very different matter from 'transmitting information.'"93 In short, communication is the coordination of behaviors in the realm of reciprocal structural coupling. We see this in some African birds in which a mating couple co-creates a melody. Each bird sings a phrase that the other continues. This song, created during the mating season, is unique to each couple.94 For us as human beings, the possibilities for reciprocal structural coupling available through the richness of our nervous system gives rise to the development of language, self-consciousness and culture.95 Max: The implication of this is that each of us has our own experience of reality based on our particular social milieu and history of interactions with the environment, which takes us back to what I was saying earlier about multiple interpretations of reality. Humberto: Exactly. We know reality, not by processing information from a pregiven world, but rather by bringing forth the world through the distinctions we are able to make given the current state of our unique structure.96 In other words, "what primarily exists for us human beings are the phenomena of our experience rather than an independent reality. . . . However, these phenomena are not necessarily the same for all, but are subject-dependent, generated by the operation of a structure-determined but plastic nervous system within a consensual domain. As such, we construct the world we experience. . . . These constructions are not purely individual, but reflect the intersubjective nature of language and action. Different domains of experience give rise to different domains of reality."97 In a family, the experiential domain of parent is different than the experiential domain of child and as such each exists in a different domain of family‚each family member lives (exists) in a different family.98 Jim: In summary then, we can say that the explanatory path of objectivity-with-parenthesis acknowledges the possibility of many legitimate realities (multiverse) within the domain of constitutive ontologies as opposed to objectivity-without-parenthesis in which there is a single pregiven reality (universe) independent of the observer. Humberto: Yes. "Every statement that an observer makes is valid in some domain of reality, and none is intrinsically false."99 Q: This is all well and good. But if there is no pregiven reality independent of the observer, then it must follow that each of us is free to bring forth any reality we like, does it not? Humberto: No, not at all. Remember that the reality we bring forth is based on experience in the lived world, that is, on our experience with others and the environment within which we live. Jim: As Ernst von Glasersfeld in his interpretation of Humberto's work says, "What is observed are not things, properties, or relations of a world that exists 'as such', but rather the results of distinctions made by the observer himself or herself. Consequently, these results have no existence whatever without someone's activity of distinguishing."100 Max: Maybe it would be helpful to revisit our "bear-in-the-woods" story to unpackage what all this means. Q: Here, here!
Max: All we can ever know is the world as we experience it, to use Humberto's terminology, through our structural coupling with it, which is not the same as the world existing independently of us as observers. As such, we are limited to describing our experience of the world, not the world itself. Furthermore, our descriptions of an experience are never the experience itself; they are always and only reflections or recollections of the experience.101 In the Bear-in-the-Woods story, our walk back to the vehicles is a lived experience in the lifeworld. In it each of us brings forth a world through our senses and makes sense of that world from our own perspective, our own ontologies. Each of us creates our own reality of the experience embedded within our own unique meaning of the experience based on a common lived experience in the lifeworld. In this context, the explanation is relative, which "does not mean subjective, arbitrary or unlawful,"102 but rather relative to the referent, the lived experience itself. Ken: The implication of this is that "no matter how much we expand our contexts, this does not invalidate the relative truths of smaller contexts. It negates their exclusiveness (or their ultimateness), but preserves their moment of truth, their context-dependent truth."103 Death as an integral part of life does not negate the sorrow and sense of loss of a loved one. Humberto: In other words, each of our explanations, while not explaining an independent world, does explain the experience of the observer in the moment in relation to the distinctions he or she is able to make in that moment, and as such, each explanation is equally legitimate, though not necessarily equally desirable, as an explanation within the domain of our individual existence.104 In the end "the ultimate reference for any description is the observer himself."105 Ken: In still other words, "each domain, just as it is, is allowed its own dignity, its own logic, its own architecture, its own form and structure and content‚yet each is joined and united by the thread of direct experience and evidence, a deep empiricism that grounds all knowledge in experience and all claims in verifiability."106 Q: I think I'm catching on. If I understand all of this correctly, a territory, that is a physical world, does exist. Through interaction with it, the map maker creates a map of his or her experience with the territory; consequently, the map is not of the territory, but rather, of the map maker's experience of interaction with the territory. Furthermore, we only know our experience with the territory reflectively, that is, through reconstructing it from the perspective of our personal and cultural history of our lived experience. As a result, we can only comment on our recollection of our experience of interaction with the territory, never on the ultimate nature of the territory.107 Ken: There is more to it than that. "The map is itself a performance of the territory it is trying to map,"108 that is, in the process of mapmaking, the map maker and the territory co-evolve as a result of their ongoing interactions. This is really the crux of my writing‚ the evolution of consciousness, the evolution of the manifestation of Spirit. "Neither the self nor the world is pregiven, but rather they exist in contexts and backgrounds that have a history, a development."109 Jim: Going back to our story, as we hike along, we encounter, perceive if you prefer, a bear. Given this knowledge, we act by deciding to backtrack and find an alternative way to our cars. But moments later, after a closer look, we realize that the bear is actually an old stump . . . Humberto: . . . which illustrates that we are unable in the moment to make a distinction between perception and illusion. Remember, "it is due to our structural determinism as living systems that we cannot distinguish in the experience between perception and illusion."110 Thus, the distinction can only be made a posteriori by negating the first experience of seeing the bear in relation to the second experience of seeing the old stump, which "is accepted as valid without knowing if it will or will not be devaluated later in relation to another [experience]."111 Jim: Thus, the bear that we saw was not located in a pregiven world, but in the perceived world brought about by our structural coupling with the shadows, moonlight and objects we were able to distinguish within the environment as well as our ontological history to that moment. As we continued to interact with the environment it was possible to change our relationship with the perceived world and reinterpret our perception as an old stump. Humberto: The significance of this is that knowing, as effective action, as the ability to make distinctions within the domain of existence, depends on the structure of the knower. Or "the changes of state of the nervous system result in changes of state in the organism, and the changes of state of the organism result in changes in its interactions, that is, in changes in its behavior."112 Or more simply. "All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing"113 . . . Q: . . . which means? Humberto: Biologically speaking, doing is the set of interactions, the structural couplings between an organism and its environment, which allows the organism to continue to exist as an entity. Knowing, based on the operational closure of the nervous system, is the ability of the organism to maintain conservation of organization while at the same time maintaining a structurally coupled relationship with its environment through constant structural change . . . Jim: . . . which is what Minsky means when he argues that "brains use processes that change themselves‚and this means we cannot separate such processes from the products they produce. In particular, brains make memories, which change the ways we'll subsequently think. The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves."114 Humberto: While there are many perspectives from which we can discuss knowledge, "cognition in its most encompassing sense consists in the enactment or bringing forth of a world by a viable history of structural coupling."115 Hence cognitive domains, that is the domains of "possible interactions with the environment,"116 arise as a result of the distinctions we are able to make through reciprocal structural couplings. In other words, biologically it all comes down to "cognition is effective interaction."117 From this perspective, doing is knowing and knowing is doing. They are quite inseparable. Jim: As I understand it Humberto, you are carving out a middle ground between representationalism and solipsism in that the nervous system does not replicate what exists independently of itself nor does it operate only from within itself separate from the environment. Rather, the nervous system, within the environment that the organism exists and through its structure and operational closure, makes distinctions which allow the organism to be in full participation with its environment, that is, to select or bring forth "a domain of significance out of the background of its random milieu."118 In this middle ground, knowledge begins with experience and the distinctions we make within our experiences. As Francisco Varela insists, "this world of ours, no matter how we structure it, no matter how we manage to keep it stable with permanent objects and recurrent interactions, is by definition a world codependent with our experience, and not the ontological reality of which philosophers and scientists alike have dreamed."119 He refers to this middle ground as enacted or embodied cognition, or enactivism.120 Max: "This enactive paradigm is based not only on Varela's work, but also that of phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty."121 This is evident in the phenomenological literature where the four fundamental existentials of lived space (felt space), lived body (living bodily in the world), lived time (subjective time), and lived other (lived relations with others) "have been considered as belonging to the fundamental structure of the lifeworld."122 Humberto: From this enactive perspective, reality "is not an experience, it is an argument in an explanation."123 It is "a proposition that we use as an explanatory notion to explain our experiences."124 Hence, "we explain our experiences with our experiences and with the coherences of our experiences. That is, we explain our living with our living, and in that sense we human beings are constitutively the fundament for all that exists, or may exist in our domains of cognition."125 Ken: Enactivism makes it clear that it is essential to explain experience not only from an objective external truth point of view but also from subjective truthfulness and intersubjective mutual understanding points of view, from "I" and "We" perspectives as well as an "It" perspective, from a perspective acknowledging values and meanings in addition to observations. Max: In phenomenological human science, this means understanding the meaning of experience through the "theory of the unique, of the particular case, . . . [which] starts with and from the single case, searches for the universal qualities, and returns to the single case."126 Humberto: As such, "knowledge is the result of an ongoing interpretation that emerges from our capacities of understanding. These capacities are rooted in the structures of our biological embodiment but are lived and experienced within a domain of consensual action and cultural history."127 Thus, human uniqueness arises through social structural coupling via language. What I am saying is, "we only have the world which we create with others"128 which is done through language "as a co-ontogeny in descriptions of descriptions."129 Jim: So in our story, we co-created the bear through our description of it. What we actually did through our conversation, when we all agreed that what we saw was in fact a bear, was to create a reality which we then acted upon by retreating and seeking another route to our vehicles. But immediately, through continued conversation, we were faced with a second interpretation of our sighting. Consequently, a controversy arose over what was actually seen, over what counted as knowledge . . . Humberto: . . . which in this instance depended upon what we accepted as adequate or effective behavior or action within the context of encountering a bear while hiking through the woods in the middle of the night, which in turn was determined through languaging.130 Q: Sorry, but you'll have to explain what you mean by languaging. Humberto: To understand ourselves as observers, we must first realize that "we have no way of referring to ourselves or to anything else outside of language"131 Languaging is the process by which we explain both ourselves as observers and the phenomenon to be explained. Max: Language "is in some sense a huge reservoir in which the incredible variety of richness of human experience is deposited."132 Humberto: Through a history of repeated interactions we become recursively coupled with each other; thus, we "develop behaviors that reciprocally trigger complementary behaviors."133 Jim: For example, I put on my hiking boots and my dog starts barking; I put his collar on him and he runs to the front door; we go for a walk. Humberto: These recursively coupled behaviors of Jim and his dog are context-dependent. Being consensual behaviors, they direct attention toward another interaction the two have in common. As such, these behaviors have no intrinsic meaning. The coordination of these consensual behaviors I refer to as linguistic acts.134 And the coordination of linguistic acts is what I call languaging. Hence languaging is "consensual behaviour about consensual behaviour."135 Without languaging that is without the coordination of consensual behavior description is impossible. Thus, there is "no way for the distinctions made by an actor to become conscious."136 It is only through an awareness of our ability to make distinctions that we are able to bring forth a consciousness of self. Jim: In other words it is through the act of distinguishing , as von Glasersfeld suggests, that "I create myself as observer."137 Humberto: It is this recognition of the observer as operating as a living system in language in such a manner that it is the observer who brings forth the distinctions of reality rather than replicating independent entities from a pregiven world that separates the explanatory path of objectivity-with-parenthesis from objectivity-without-parenthesis.138 Q: Hummm? Jim: What Humberto is saying is that through mutual cooperation we make sense of the world through languaging, meaning, we create ourselves and the objects we distinguish through our cooperative use of language, through our conversations . . . Humberto: . . . conversations involving the "consensual braiding of language and emotions."139 Emotions (love, joy, fear, anger, sorrow, etc.) determine at any given moment the consensual domains in which languaging takes place, and thus the domain in which we operate at any instant.140 As such, languaging becomes the medium in which we interact. In conversations, we communicate with each other when "coordinated behaviors are mutually triggered among the members of a social unity."141 Change within a social system occurs when there is a change in the conversations arising from encounters with others outside the social system or upon reflection of circumstances within the social system. Subsequently, the "configuration of conversations" and the "manner of emotioning" of any given social system specify what counts as knowledge. Jim: Going back to our story, the evolution of our knowledge from seeing a bear to seeing an old stump could be explained by different manners of emotioning, fear-based to curiosity-based or by different configurations of conversations, different worldviews as it were. For example, from a rational worldview we might say that our initial perception was incorrect due to poor lighting, resemblance of shapes, lack of experience in this particular environment, or other such logical arguments. On the other hand, from a magical worldview this transition of bear to old stump might have been perceived as a trick played on us by a spirit being. From this perspective, the object first seen was actually a bear, and then, through the intervention of the spirit being within the object, it transformed into an old stump and at any moment might change back into a bear if it so desired . . . Ken: . . . which leads us to the evolution of consciousness and worldviews. Q: Is there no end to this? Ken: Not as far as the eye can see.
Jim: All our talk so far about the nature of reality‚holons, objectivity-with-parenthesis, etceteras‚is background for understanding the processes of how people go about deciding what counts as knowledge. You see, the evolution of what counts as knowledge is really about the evolution of worldviews people of different cultures have held throughout time, which in turn is based on the evolution of consciousness. In other words, the collective stages of human development (worldviews) and the development of intellect (consciousness) are basically similar142 . . . Ken: . . . in that they are both "the study of what holons can respond to."143 Max: The importance of worldviews is that they are the constructs we use to make sense of the experiences of our daily lives. Jim: They are how we explain the nature of reality, our view of the structure of the universe, how things work, how things, events, and people come to be as they are, how they interrelate, and how we come to know what we know.144 Worldviews influence "what people do, how they act toward others, and how they feel about themselves."145 Humberto: The culture in which we live, through the conversations we have, gives rise to and conserves our identity as to the type of human beings we become. It is through language that "mind" and "self-consciousness" arise.146 However, because we are reflexive beings, we can, based on our emotions, stop being one kind of human being and become another according to the worldview we chose.147 Ken: I discuss the evolution of worldviews from the "We" or cultural domain and the evolution of consciousness from the "I" domain; however, in actual practice it is quite impossible to separate the two. Because the individual is always situated within a cultural context, and because it is the cultural milieu that gives meaning to an individual's thoughts, the evolution of consciousness goes hand in hand with the development of worldviews.148 Or to use Jean Piaget's words: "the evolution of individual thought is closely enmeshed in collective systems of knowledge."149 Having said that, I will discuss them separately, starting with the evolution of consciousness . . . Max: . . . because "the real things of the world are always meaningfully constituted by conscious human beings . . . [and because] consciousness is the only access human beings have to the world"150 . . . Jim: . . . which takes us back to holons, that is, entities whose behavior, partly as wholes and wholly as parts, depends upon the distinctions we as observers make in the praxis of living. Both Ken and Arthur Koestler contend that as holons evolve, the new emergent holon, in taking on new properties of its own, becomes a new whole.151 Therefore, it is self-transcending‚the old becomes the new. While the new holon negates the separateness and exclusiveness of the old holon, it also preserves the old. In short, the emergent holon transcends and includes its predecessor. Molecules, for example, transcend atoms but include them; cells transcend molecules but include them; organisms transcend cells but include them‚holons nesting within holons all the way up and all the way down.152 Humberto: As Francisco Varela observes, "at a given level of the hierarchy, a particular system [molecules] can be seen as an outside to systems below it [atoms], and as an inside to systems above it [cells]; thus the status of a given system changes as one passes through its level in either the upward or the downward direction."153 Ken: This evolution of holons also includes an increase in depth and thus a corresponding increase in consciousness. I use consciousness in much the same manner as Humberto uses knowing. All holons have consciousness as they all have knowing, both of which are interior aspects of the four dimensions of holonic existence. A cell has cellular-consciousness, that is, it knows how to be a cell; it does what is needed to maintain cellness. When it no longer knows how to be a cell, that is, when it can no longer maintain conservation of cellness, it looses cellular-consciousness. As holons increase in depth, they decrease in span, that is, the number of individuals per level. There are fewer cells than molecules and fewer molecules than atoms. The significance of this is that the evolution of holons is developmental. In the structural-developmental model of consciousness, each stage "unfolds and then enfolds its predecessor in a nested fashion."154 Q: Isn't this just basic evolution in which one organism is built up from another so to speak? Ken: Not exactly. As Erich Jantsch points out, the building up you refer to "emphasizes structure and describes the emergence of hierarchical levels by the joining of systems 'from the bottom up.' Unfolding, in contrast, implies the interweaving of processes which lead simultaneously to phenomena of structuration at different hierarchical levels."155 He concludes that "evolution is the result of self-transcendence at all levels."156 In other words, when cells come together to form an organism, the emergent processes which constitute the organism are categorically different than those of the constituent cells. Jim: Or as Jean Piaget says, "the initial structure is incorporated into later ones thanks to genesis, because it is a system of transformations."157 Ken: The outcome of this process of transformations, of evolution, is the "Great Nest of Being," which consists of matter, life, mind, soul, and spirit.158 An interesting side note here is that scientific materialism reduces all of the Kosmos to matter thus negating the other dimensions of the Great Nest of Being. In effect what has happened as a result is that the physiosphere (matter) is viewed as the most significant aspect of reality, and consequently the study of it, physics, has been awarded the highest status of all the sciences. As such, validity rests with physics; that is, validity exists only within the "It" domain. The mistake here is that while the physiosphere is the most fundamental, that is, the greatest span, it is the least significant in that it has the least depth. Jim: When considering matter, life, and mind, this means that the noosphere (mind) is the least fundamental (least span) but the most significant in that it has the greatest depth. Ken: Thus, while the noosphere depends on the biosphere (life) which depends on the physiosphere, the noosphere is part of the biosphere which is part of the physiosphere rather than the other way around as the reductionists, including the holists, would have it. We are more than just another knot in the web of life; we are not just exteriors; we have interiors that can only be known through dialogue. So greatest depth means greatest consciousness. It is consciousness that the reductionists, with their flatland thinking, deny. Humberto: In denying consciousness, they deny responsibility. As I have said earlier, adherence to the explanatory path of objectivity-without-parenthesis demands obedience to a pregiven reality. That is to say, since there are no possibilities other than the one pregiven reality, this explanatory path is justification for a person's actions. In accepting consciousness, as does the explanatory path of objectivity-with-parenthesis, there is the possibility of multiple realities. Hence, a person can choose the reality in which he or she wants to participate. In doing so, he or she takes responsibility for his or her actions. Similarly, it is possible to move from one level of consciousness, one worldview, or one domain of reality to another . . . Ken: . . . which returns us to the evolution of consciousness. Q: Good. I'm curious about how this evolution of consciousness, this self-transformation takes place. Ken: I use a ladder metaphor to explain the transformations of consciousness.159 In this model, there are nine stages. For our discussion, I will focus on "the stages of average consciousness up to this point in collective history,"160 stages 1 to 6, emotion (sensoriphysical), symbols (phantasmic-emotional), concepts (representational-mind), concrete operational (rule/role mind), formal operational (formal-reflexive), and vision-logic.161 As you can see from their names, they correspond very closely to Jean Piaget's cognitive stages.162 I'll leave stages 7 to 9, the stages of Mysticism, for another time. It is important to realize that within each culture, past and present, there are individuals at stages 7 through 9 as well as stages 1 to 6. However, every culture has a center of gravity toward which each person's development is pulled. "If you are below the average level, it tends to pull you up. If you try to go above it, it tends to pull you down."163 Jim: Is it correct to say that the average cultural center of gravity defines a culture's worldview, while an individual's center of gravity defines his or her personal worldview? Ken: Correct. Furthermore, "the self at any given point in its development will tend to give around 50 percent of its responses from one level, 25 percent from a level above that, and 25 percent from a level below it. No self [or culture for that matter] is ever simply 'at' a stage."164 As such, a person whose center of gravity is formal-reflexive will on occasion, say in a high stress situation at home, fall back into a rule/role mind set, or in some unexpected moment while working on a special project at work will experience a moment of vision-logic insight. Jim: I assume then that these stages of consciousness, like other structural-developmental stages, while shaped by culture as you have indicated, are innate, discrete, and sequential, that is, one stage precedes the other and no stage can be skipped "because each one of them is necessary for the formation of the following one."165 Ken: Yes. This is why I use the ladder metaphor in which the climber moves up the ladder one rung at a time and from each position has a particular view of the world.166 Q: This sounds pretty linear to me. More "built up" than "unfolded" if I may say so. Ken: True enough. But remember we are only speaking about one portion of the four quadrants, the "I" domain. Concentric circles would better represent the full four quadrants of nesting holons than the ladder; however, "the ladder metaphor is useful because it indicates that the basic components of consciousness do emerge in fairly discrete stages, and if you destroy a lower rung, all the higher rungs go with it. Where the ladder metaphor fails badly is that each higher stage does not actually sit on top of the lower stage. . . . [Rather] as I said, it's a nested holarchy."167 Q: Tell us more about this ladder metaphor. Ken: Each rung of the ladder represents one of the nine basic structures of consciousness as outlined earlier. The climber is quite separate from the ladder in that both have a different set of characteristics. The climber has a sense of self, a drive for growth whereas the rungs of the ladder, being inanimate, do not. "But the self appropriates these rungs, or identifies with them, and this generates various types of self-identity and various stages of growth."168 Jim: Being a holon, the climber's growth and development will depend upon the extent to which it cultivates the four basic drives of holons: self-preservation, self-adaptation, self-transcendence, or self-dissolution.169 Ken: The growth and development of the climber occurs with each step, or fulcrum, in the climb. Each fulcrum is a 1-2-3 process. First, the self, as it moves onto a new fulcrum or level of consciousness, identifies with the new level. Second, as the self begins to move beyond that level, it differentiates or separates from that fulcrum. Third, in the process of identifying with another new level, the self integrates the previous level.170 The result is that each fulcrum is transcended and included as long as the climber continues to climb . . . Jim: . . . which isn't always the case. Both Piaget and Kohlberg indicate that stage movement is neither automatic nor inevitable.171 Ken: Correct. Furthermore, at any point on the ladder instead of differentiating, the self can become fused with the rung thus either stopping or retarding its growth and development. Or, a piece of the self can be dissociated from the self, that is, as the self moves upward some of it remains on a lower rung. It is this piece that sabotages the self in its daily living.172 Jim: In other words, fear of authority gained in childhood during the concrete operational stage could inhibit an adult person's ability to critically analyze situations involving authority figures. Ken: Exactly. Furthermore, wherever the climber is, whatever rung he or she is at "there is a different view of the world‚a different view of self and of others‚a different worldview. The world looks different‚is different!‚at each rung in the developmental unfolding. As we have constantly seen, different worldspaces, different worlds, come into being as consciousness evolves‚there is not simply a pregiven world that is monologically reflected!"173 Humberto: This is exactly the point of objectivity-with-parenthesis. In our everyday experience, we experience a world. "But when we examine more closely how we get to know this world, we invariably find that we cannot separate our history of actions [our developmental unfoldings]‚biological and social‚from how this world appears to us."174 Jim: This is evident in Jean Piaget's work with children. For example, the child who is able to conserve matter at one stage of development, will deny that he was unable to do so at an earlier stage.175 Q: What is it that actually develops in the evolution of consciousness? Ken: The ladder metaphor, which "is based on the work of perhaps sixty or seventy theorists, East and West,"176 concerns itself primarily with the differentiation of self. As infants we are totally fused with the physical world. We cannot distinguish between self and other. As we move through the stages of the evolution of consciousness, we differentiate between our self and the physical world, our self and other's emotional worlds, between the concrete world and the abstract symbolic world which leads to a sense of "oneness' with the universe and all that it entails to finally a comprehension of "pure emptiness."177 Jim: Caroline Myss addresses the development of consciousness and spirituality through the study of human energy systems. She synthesizes the wisdom of the Hindu chakras, the Christian sacraments, and the sefirot of the Jewish Kabbalah into seven sacred truths of body and spirit.178 Others who have concerned themselves with different aspects of consciousness include Lawrence Kohlberg with his levels of moral sense: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. Jean Piaget looked at cognitive development, that is, at how we come to have rational thought. Mary Belenky and her colleagues have looked at the ways women develop self, voice, and mind through five different ways of knowing: silence, received knowledge, subjective knowledge, procedural knowledge, and constructed knowledge. Erik Erikson studied personality development which entails hope, will, purpose, competence, fidelity, love, care, and wisdom. Another is Abraham Maslow whose research on self-needs covers safety, belongingness, self-esteem, self-actualization, and self-transcendence. One whose work dovetails closely with worldviews is James Fowler who looks at stages of faith in which the generic feature of human existence is the struggle to find and maintain meaning in life experiences. This struggle for finding meaning, like other aspects of consciousness, develops via structural-developmental stages.179 Humberto: It is evident from this synthesis of notions about the stages of the evolution of consciousness that the individual continually expands his or her cognitive and relational domains through his or her interaction with the world and in doing so, in collaboration with others, generates a world in which he or she lives with others,180. . . Ken: . . . a shared space which they can respond to. "When individual and subjective cognitions are shared or exchanged with other individuals, the result is a collective worldview or community shared outlook."181 Jim: This notion of worldview is similar to that of Fritjof Capra's idea of a social paradigm which he defines as "a constellation of concepts, values, perceptions, and practices shared by a community, which forms a particular vision of reality that is the basis of the way the community organizes itself."182 Ken: While worldviews are resistant to change, they are not static. Cultural transformations from one worldview to another worldview result from the movement of individual levels of consciousness in the "I" domain to collective worldviews in the "We" domain which become incorporated into social institutions in the "It" domain which in turn reproduce the worldview and thus socialize the individual. The growth of American democracy from an ideal in the minds of a few individuals to a national institution embedded in the minds of all American citizens exemplifies how such transformations evolve. Q: On to worldviews please. Ken: Worldviews fall into the Lower Left quadrant, the cultural or "We" domain of holonic existence. As such, not only are they about shared space, but they are also about shared values, meanings, and beliefs as Capra suggests in his definition of social paradigms. In both Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and A Brief History of Everything, I write extensively about "the predominate 'worldviews' of the various epochs of human development . . . which may be summarized as archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and existential."183 However, for now I will give only a brief outline of each, highlighting the significant characteristics which relate to our discussion. Q: That would be appreciated. Ken: The most ancient, the archaic worldview, is associated with foraging societies. Life was tribal with the family being the core unit of human functioning. These "primal tribes are literally our roots, our foundations, the basis of all that was to follow, the structure upon which all subsequent human evolution would be built, the crucial ground floor upon which so much history would have to rest."184 Jim: Archetypically, the tribe represented group identity, group force, group willpower and group belief patterns which instilled the moral attitudes of loyalty, honor, and justice into our very being.185 The importance of tribal family structure is evident in Bowen Family Systems Theory which is built around the notion of "the family as an emotional unit" that governs individual behavior and development.186 Ken: The archaic worldview was very much a geocentric worldview in that there was little differentiation between humans, world, and universe. However, there was the emergence of role differentiation between men and women. Men hunted; women gathered. Jim: The archaic period was the dawning of consciousness. With it, and the emergence of language and thought, came the magic worldspace.187 Ken: The magic epoch was characterized by horticultural village societies, the Great Mother societies, societies in which thinking was preoperational and prerational, and moral sense was preconventional. Body and mind were still undifferentiated, leading to confusion between object and image‚the part could stand-in for the whole. The magic world was and still is spaceless and timeless. The collective identity, which still has a significant presence today, is kinship based. The world of magic is characterized by a striving for power over others and nature.188 Jim: The individual equivalent to the collective magic worldview is the literalist whose heart rests, as James Fowler would say, with the intuitive-projective stage of faith.189 In this stage, thinking is magical in that symbol and object are fused. There is no metaphor; there is only denotation, no connotation. Morality and rules are black and white, there is no gray. As the epoch neared its end, tribal life gave way to transtribal life, preoperational thinking gave way to representational thought, the plow began to replace the digging stick, the ego began to emerge, and magic gave way to myth,190 . . . Ken: . . . which takes us to the next epoch, the mythological. During this period, clans became united through common mythology. Characterized by an agrarian technology, villages grew into cities, and cities joined together to create empires. Wars were waged. Thinking was concrete operational, morality conventional. The notion of "ruler" expanded from head of the clan to mythical "god." Ritualistic sacrifices appeased the gods. Individual consciousness was as yet unrecognized. Rules and roles focused on group membership. Identity was with the collective as well as with life roles; men's roles centered around the public world of politics while women's roles focused on the private world of home life.191 Jim: In this period, the literalist with a mythical worldview moved from an intuitive-projective faith to a mythic-literal faith. "The new capacity or strength of this stage is the rise of narrative and the emergence of story, drama and myth as ways of finding and giving coherence to experience."192 The Great Myths emerged as ways to explain the mysteries of the universe, the shape of the universe, to validate social order, and to teach people how to live "in harmony with themselves and each other and with the universe."193 However, meaning was still literal and as such trapped within the story. Today individuals at this stage of faith identify with the stories, beliefs, and rituals of their communities. For "received knowers,"194 that is, for individuals who believe that truth comes from others, it is the word of God, emperor, father, or other authority figure that counts as knowledge. As such, mythic membership is alive and well. A two edged sword, mythic membership binds us together in community while at the same time pits community against community and thus is a great source of many of today's problems. Ken: While we are treating these worldviews as if they are discrete entities, you should realize that they actually flow along a continuum, one into the other. An example of this is the mythic-rational worldview in which the concrete operational gives way to formal operations, mythological structures become rationalized, rationality begins to emerge, and morality shifts toward the postconventional. The average societal level of consciousness orbits somewhere between here and the mythic.195 Jim: This coincides with James Fowler's conformist stage which he contends represents average consciousness. In this synthetic-conventional stage of faith, emphasis is placed on creeds and doctrines. For the conformist, the meanings of symbols are inseparable from the symbol itself. Authority, while located external to the self, is found among like-minded believers. In this stage, "interpersonal relationships provide the paradigm for constructing social and political relations."196 The conformist, while basically unreflective regarding values even though there is the ability to articulate and defend them, is able to think reflectively about his or her own thinking and experience. This reflective thinking is the gateway to the next stage . . . Ken: . . . the rational, where mutually recognized industrial nation-states began to eclipse agrarian empires. This era, dominated in its early stages by the collective mystic, produced during its middle stages the first named writers, who began to have an ever increasing influence on the development of culture. In the later stages, the rational period became, and still is, dominated by the thinking of science and modernity, the dignity of which is the differentiation of the cultural value spheres: art, morals, and science. Here, "each of the spheres could pursue its own truths and aspirations without domination or violence from the others."197 Here, formal operational thinking goes beyond rules and roles. Here, reason liberates myth from its concrete literalness. Here, the individual is self-aware and introspective. Here, identity is with the ego, and the noosphere begins to differentiate from the biosphere. And here, where machine replaces muscle, the liberation of women begins.198 Unfortunately, differentiation of the value spheres eventually led to dissociation of the subjective, intersubjective, and objective domains. "This dissociation allowed an explosive empirical science, coupled with rampant modes of industrial production‚both of which emphasized solely it-knowledge and it-technology‚to dominate and colonialize the other value spheres, effectively destroying them in their own terms."199 Jim: With the rational worldview came the critic with his individuative-reflective faith. This faith involved questioning and the subsequent suspension of the old mythic beliefs. Thinking evolved from the concrete to the abstract rational in which meanings are separated from symbols. Here, knowers learned to apply objective procedures for obtaining and communicating knowledge.200 That which could be objectively and empirically observed came to be what counted as knowledge. Identity became located in the "executive ego"201 which was responsible for the choices made, rather than in one's roles or meanings to others. The critic stage is characterized by inner turbulence. As such, it is often the case that the critic will return to the conformist stage where life is more settled rather than full of questions. The other path, the one least traveled, is that of conjunctive faith which coincides with the centauric or vision-logic worldview. Max: While this is all very interesting, it lacks life; in and of itself it has little meaning. Before going on to vision-logic, we need to put these ideas into a context of lived experience. Q: I agree. All this talk about the evolution of consciousness and worldviews is like looking at a map of the countryside while sitting at home in your living room. It tells you where the forests, prairies, and marshes are located, but it tells you nothing about the individual trees in the forests, or the prairie grasses, or frogs that inhabit the marshes . . . Max: . . . nor anything about the smell of the flowers, the sounds of the wind, the beauty of the sunsets . . . Humberto: . . . once again I think we need to return to our story in order to grasp the implications of these notions to which we have listened so patiently.
Jim: When discussing consciousness and worldview in a specific lived experience, it is difficult to isolate and correlate levels of consciousness and worldview with specific behaviors. This is partly because the stages are about overall general patterns rather than about specifics, partly because consciousness and worldview are entwined with one another, and partly because the structures of consciousness, both individual and collective, "are not merely past, but are in fact still present in more or less latent and acute form in each one of us"202 . . . Ken: . . . and as such "should be honored as a rich source of one's own being and one's own roots"203. . . . Max: . . . and partly because life is more complex than we can imagine. Jim: Therein lies the difficulty of comprehending the terrain from reading the map. Q: In terms of sensemaking and with reference to consciousness and worldview, I am curious about what was going on in our story when Upon seeing the bear we all jump back and quickly decide to turn around. Max: Considering the distinctions we were able to make in the moment, our decision to retreat was made from a rational perspective. Collectively from our previous experience with bears, either directly through lived experience with them or indirectly through others telling us about them in one way or another, we understood that they could be dangerous and that they should be avoided. Ken: While all of us were being quite logical externally, it is possible that internally one or more of us reverted to the magic or mythic within us, for example, appealing to God for protection from the bear. Q: Wait a minute. How can that be? You folks are all rational scientist types. Why would any of you revert to prayer? That isn't very rational, is it? Jim: There are numerous possibilities. The sophistication of a person's worldview can range from unarticulated and inconsistent beliefs to highly articulate and consistent metaphysical positions.204 While our worldview about the nature of reality might be quite sophisticated, our view of bears might be considerably less so. Also, it is possible to hold beliefs that are contradictory by keeping them in nonintersecting domains.205 Consequently, it is possible to function at a rational level on the one hand and a mythical or magical level on the other hand‚a person's rational-logical understanding of bears is totally separate from the belief in a god who can protect him or her from bears. Humberto: Or the individual could be functioning at a transrational level, that is to say, beyond the rational. Ken: Yes, the self can function all over the place. "It can have a peak experience of a higher level, only to fall back into its actual and present self-stage. Conversely, a taste of the higher levels can so disrupt the self that it regresses to earlier fulcrums, fulcrums at which there is still some sort of fixation or repression or unfinished business."206 As the self climbs the ladder, it can happen that while part of the self develops to the next rung, other parts are left behind‚fused to the current rung.207 This dissociation, this domination "by all that you have not transcended"208 and the pathological, repressed, or alienated response that comes with it, can resurface in situations of stress or high anxiety. For example, seeing the bear, a dangerous wild animal, could trigger a memory of a childhood trauma of being bitten by a large dog. Such a memory could cause a person to revert back to the level of consciousness occurring at the time of the trauma. Wherever we have a deficiency, be it in level of consciousness or worldview, as individuals in the "I" domain or collectively in the "We" domain, we are vulnerable to regression and the various and sundry behaviors that go with it. Jim: Another aspect of this vulnerability from the "It" domain relates to the fact that our thinking brain, the neocortex, is biologically linked to our emotional or limbic brain. The stresses and anxieties of everyday living, particularly fight or flight situations, can cause a person's normal level of functioning to be "emotionally hijacked."209 In other words, the emotional brain overrides the thinking brain. For example, faced with the danger of the bear, one of us could have panicked and without any regard for the safety of the group, raced back down the path leaving the rest of us to face the danger of the bear. Humberto: "It is emotion that specifies the kinds of relational behaviors in which one can participate at any instant."210 Our ethics, whether we run or remain with the group, are determined not by reason but by emotion. Hence, the history of our behavior is the path of our desires. Jim: This run-or-remain dilemma represents the tension between the self-assertive tendency and the integrative tendency common to all holons. In this situation, the person is caught between saving his own skin and transcending "the narrow boundaries of the self."211 This need to be part of a social holon "is at the root of the 'self-transcending' emotions."212 Humberto: Through the explanatory path of objectivity-with-parenthesis we know that the validity of any given behavior is relative to the domain to which it is applied. The desire to save yourself, valid in the domain of individual self-preservation, is less valid in the domain of collective human relations if it negates the preservation of others. Ken: "That everything is relative does not mean nothing is better; it means some things are, indeed, relatively better than others, all the time."213 Since "we exist in a network of relationships, . . . our relatively greater rights absolutely demand relatively greaterresponsibilities."214 Humberto: "This is why we frequently do not want to reflect on our desires. If we do not see our desires, we can live feeling no responsibility for most of the consequences of what we do,"215 which is the stance of the explanatory path of objectivity-without-parenthesis. Jim: In our story where I step forward to take a better look at the bear and in doing so realize that the bear is really an old stump. And eventually convince the rest of the group that it is okay to continue. presents an interesting example of how this plays out. Here I am faced with two conflicting desires‚the desire to be accepted as a member of this prestigious group of scholars and the desire to take charge of the situation. The first requires me to remain silent, to go along with the group's decision, to be a follower. The second requires me to step forward, to be a leader. Whichever choice I make, the other is compromised. Humberto: Notice that each of Jim's desires is actually located in its own domain of relational behaviors, in its own system of co-ordinations of actions in language. In other words, his choices are located in two different communities. The first is located in the community of prestigious scholars. The second is located in the community of outdoorsmen. The course of Jim's actions will be determined by which desire dominates, not by his ability to reason. Q: This sounds similar to the run-or-remain dilemma we just discussed. Ken: Yes, but this time let's examine the dilemma from a worldview perspective. The desire to be a part of a community beyond the family group has its roots in the mythic worldview. The desire to be an individual, to follow the course of one's own thinking, has its roots in the rational worldview. If Jim were functioning from strictly a mythic worldview, without question he would follow his desire to be a member of the group. However, and this is what is most fascinating, the nature of mythic membership changes with the transcendence to a rational perspective. From his rational point of view, Jim can see that the most effective way to resolve this dilemma is to take an action that includes both desires. In other words, if he takes an action that is helpful to the group, that is, points out that the bear is an old stump, then he not only satisfies his desire to follow his intuition, but he also strengthens his membership in the group thus satisfying his mythic membership desire. This is what is meant by transcending and including. Q: But if, as Humberto tells us, we can never know in the moment the accuracy of our observations, how can we determine the "better" choice? Jim: Better is always determined in hindsight. We reconstruct the past in light of the present, that is, once we know the outcome of our action, we justify it.216 Humberto: Hence, what constitutes the better choice is a decision each one of us must make for him- or herself. I can not tell you which is better. However, I do claim that biologically it is love and only love that constitutes human social behavior, and, from this point of view, that which legitimizes self and other is better than that which marginalizes self or other.217 Max: Humberto's notion of love as legitimization of self and other goes hand in hand with the notion of tact as mindful and thoughtful action with others. By tact, I mean tactful action as "the expression of a thoughtfulness that involves the total being of the person, an active sensitivity to the subjectivity of the other, for what is unique and special about the person."218 Ken: From a holonic perspective, better is the greatest depth over the widest span, which is exactly where the evolution of the noosphere, the evolution of consciousness, is headed.219 Max: Goethe sums up our thoughts beautifully: "One learns to know only what one loves, and the deeper and fuller the knowledge is to be, the more powerful and vivid must be the love, indeed the passion."220 Q: I fail to see how all this relates to science. Ken: Before addressing that relationship, we must first turn to "deep science."221
Jim: It all goes back to what counts as knowledge. On the one hand, we have the empirical sciences seeking certainty, objective truth, and on the other hand, we have the subjective human sciences seeking meaning. With the differentiation of the cultural value spheres, empirical science, free to explore the world, became so successful in gaining objective knowledge of the physical world that it gave rise to the belief that scientific knowledge was "the only acceptable kind of knowledge."222 All else simply did not exist‚ "the belief becomes the experience."223 Ken: Belief in the certainty of objective knowledge led to the collapse of the subjective and intersubjective domains. Meanings and values became objectified. Mind and consciousness were reduced to aberrations of the nervous system. There was no depth to reality, only objective reality, only flatland. Max: Unfortunately, theory development and research in human science was reduced to the interobjective, or restricted to establishing principles and norms, to finding "the permanent in the fleeting, the commensurable in the incommensurable, the conceptual in the unique, the measurable in the poetic,"224 which inevitably failed. Consequently, human science was left with ineffective and unacknowledged methodologies for establishing validity claims. Now, even as the physical sciences begin to see the shortcomings of the positivistic approach to knowledge, the empirical-analytic and phenomenological-hermeneutic types of human sciences debate which methodologies, which approaches to research, produce what counts as valid knowledge. As human scientists, we get entangled in organizing life around our theories forgetting that it is people "who bring schemas and frameworks into being and not the reverse."225 In phenomenology in particular, we must remember that its purpose "is not propositional discourse. There is no systematic argument, no sequence of propositions that we have to follow in order to arrive at a conclusion, a generalization, or a truth statement, because that would be to see theorizing itself as method."226 Humberto: Granted, the methods of empirical science are not applicable for examining human experience. However, if human science is to be acceptable as a science, "it must have some method for exploring and knowing what human experience is."227 Ken: The problem is not so much one of methodology as it is one of application of methodology. Traditionally, doing science has been characterized by sensory empiricism and as such limited to the objective domains. However, the scientific method need not be limited to sensory experience. After all, "empirical" in its broadest sense means "experiential." Thus to be an "empiricist" "simply means to demand evidence for assertions, and not merely to rely on dogma, faith, or nonverifiable conjectures."228 Jim: In the broad sense of empiricism then, evidence can be obtained by any direct experience regardless of the domain. Ken: As long as it incorporates the three essential aspects of scientific inquiry, the three strands of all valid knowing: injunction, illumination, and confirmation.229 Through the application of these three strands, that is, through "deep science," it is possible to create a valid method for gaining knowledge in the subjective and intersubjective domains as well as in the interobjective and objective domains . . . Jim: . . . thus leading to the integration of art, morals and science. Ken: Moreover, "the three strands of deep science separate the valid from the bogus in each quadrant . . . helping us to separate not only true propositions from false propositions, but also authentic self-expression from lying, beauty from degradation, and moral aspirations from deceit and deception"230 . . . Max: . . . which is actually what is needed in the human sciences. Ken: Science, in its broadest sense as "the primordial human quest to understand the universe and our place in it,"231 begins with instrumental injunction, which is always of the form "If you want to know this, do this."232 As we know, science is first and foremost descriptive, but, as G. Spencer Brown points out in Laws of Form, "description is dependent upon, and secondary to, the set of injunctions having been obeyed first."233 This is true regardless of the domain in question, be it sensory, mental or spiritual. Humberto: Of course, this is what I have been saying all along‚knowing is doing. As a biologist, injunction is manifest as experiment. If I want to know the structure of a pigeon's eye, I must learn to dissect it. Max: In education, we have teacher practica. Apprentice teachers learn from exemplary teachers. Phenomenologically, injunction is lived experience. If you want to know what an experience is like, you must live it as well as dialogue with others who have lived it. Jim: Injunction then is the same as paradigm, which Thomas Kuhn used "to refer to a collection of procedures or ideas that instruct scientists . . . [as to] how to work."234 It is through shifts in paradigms that scientific knowledge moves forward. Each new paradigm provides a new way of looking at the world . . . Ken: . . . a new way of experiencing the world. As such, injunction leads us to direct apprehension, experience, or illumination. It is through injunction that experience is brought forth, that illumination arises. Thus, injunction provides the data that serve as "the crucial anchor of genuine knowledge."235 Max: One of the issues that has plagued phenomenology, as a legitimate study of human experience is that it "has been called a method without techniques."236 This has been interpreted to mean an approach to studying human experience that is devoid of injunctions and as such without a reliable method of collecting valid data. However, I interpret it to mean an approach that avoids objective-analytic methodology, which separates the researcher from the experience and as such nullifies the research process and the subsequent results. In turn, I argue that writing, which is integral to phenomenological research, is the key injunction necessary for effective understanding of human experience. Of course, writing cannot occur without first having had the experience and communicating with others who have also had the experience. Paradoxically, however, "writing distances us from lived experience but by doing so it allows us to discover the existential structures of experience."237 It illuminates our understanding of the experience. Q: This doesn't make sense to me. If each of us have our own unique experience of something, how can you as a researcher write anything meaningful about the experience? How do we know if the writer is telling us something valid or if his or her experience is simply an illusion or deception? Ken: This brings us to our third strand, confirmation. Once we make a knowledge claim, we seek confirmation or rejection of our results from others who have, and this is the essential factor, also completed the first two strands, injunction and illumination. If these informed knowers accept our knowledge claim as valid, then it is deemed valid. If they reject it, our knowledge is discounted. Max: Such is the case in human science where phenomenological text is confirmed or rejected by others who have had the same experience. It is the resonance between author and informed reader that provides the validity of the claims being made. Humberto: In other words, we grant knowledge to another when he or she demonstrates a behavior or action we deem as adequate or effective within the domain under consideration.238 And we deny or reject knowledge when the behavior or action is inadequate or ineffective within the domain under consideration. Thus, the key factor in granting knowledge involves the relationship between action and context. Smoking illustrates this point quite clearly. In the domain of health care, smoking is seen as ineffective behavior, while in the domain of street gangs, smoking is a criterion for membership and a sign of coolness. Jim: What we call validity is based not on certainty, but rather on social coherences, on the interpretation of the community of knowers, the community of individuals who share the same paradigm. The acceptability of knowledge claims therefore is dependent upon consensus criteria.239 Consequently, when paradigms shift, the validity of knowledge claims shift, which is the whole point of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As Kuhn points out, politics, that is, authority and power, is as much a part of the construction of scientific knowledge as is collected data.240 Ken: However, this does not negate knowledge brought forth by valid injunctions. "The fact that all holons have an interpretive as well as objective component does not deny the objective component, it merely situates it."241 In other words, "paradigms disclose data, they do not merely invent it."242 Q: But isn't truth, regardless of context or domain, simply "truth"? Ken: Not at all. The objective, subjective, and intersubjective domains each have their own respective validity claims that "can be exposed to evidence and checked for their actual validity."243 Let me explain. Validity claims in the objective domain are based upon objective analysis of observable behavior. In this domain we are looking at the exteriors of holons. As such, truth is representational, propositional. All objects of this domain have simple location. The same is true for the interobjective domain where we talk about "functional fit," which refers to how holons fit into the overall objective system. In both domains knowledge claims are based on the correspondence theory of truth, . . . Humberto: . . . the explanatory path of objectivity-without-parenthesis. Ken: In the subjective domain, there is no simple location upon which to base validity claims. Instead, validity depends on the individual's ability to match words with intentions and actions, upon the individual's trustworthiness, sincerity, and integrity. Thus, rather than seeking "truth," we seek "truthfulness." Of course, this is difficult because it is always possible that we misinterpret our own experience, to say nothing about intentionally misrepresenting it. Max: Discovering the "truthfulness" of lived experience is really what hermeneutic phenomenological human science is all about. Through the validating circle of inquiry, a description of lived experience "is collected by lived experience and recollects lived experience‚is validated by lived experience and it validates lived experience."244 Humberto: Of course we must keep in mind that "everything said is said by someone."245 Q: What's that supposed to mean? Humberto: That is to say, "nothing precedes its distinction."246 It is only through the observer, through language, that we bring forth a shared world of distinctions. Through this coordination of coordinations of relational behaviors we bring forth shared descriptions of experience. We cannot separate our way of being from how the world appears to us. Jim: In a sense then, we co-create truthfulness. If your description resonates with my description, I acknowledge the truthfulness of your description. If our descriptions resonate with the descriptions of others in a particular community, then our claims are viewed as valid at least in that community if not in others, which leads us back to what we were saying about confirmation and rejection by a community of knowers. Ken: To be a member of a community of knowers "means you and I inhabit each other's interior to some degree. You and I can share our depth. When we point to truth, and we are situated in truthfulness, we can reach mutual understanding,"247 which is the basis of validity in the intersubjective domain. Max: Human science researchers, through interpretive conversations with others, orient themselves to the collective context, the cultural ground that brings forth the significance of mutual experience.248 Ken: As "the participant observer, the hermeneutic interpreter . . . you understand by immersing yourself in this cultural background which will give you the common worldspace or common context against which you can now make adequate interpretations."249 Humberto: What the two of you are saying is that an explanation is acceptable to a given community of knowers who share a common set of conditions for validation. "Magic, for instance, is as explanatory for those who accept it as science is for those who accept it."250 The difference between magic and science is that each in their own domain must meet the specific conditions of validation set forth within their respective domains. In the explanatory domain of science, we can distinguish four such conditions.251 These conditions are not necessarily sequential and may overlap in various ways. Interestingly enough, they dovetail closely with the three strands of deep science. The first condition involves an explanatory hypothesis, that is, a way of generating the phenomenon or proposed "injunction." The second condition is invoking the injunction, which leads to the third condition, experiencing the phenomenon in the praxis of living, that is, "illumination." The fourth condition requires that the description of the phenomenon be explained in an acceptable way to a community of knowers, "confirmation." The implication of this discussion is that "since it is not measurement, quantification or prediction that constitutes science as a domain of explanations and statements but the application of the criterion of validation of scientific explanations by a standard observer in his or her praxis of living, a standard observer can do science in any domain of the praxis of living in which he or she applies this criterion."252 Ken: The importance of these notions is that they provide us with the power and the tools to transform beyond the rational. Through the understanding and application of deep science in conjunction with enactivism, and the tenets of holons, we have, for the first time in history, the possibility of actually integrating on a cultural level, the "I," "We," and "It" domains rather than re-fusing them as many new age imperialists advocate. It is this integration of the cultural value spheres that constitutes the next stage in the evolution of consciousness, vision-logic, or the centauric worldview.
Jim: Modernism, the dominant feature of today's rational worldview, stems from Rene Descartes' famous proclamation: ". . . the mind by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body,"253 whereas vision-logic is based on the integration of body and mind . . . Ken: . . . "which is why I call the self of this stage the centaur, representing an integration of the mind and the body, the noosphere and the biosphere, in a relatively autonomous self."254 This integration was made possible through the development of abstract critical thinking which is an integral part of the rational worldview. Abstract thinking led to metathinking‚thinking about thinking‚which has subsequently led to postmodern thought, the principle source of the centauric worldview. Humberto: From within the context of postmodern thought, constructivism and the notion of constitutive ontologies emerged. Through constructivism, we began to understand that we cannot assume a pregiven reality independent of the observer.255 Through constitutive ontologies we came to realize the possibility of multiple realities. Max: Of course, postmodern thought also includes the whole notion of contextualism in which meanings are context-dependent, contexts are boundless, and language creates the world, or better, worlds we live in.256 In part, it is through constructivism and contextualism that we have come to apprehend the uniqueness of human experience and appreciate the value and validity of phenomenological human science. Jim: Moreover, postmodern thought has led us to realize that there is no one privileged perspective‚a concept the dualistic rational perspective can scarcely grasp. As such, it is postmodern thought that forms the link between the rational worldview and what Jean Gebser calls the integral-aperspectival worldview or simply the integral.257 Ken: Not only does the integral-aperspectival mind privilege no perspective as final but it maintains an awareness that synthesizes all perspectives. The clear boundaries of self and other which the rational mind worked so hard to establish, the integral mind now strives to make porous and permeable. The centauric stage acknowledges the depth of our relationship with the natural world and the Jungian archetypes that have their origins in archaic images and magico-mythic motifs.258 It realizes the transformative powers of myths and that "all of the world's great mythologies exist today in each one of us, in me and in you. They are produced, and can at any time be produced, by the archaic, the magic, and the mythic structures of our own compound individuality."259 While the integral mind respects the differentiation of the arts, morals, and science as achieved by the rational mind, it strives to integrate them. It transcends simple rationality in its ability to "unify opposites and see identity-in-difference."260 In moving toward a worldcentric or planetary perspective, the integral-aperspectival mind transcends egocentric and ethnocentric perspectives. Jim: This means that conjunctive faith, the individual's planetary perspective "is ready for significant encounters," as James Fowler suggests, "with other traditions than its own, expecting that truth has disclosed and will disclose itself in those traditions in ways that may complement or correct its own."261 To enact this readiness the integral mind makes itself vulnerable to another's truth without negating its own truth. There is the knowledge that truth is a matter of context and that in order to construct knowledge there must be a joining "together [with others] to arrive at some new understanding."262 By engaging with another in dialogical knowing, that is, through mutual listening and speaking in an I-Thou relationship, it becomes possible to grasp the depths of reality of the other's experience and thus move closer to truthfulness.263 Fritjof Capra's exploration of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism is an excellent example of this kind of awareness.264 Ken: The significance of this awareness is the recognition that "any single perspective is likely to be partial, limited, perhaps even distorted, and only by taking multiple perspectives and multiple contexts can the knowledge quest be fruitfully advanced."265 This capacity to recognize one's own perspective as a distortion of transcendent reality is James Fowler's ironic imagination.266 Humberto: This is exactly the point that rational-minded critics don't really understand. They argue that because the explanatory path of objectivity-with-parenthesis maintains the notion of multiple realities and that no theory can claim objective truth, then it must follow that the notion of constitutive ontologies is either not worth considering or is self-contradictory.267 What they don't comprehend is that constructionistic or relativistic notions like constitutive ontologies don't claim to have an objective truth that covers all domains, but rather they claim a truth relative to a specific domain in a given period of time. These critics fail to recognize that truths are context dependent as well as dependent upon the acceptance of a community of knowers, which always makes them subject to revision. Ken: In other words, they fail to understand "no matter how much we expand our contexts, this does not invalidate the relative truths of smaller contexts. It negates their exclusiveness (or their ultimateness), but preserves their moment of truth, their context-dependent truth."268 Jim: Unlike the rational mind, caught in the world of dualities, in the world of oppositionality, the integral mind is able to accept paradox, to hold contradictions. Whereas the rational mind separates object from background, self from other, the centauric mind, in apprehending the inclusiveness of being, goes beyond either-or thinking by attending to the organic and interconnectedness of the nature of all things.269 It is the acknowledgement of this interconnectedness that forms the basis of web-of-life systems thinking. While some holists may be reductionists in that they collapse internal domains to external domains, there are others like Fritjof Capra who go beyond flatland notions. This is evident in his belief that "ecological awareness, at the deepest level, is the intuitive awareness of the oneness of all life, the interdependence of its multiple manifestations and its cycles of change and transformation, . . . [and that] spirituality, or the human spirit, could be defined as the mode of consciousness in which we feel connected to the cosmos as a whole."270 Ken The power of vision-logic is not that it sees the interdependence of all things, but rather that it can identify and articulate that "it is itself an intrinsic part of the interrelated Kosmos."271 As such, vision-logic incorporates the best of both the rational and the transrational, which makes it quite difficult for solely rational minds to comprehend.272 Q: Transrational? Are you insinuating there is a state of being, a level of consciousness that actually goes beyond the rational? Ken: Absolutely. The mystical or contemplative levels, fulcrums 7 to 9 that we mentioned earlier, go beyond the rational. While a thorough discussion of them is more than we can manage here, the confusion between prerational and transrational is worth commenting on. The prerational stages of the archaic, magic, and mythic are externally quite similar to the transrational stages of the psychic, subtle, and causal in that they are both nonrational stages. As such, those who see the rational mind as the end state reduce the transrational to prerational. This is what I call the pre/trans fallacy.273 The fallout of this is that genuinely transrational experiences such as the contemplative behaviors of both Western and Eastern religions is seen as regressive or prerational and thus negated. Of course the opposite can happen as well. Supporters of the transrational elevate prerational experiences to transrational, which reinforces the rationalist's position that all transrational experience is bogus. Q: So the issue here appears to be one of validity. What constitutes an experience as a valid transrational experience? Ken: The answer lies in deep science, in the application of the three strands of valid knowing. Is there an injunction that leads to an illumination for which there is confirmation by a community of knowers? Unfortunately, for the Idealists the answer was no; they didn't have an adequate practice for reproducing their insights. Or, as is the case for many of their New Age descendants, their practices are ones that revert to the magic or the mythic worldview and as such are prerational, not transrational as they would like to claim.274 Humberto: Francisco Varela maintains that Western secular thought has no practice "that works with cognition and lived experience in a direct and pragmatic way."275 Because traditional science has separated itself from everyday lived experience, it is incapable of transcending from the rational mind set to vision-logic. Therefore, Varela and his colleagues recommend that in order to overcome this problem, science, through phenomenology, must shift from reflecting on lived experience to the practice of "mindfulness meditation" which allows the mind to be present in the experience‚allows the experience to bring itself into the mind's consciousness. They argue that the tradition of mindfulness awareness offers a path leading to centauric thinking which "requires the embodiment of concern for the other with whom we enact a world."276 Max: While your colleague and his friends have a valid point, I am afraid, given Ken's suggestion that the majority of society functions at the mythic-rational stage of consciousness, that we have a long wait before the general population of phenomenologists, let alone scientists in general, embrace mindfulness meditation. Until then, we will have to rely "on the interpretive sensitivity, inventive thoughtfulness, scholarly tact and writing talent"277 of the human science researchers as they are. Q: Before going any farther, what's the downside of this vision-logic? Ken: Like all other levels of consciousness, vision-logic is faced with its own pathologies. The more complex a holon becomes, the greater the possibility for dysfunction. "And the greater the depth of transcendence, the greater the burden of inclusion,"278 which is where the problem lies for the integral-aperspectival mind. Aperspectival awareness with its apprehension of multiple perspectives privileges no perspective. However, the effort required to take into account all the different perspectives can become quite disorienting, quite overwhelming. Forgetting that "relative does not mean that no perspective has any advantage at all,"279 can lead to a "total paralysis of thought, will, and action,"280 that is, aperspectival madness. In other words, in viewing all perspectives as equal, none are seen as having any real depth, which leaves only flatland, a postmodern wasteland‚a world without depth, without Spirit. Jim: Another problem arising with vision-logic is our ability to produce the technology which allows for a worldcentric economy, a technology which, in the hands of individuals with less-than-planetary consciousness, is used to further global but not worldcentric agendas.281 For example, the internet, a worldcentric technology, is used to spread hate literature and foster terrorism to say nothing of its use to make money for some at the expense of others. Q: So where do we go from here? Jim: "As Einstein is often quoted as saying: No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it."282 On a cultural level, this means problems created from a mythic membership mentality, such as the tribal wars of Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, will require the world community to find solutions based on a rational or vision-logic perspective rather than on their old mythic membership positions. It means developing theories of human development that are inclusive of women and minority groups rather than simply taking the white male life cycle as being the norm.283 On an individual level, it means resolving personal issues associated with the lower rungs of our functioning by accessing our higher rungs of consciousness. Given that each of us, individually and collectively, is an interwoven fabric of levels of consciousness, and that evolution is as of yet an unfinished process, I believe solutions to our gravest problems are still possible. Ken: Unfortunately, "the cognitive means usually run way ahead of the willingness to actually climb that ladder of expanding consciousness."284 However, having said that, I believe our hope for a better future lies in the integration of the Big Three domains of holonic existence: art, morals, and science. Through its foundation in a rational worldview, science, both traditional natural sciences and human sciences, in conjunction with other societal institutions, must take the lead in creating a future focused on the basic moral intuition: "protect and promote the greatest depth for the greatest span."285 "The evolutionary drive to produce greater depth is synonymous with the drive to overcome egocentrism, to find wider and deeper wholes, to unfold greater and greater unions."286 We cannot do this alone. We must engage the personal values, collective wisdom, and technical know-how of all from around the globe if we are to succeed in our journey toward the ultimate objective truth: "All beings are perfect manifestations of Spirit or Emptiness."287 Jim: Such an engagement requires a uniting force. Despite the contention that no one knows how paradigms are actually integrated into human culture,288 I maintain their presence is facilitated by strong metaphors. Brent Kilbourn argues that "a metaphor which has scope and precision in its ability to account for a wide variety of seemingly disparate phenomena could conceivably form a basis of a worldview." Historically, each worldview has had its own metaphor. For the magic epoch, it was the image. A picture of the hunted animal drawn in the earth was shot with an arrow to ensure the success of the hunt. In the mythic world god became the metaphor for uniting the sources of power. Throughout history innumerable wars have been fought in "God's" name. The rational worldview has taken the machine, given to us by Descartes, as its model of the world, a model so ingrained in our culture that its presence permeates our very being in ways that go beyond our comprehension. In order to engage the world in the transition to vision-logic, (a transition Fowler calls "a watershed time of cultural and intellectual change that equals or exceeds the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in depth and significance"289), a strong metaphor with great depth must emerge from the upper rungs of our collective consciousness. The web-of-life metaphor, while effective in uniting the components of the "It" domain, misses the mark in terms of depth. When I think of the web-of-life, I am always reminded of a spider's web, which, while beautiful, is only two-dimensional and as such without depth. I think a better metaphor, one that best represents the four dimensions of holonic existence as well as the self-organizing principle of all of life, and possibly the entire Kosmos, and as such the evolution of consciousness as understood from a vision-logic perspective, is the human mind‚the most complex of all self-organizing networks. Humberto: Yes, the mind is a powerful metaphor, for it is the mind that allows "us to treat any situation that we live as a starting point for recursive reflections."290 Our mind gives us the ability to consider our actions, to choose our actions and the emotioning that drives them. Our problems, the world's problems, belong to the emotional domain and will only be changed by changes in our emotioning. Will metaphor effect such a change? I don't know. But what I do know is that "we shall remain human only as long as our operation in love and ethics is the operational basis of our coexistence."291 I also know that I personally want to contribute to a cultural change in which "love, mutual respect, honesty and social responsibility arise spontaneously from living instant after instant."292 Max: The starting point for this kind of cultural change is in finding the universal in the particular. As such, "phenomenological engagement is always personal engagement: it is an appeal to each one of us, to how we understand things, how we stand in life, how we understand ourselves,"293 collectively and idiosyncratically. Each of our stories, each of our lived experiences, contains some essence of truthfulness. The aim of human science then is to identify and articulate the essence of each particular experience, the universal meaning common to all who share the experience. Jim: So we end where we began, with human science research as a loving act, an act in which another is seen as a legitimate other. But legitimization of self and others is not limited to human science research; it is core to what it means to be human. It is integral to each stage of our spiritual development.294 Love, as the emotional basis of knowing, of knowledge, is the essential ingredient necessary for the continuation of the evolution of consciousness individually and collectively. In sum, we are left with Fritjof Capra's words: "There can be no wisdom without compassion."295 If you look carefully to the north, just above Cassiopeia, you can see the Andromeda nebula, the most distant object perceptible to the unaided eye.296 Knowing that its light has traveled for one and a half million years to reach us here in this moment, how can you but wonder "what else is going on?" As I am humbled by the presence of this distant light, I am humbled by the depth of vision-logic within each of you and by the manifestation of Spirit within each of us. The fire is all but embers; it is time to go . . .
The preceding conversation represents an effort to unpack the complexities of knowing, knowledge, and reality through reflection on the notions of enactivism, the ontology of cognition, and the unified field theory of consciousness within the context of deep science as applied to lived experience. Although I know more now at the end of the conversation than when it started, I realize how much more there is to know‚how many topics untouched, how many perspectives unseen, how many voices unheard. There are volumes of text regarding such matters as the constitution of reality, the various ways of knowing, and the social structure of knowledge that I have yet to study. The limitations of enactivism, the importance of the biology of cognition in the fields of sociology and psychology, the philosophical implications of the four quadrants of holonic existence, and the application of deep science to the mental and spiritual realms remain to be addressed. While there are innumerable topics left to investigate and questions to answer, the ideas explored in this chapter represent a working epistemology from which I can examine lived experiences of sensemaking. The writing of this conversation as a reflective process of knowing how we know has significantly influenced how I apprehend the world. First, in coming to understand that cognition is not representational and that the world is brought forth by the distinctions we make, I have replaced the construction metaphor of knowledge with an evolutionary metaphor. The construction metaphor, based more on a representational than an enactive perspective, lacks life and is too static to accurately depict the dynamic processes of knowing. Take for example, the building of a brick structure in which the first brick laid remains the same with the addition of other bricks. In the end, the interconnection of bricks creates something new, yet in and of themselves each brick remains unchanged. This image fails to capture Humberto Maturana's observation that subsequent knowledge changes prior knowledge.297 Evolution, unlike construction, is a dynamic "interweaving of processes" that are the "result of self-transcendence."298 Hence, knowledge viewed through an evolutionary metaphor is seen as alive and dynamic. This metaphor portrays knowledge as emergent much in the same way as an oak emerges from an acorn. As such, it provides a more precise and representative account of knowledge than the construction metaphor. This shift in metaphor has given me a completely new way of comprehending knowledge. Next, the notion of holons has profoundly influenced my understanding of the constitution of reality and the meaning of truth. Ken Wilber's synthesis of the four quadrants of holonic existence299 has given depth to the ecologic and holistic beliefs that comprise my worldview. In the process of coming to comprehend the profundity of this synthesis, I have separated myself from the dualistic struggle between objective and subjective truths, and come to embrace the integration of the objective, subjective, and intersubjective domains. This integration involves more than just acknowledging the existence of these domains; it includes realizing that there is no existence without the inclusion of all three domains and that each domain is integral to the others. While we talk of them as if they are separate, they aren't. There is no "I" domain except in the context of the "We" domain which exists only in an "It" domain. In other words, the world consists of an endless nesting of holons within holons, contexts within contexts. The validity of a truth or truthfulness then is determined by the context within which it is set. From these insights, I have come to understand the evolution of life and the evolution of the universe as the evolution of holons, as the evolution of consciousness. I have come to understand that I am still in the middle of an evolutionary process of understanding this evolution. My continuing efforts to grasp the meaning of the evolution of consciousness as the unfolding of Spirit will no doubt cast my current understanding in a new and different light. Finally, in composing this chapter, I have come to appreciate Max van Manen's insistence that writing is an integral part of human science research.300 Writing, as the interplay between what is known and what is emerging, compels us to dig deeper, to reach farther, to wrestle with our reflections in order to discover the meaning of our experiences. It compels us to challenge our certainties, to entertain new possibilities. Each revision, each change of word, sentence, or paragraph, constitutes a new way of seeing, of understanding, and hence a revisioning of what had previously been seen. In writing this chapter, the most dramatic revisioning occurred with the map metaphor. Through the writing process, I began to realize that the metaphor is not simply about the relationship between map and territory but rather about the relationship between map, experience with the territory, and territory. This change in thinking is evident in the change from first to final draft of Q's comments on pages 35 and 36: 1st Draft Q: I think I'm catching on. If I understand all of this correctly, a territory does exist and through interaction with it, the map maker creates a map of the territory; however, the map is not the territory. We only know the territory reflectively, that is indirectly from the history of our lived experience. Consequently, we cannot comment on the ultimate nature of the territory. Final Draft Q: I think I'm catching on. If I understand all of this correctly, a territory, that is a physical world, does exist. Through interaction with it, the map maker creates a map of his or her experience with the territory; consequently, the map is not of the territory, but rather, of the map maker's experience of interaction with the territory. Furthermore, we only know our experience with the territory reflectively, that is, through reconstructing it from the perspective of our personal and cultural history of our lived experience. As a result, we can only comment on our recollection of our experience of interaction with the territory, never on the ultimate nature of the territory. Reading this final description of the map metaphor, I see that it too is incomplete, simplistic, and limited. It says nothing about how to orient the map or use it to navigate through lived experience. While the validity of a map lies in its structural resemblance to the structure of the territory, its functional value lies in the map reader's ability to effectively use it to navigate the lifeworld. It is one thing to create a map; it is quite another to use it, given its inherent generalizations, limitations, and inaccuracies, to successfully navigate through the territory of lived experience. As I wrote and rewrote this chapter, I began to question the map as a metaphor for knowing in that at its core it is representational which enactive knowing, as understood through Maturana and Varela's biology of cognition, is not. Given that I have no replacement metaphor and that we live life as if knowing is representational, I will continue with this metaphor until a more effective one arises. With the limitations of the map metaphor in mind, the goal of this chapter is to develop a map that will provide a basis for "knowing thyself," to create an integrative epistemology in which knowing, knowledge, and reality arise from a common ground, to explore the evolution of what counts as knowledge. What has been achieved is an epistemology of participation,301 an epistemology in which we come to know the world through our full participation in it, through bringing it forth by the distinctions we make and the significance we give it as a result of our interactions with the world and with each other. It is an epistemology grounded in an integration of theory and lived experience. It is one in which we as knowers must come to recognize the tenuousness of our certainties and open ourselves to the notion of multiple possibilities. It is one that requires us to take responsibility for our actions, our knowings. It is one that informs us that the world is as we create it, and, if we want it to be different, we must be different. It tells us that we can be different. The choice is ours. This is not just a theoretical epistemology isolated from the lived world, but rather it is one that realizes its roots are buried deep within lived experience and, as such, includes art and ethics as well as science. It is one that informs life as well as research. It is from the perspective of an epistemology of participation that I examine the lived experience of a field trip as a case study in sensemaking. But first a description of the case study.
Gathering at the Fire
Explanatory Paths
Bear in the Woods
Evolution of Consciousness
Old Stump
Deep Science
Vision-Logic
Know Thyself Revisited
TOP
Chapter 3: Journey into the Rocky Mountains
May the FORCE be with you!
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