Metamodern View of Reality
The Metamodern View of Reality
By Zachary Stein:
" To see the fractal nature of reality and of the development and applicability of ideas, that all understanding consists of reused elements taken from other forms of understanding.
To be anti-essentialist, not believing in “ultimate essences” such as matter, consciousness, goodness, evil, masculinity, femininity or the like – but rather that all these things are contextual and interpretations made from relations and comparisons. Even the today so praised “relationality” is not an essence of the universe.
To no longer believe in an atomistic, mechanical universe where the ultimate stuff is matter, but rather to view the ultimate nature of reality as a great unknown that we must metaphorically capture in our symbols, words and stories. To accept the view of a world being newly born again and again.
To see that the world is radically, unyieldingly and completely socially constructed, always relative and context bound.
To see that the world emerges through complex interactions of its parts and that our intuitive understandings tend to be much too static and mono-causal. This is called complexity. It is the fundamental principle of not only meteorology but also of social psychology, where patterns (such as the “self”) emerge through the interactions of interrelated, interdependent dividuals.
To accept the necessity of developmental hierarchies – but to be very critical and careful with how they are described and used. Hierarchies are studied empirically, not arbitrarily assumed.
To see that language and thereby our whole worldviews travel through a much greater space of possible, never-conceptualized worlds; that language is evolving.
To look at the world holistically, where things such as scientific facts, perspectives, culture and emotions interact (this form of interactivity is called hypercomplexity, because it involves not only many interacting units, but interacting perspectives and qualitatively different dimensions of reality, such as subjective vs. objective reality).
To see that information and management of information is fundamental to all aspects of reality and society: from genes to memes to money and science and political revolutions.
To accept an informational-Darwinian view of both genes (organisms) and memes (cultural patterns) competing to survive through a process of developmental evolution that involves negative selection (that disfavored genes and memes go extinct, but continue to exist as potentials).
To see that Darwinian evolution depends equally on mutual cooperation and competition; that competition and cooperation are always intertwined.
To see the dynamic interplay of the universal and the particular, where for instance humans in more complex societies become more individualized, which in turn drives the development of more complex societies where people are more interdependent and more universal values are needed to avoid collapse.
To see that the world runs on dialectic logic, where things are always broken, always “stumbling backwards” as it were; that things are always striving for an impossible balance and in that accidental movement create the whole dance that we experience as reality. So the development of reality does have directionality, it’s just that we are always blind to this direction; hence the metaphor of “stumbling backwards”.
To see that reality is fundamentally open-ended, broken, as it were, even in its mathematical and physical structure, as shown in Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and in some of the core findings of modern physics.
To recognize that potentials and potentiality, rather than facts and actualities, constitute the most fundamental or “more real” reality. What we usually call reality is only “actuality”, one slice of an infinitely larger, hypercomplex pie. Actuality is only a “case of” a deeper reality, called “absolute totality”.
To explore visions of panpsychism, i.e. that consciousness is everywhere in the universe and “as real” as matter and space. But panpsychism should not be confused with animistic visions of all things having “spirits”."
(https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf)
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See also: The Metamodern View of Science