Multi-Modal Understandings of Reality

Context

The P2P Foundation founder has been especially influenced by Integral Theory, which stresses multi-perspectival approaches to understanding reality.

Matthew McNatt claims there is a variant integral approach, that is based on multi-modality.

Here here provides some hints and resources:

Discussion

Matthew McNatt:

Kieran Egan's "The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Understanding" (one of my favorite works of educational philosophy). ("The Educated Mind" is first in a series of three books; I think it's a classic. I also I find the third in the series—"Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dwery, and Jean Piaget" to be uproariously funny".

Anyway, these authors defend the theses that:

1. Ways of sensemaking (aka "modes of being" / "movements in process" / "successive optimizations" / "cognitive tools") are a primary driver of the historical cycles that you (Michel) have been researching;

2. Successive ways of sensemaking emerge as prior ways of sensemaking become palpable inadequate;

3. Mentors can make the inadequacy of current ways of sensemaking more obvious and, thereby, accelerate development (resulting in stark differences between communities that value mentors and communities that value character formation from "learning the hard way");

4. Social systems develop to support and to be leveraged by people in discernably different "stages" of these ways of sensemaking;

5. There are gains AND losses experienced with each transition from one dominant way of sensemaking into another dominant way of sensemaking (and it's impossible to ever "go back" / "return to Eden" once one has shifted dominant ways of sensemaking.)

Berdyaev and Egan both postulate five movements.

Dooyeweerd, Gendlin, and Fischer likewise postulate five movements—but from within a theory that predicts six movements. The sixth, a movement rest, gets mentioned by Gendlin and by Fischer's team but subsequently minimized by each because not much forward progression occurs during the resting movement… "merely" self-reconstitution. Dooyweerd doesn't mention the sixth movement, but his first-generation pupils do, when they notice that one of the parallels Dooyeweerd's theory predicts (between phylogenesis and personal development) requires it.

The integral approach each of these thinkers take is MODAL instead of PERSPECTIVAL. They defend the thesis that

6. Whereas gathering multiple perspectives as a *primary* strategy facilitates self-deception (via coalition building, which incentivizes hiding information from oneself and from others that might otherwise undermine the coalition), intentionally "inhabiting" distinct, successive "ways of sensemaking" / "modes of being" as a *primary* strategy deepens intersubjectivity (with other humans, with the natural world, and even with mechanized processes) that counteracts self-deception (by increasing a "sense" of "thriving within shared constraints").

I agree with this contention, though I think that because most people are incapable for "thinking modally" without bastardizing the approach into something more familiar, it's *necessary* for an individual or team interested in modal thinking to (1) begin with a *transformational heuristic" to "prime the pump" of modal thinking and (2) to learn social technologies, without which group processes around emergent insights too readily stagnate.

The series of courses I'm working on teach one such transformational heuristic ("The 8 Questions"), as well as a series of social technologies for handling emergent, often "frame-shaking" insights.

My sense has been that Ken Wilber's integralism is multi-perspectival, instead of modal. It's the best perspectival integralism I've encountered… and it operates largely orthogonally to the modal approaches above. I thus find it *fascinating*, Michel, that Zak Stein—who "cut his teeth" with Fisher's group—is in regular dialogue with Wilbur.

Each "path toward integration" shares a goal—but they're as different from each other as from the Catholic integralists' path, whose way forward entails appeals to (and expected, enforced obedience to) ostensible Divine revelation."

(email, July 2024)