Thanks to Bruce Alderman at The Integral Stage for moderating.
Cosmologies in Question: A Debate with David Long
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Alfred North Whitehead, autopoiesis, Brian Swimme, Copernican Revolution, Darwin, Descartes, Evan Thompson, Extended Mind, Fichte, Francisco Varela, Galileo, Goethe, Hegel, imagination, Jean Gebser, Kant, Ken Wilber, Modern Philosophy, Paul Churchland, poetry, reason, Richard Dawkins, Romantic Philosophy, Schelling
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6 responses to “Cosmologies in Question: A Debate with David Long”
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I have had this argument myself Matt. Look forward to watching.
Herman
On Wed, Aug 19, 2020 at 11:19 AM Footnotes2Plato wrote:
> Matthew T. Segall posted: ” Thanks to Bruce Alderman at The Integral Stage > for moderating. https://youtu.be/rRxL_6DeIV0 ” >
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Matt, your patience is positively saintly.
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I watched the dialog. Great job to both of you. I learned a lot. I hope to be getting back with my perspective on the subject.
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David has never proven the case that consciousness is epiphenomenal. Nobody has it; yet, he calls his approach “scientific”. That’s not a scientific approach. That’s closing off scientific inquiry without supporting evidence. HOw is it rational to rely solely on an alleged scientific consensus when that consensus has been wrong many times before. It can be wrong again. 2.0 appears to be built on sand. He seems to be making science the territory instead of the map, elevating science to a pedestal above its scope. That’s basically scientism.
The issue with David co-opting Integral Theory into a rationalist paradigm and calling it 2.0 is that instead of moving forward a step, he’s moving backward a step into some form of logical positivism. We have already been there and he has done nothing to justify his claim that art, poetry, spirituality, beauty, etc., are scientifically rational. He just decides these have a rational basis without explaining how ideas such as beauty and morality are discernible in a scientific rationalist paradigm.Thus, his justification for morality seems to be a kind of self-deception for appearances sake, rather than something flowing naturally from truth. One truly has to be dishonest with oneself and others to live in this rationalistic paradigm. Who would want to live in such a paradigm? No true artist would want to live there. Yet, he claims to be an artist. No, he’s a rationalist pretending to be an artist.
David seems anxious about uncertainty. He is all Left hemisphere, claiming Left hemisphere is master when Right hemisphere is master (see Ian McGilchrist). Uncertainty is a fact of life. Integral 2.0 appears to be David’s attempt to eliminate uncertainty by making it a close ended system. Scientific inquiry is racheted down to serve an anthropocentric need for certainty in an otherwise uncertain universe. He indicated that that quantum theory and classical theory fit together with no problem. Since when? In fact, we have no one size fits all theory of everything, yet. Nor do we have a complete explanation of consciousness. There isn’t even a complete explanation of what the universe is made of; yet, David has taken it upon himself to claim an upgrade to Integral theory based on an invented certainty.
You were right to challenge him on his logical positivist certainty because that’s a flaw in David’s schema. He has no defense against Godel, Whitehead, Planck, Sheldrake, Penrose, and 1000’s of scientists who reject his ontological basis. He acknowledges that consciousness is the prime datum; yet he sees it as an as extension of an as a product of a scientific abstraction, rather than as the “I Am” he inserts before his name. That’s merely co-opting “I Am” to the little ego. He seems to accept as a given that consciousness can be recreated in a material substrate, that “AI” can be conscious. Yet, that is merely science fiction with little grounding in fact. Consciousness has never been shown to be “software algorithms” and the onus is on him to prove it. He can’t. Nobody can.
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Perhaps ‘free will’ is just the manifestation of a quantum probabilistic function? Not creating a multiverse as in Deutsch, but a full exploration of every possible ‘position’?
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[…] “PANPSYCHISM is not more PARSIMONIOUS than EMERGENTISM (Reply to Bruce on his thoughts about the David/Matthew debate) […]
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?