Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of the meta-crisis...

[AxelHeyst]

Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilization
Youtube video of Jonathan Rowson's talk on the Stoa, and his paper. I found the video accessible without having read the article, which I'm currently working my way through.

I've only read relatively brief stuff on the metacrisis to date (such as this piece also, I just realized, from Rowson).

The Stoa talk and in particular the article are very rich, and I'm getting a much better sense for what I feel is the latest thinking on how all the crises tie together. Also, as I'm reading it, I'm going "ah, that bit there ties in well / is informative to what Jacob was saying in his Stoa talk", such as collective individuation, and the lack of a viable "We" to do the things that "We" all must do so urgently.

Rowson himself is an example of Jacob's emphasis on transdisciplinarity: he is a former Chess Grandmaster, and his chessic idea of style and beauty arising from specific thought processes leading to a specific chess move informed his idea about *tasting* the pickle, i.e. implying that there is an aesthetic component that one can embrace with respect to understand the worlds crises and emergencies.

A point from the article is that doing the cognitive work necessary to wrap our heads around the metacrisis, what it is that is blocking us from understanding it, might itself be the key to unlocking the ways of thinking/perceiving necessary to a future world.

And in case this seems like too much abstract philosophizing,

the aim is to know the meta-crisis well enough that it ceases to be ‘meta’, and ceases to be a ‘crisis’, and frees us of the need to speak in those terms. The aim is to get back to living meaningfully and purposively with reality as we find it.

[daylen]

Oooo.. entelechy.. my new favorite word for the week.

[jacob]

The concept of meta-crisis was actually not in the original talk. 100char youtube title limit something-something. I didn't know the concept until I started listening to Stoa presentations and like with much of what's going on there they like certain concepts to be---I'm lacking the proper word---vaguely-defined and very subculturish, which makes it really hard to google. It's like how teenagers have their own jargon. This, incidentally, is somewhat deliberate. I'm beginning to appreciate why this is so.

The first time I think I grasped its meaning---or more accurately my meaning of its meaning---was a google search returning Dr. Who episode called the meta-crisis. My takeaway was that the meta-crisis was some kind of O/S failure: This makes it meta to the growing collection of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem and not "just" a philosophical specialty.

In terms of "we", the AQAL model is interesting, because there are two different "we"'s and also two different "I"'s: (interior, exterior) x (individual, collective). The "individual exterior" aka "it" is the object of [reductionist] science. Calls for technomagic are appeals to this quadrant. The "collective exterior" is politics. Hoping that "they will fix it" is aimed at the exterior individuals and collectives.

What Wilber has tried to do for 20+ years and what it seems to me that the "meta-crisis galaxy brains" are trying to do is to have the interior "I"s and "we"s catch up. These "inner experiences" (in my talk it's the core on the illustrations) have been hollowed out a great deal or replaced with "junk"(*), a point I was trying to make in my talk. This is why the field is so attractive to information nerds, philosophers, psychologists, etc. The exterior is also called "flatland" as in "all you see is the surface" (like black boxes with interface code, there's no perception of depth).

(*) How consumers only seem to see and find meaning in cafe latte, red wine, concerts, cheap air travel, and mortgaged sqfootage.

It's why aesthetics is an actual quality for a solution. Insofar one appreciated the depth of "the many", the perception would become far richer... like art rather than engineering. So to me aesthetics reads as turquoise; finding the right internal pattern matching to the new O/S. This is beyond what I'm trying to do. In terms of practical differences made, I think it's asking for too much of humanity, like Kegan5+. A vision without a plan is but a dream. What to do what to do ...

[RoamingFrancis]

@jacob For what it's worth, Jay Sanguinetti's research is focused on building more or less a "turquoise techno-boost" which could accelerate the process. Though in Wilber's model, this would likely fall under a "Waking Up" process rather than a "Growing Up" one. Obviously this is very early research. Could be an interesting rabbit hole to go down though.

By the way, I'm totally digging the new forum and focus on Emergent Renaissance Ecology. Like the tagline too.


https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10 ... 00052/full
https://www.jaysanguinetti.com/neuroenhancement

[chenda]

Rowson interestingly has become a Hindu.

All this stuff about colours, flavours, quadrants and meta stuff entirely goes over my head. This may reflect the limitations of my head.

But I wonder if there's just far too much intellectuallisation going on.

[AxelHeyst]

re: intellectualization, I think that at this point the only way is through (see the quote I put in OP).

[jacob]

But I wonder if there's just far too much intellectuallisation going on.

That's a good question. My thesis is that there's not nearly enough intellectualization going on given the complexity of the problem. Underthinking is a structural problem for the meta-crisis in the same sense that unemployment can be structural. We've too many humans who are not capable of thinking once they're out of their box.

The meta-crisis absolutely exceeds what's possible with human "tribal hardware" like emotional intuition and social mimicry.

Even language is not there. English, for example, is limited to 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person perspective. English grammar has he/she/it and past, present, future tenses. IOW, English makes it possible to talk in a slightly expanded 3rd person perspective. Nothing more.

For example, it's possible to talk about "how I see you and you see me" (second person) or "how I see her seeing him" (third person) in respectively the past, the present, and the future. Adding time allows for a slightly expanded third person perspective, e.g. "I saw him talking to her" vs "I see him talking to her" being the same structure in two different times, thus seeing the same relation but at two different times. Hold onto that image (you seeing two people talking two different times).

However, there's no way grammatical way of communicating higher person perspectives. These structures do not exist in English. As such they are not natural. They become intellectualized. For example, "my seeing her talking to him was colored by me being in a happy mood" vs "my seeing her talking was colored by me being in a sad mood". My mood determines what I see. Here there's a fourth person observer realizing that my third person perspective is affected my mood. There's no simple grammar that provides introspective context in the same way that grammar does exist for differentiating perspective in time. Fortunately we can still communicate this but we have to rely on sentence constructs. There's no way to to it with mere grammar anymore.

So if you're intellectualizing this, you can as a short-hand just say that someone who realizes that there perspective is set by circumstances is "Kegan4" whereas anyone who always brings their own perspective along is "Kegan3". In particular, if intellectualizing it's possible to say that your perspective is also set by value-constructs, e.g. "Blue vMEME me saw him talking to her as being unfaithful" but "Orange vMEME me saw him talking to her as a simple professional conversation". Kegan4 is aware that it's really the adopted/constructed value-set that's doing the judging. Kegan3 is blind to this. Literally blind. It's not that Kegan3 is not aware of their own values but that they're not capable of seeing their own values from outside because the mental instruments for doing so are just not there. The epistemic tools are missing. (Similar to how a baby is not able to see himself as being a separate entity from his mother.) IOW, Kegan3 analyses all values in terms of their own values and cognitive framework (e.g. logic MBTI T-types or feeling MBTI F-types) including their own (which of course is the only one true set of values---if anyone else disagrees they're misguided, failing in their logic, ... ). A simpler example might be how a German is not aware of what constitutes Germanhood until he has lived outside of Germany for quite a while observing Germany (and his own Germanhood) from afar and from a different context. IOW SD is just a map of [mostly] different Kegan3 values (Tier1).

However, in order to generate alternatives one needs to step out of the 4th order perspective in which there are different given perspectives and realize that perspectives are actually not god-given (countable from beige to green) but rather constructed in a process of growing up and being raised in a particular culture. This allows the possibility of constructing new cultures rather than just, say, traveling and observing. Realizing that perspectives can be constructed on the fly---having a perspective on perspectives---is Kegan5.

If all this was part of the grammar rather than an intellectual exercise with weird diagrams, I doubt we would have a meta-crisis. To grok the magnitude of the problem it would be as if all English speakers were limited to first-person language. Imagine the communication issues of expressing relations between other people. Similarly, we're currently suffering from our language limit of communicating aperspectival point of views.

[jacob]

If all this was part of the grammar rather than an intellectual exercise with weird diagrams, I doubt we would have a meta-crisis. To grok the magnitude of the problem it would be as if all English speakers were limited to first-person language. Imagine the communication issues of expressing relations between other people. Similarly, we're currently suffering from our language limit of communicating aperspectival point of views.

Any linguistists wanna take a stab at this and create a language expansion pack? Physicists and mathematicians have partially rewired their brains to think in [the structure of] diagrams, but this does not allow for easy communication because it's often limited to what can be projected down to 2D. I suspect the human mind is overall better at language than diagram ... only problem is that learning a new language as an adult leads to speaking pidgin.

[daylen]

This is partially why I think that occasionally bringing the beauty/poetry into truth/language is practical.. as it correlates a structure of he/she/it usage that has a recognizable breakage in flow/rhythm, thus expanding out the space of fourth-order contexts.

Higher-order structure can be parsed from third-person oriented grammar but it can be hard without variable tone or emote. Tone and emote being especially hard to convey in a forum setting.

I think this is why Nora Bateson pushes "warm data" so much.

[daylen]

Though, connotation can only go so far and hence the denotation of such may retain beauty by pushing such out further or in deeper. Basically what I have been attempting to do with point/frame use is denote fourth-order perception.

[jacob]

To give an example of a 4th person expansion pack.

It used to be ... or at least it happens in the literature ... that when people are communicating in a romantic or respectful manner the pronouns would shift to Thou instead of you to convey the deliberate/aware shift in perspective. German still has Sie and Danish has De (these days only used for members of the Royal family or people over 90...).

Similarly, aside from time (past, present, future), it's possible to create additional inflexions to deal with generalities, specificities, in-tribe/out-tribe, etc.

[daylen]

Appears to me that this is subtly happening all the time but doesn't become grossly apparent because it is hard to show or point to two different contexts simultaneously and hence the conflation erodes such meaning as fast as it can be erected.

[daylen]

That is, once you fit "it", "it" becomes comparable and rapidly conflated when drawn into the gen pop. Perhaps such scaffolding is only stable in smaller groups with mini towers of babel.

[chenda]

To give an example of a 4th person expansion pack.

It used to be ... or at least it happens in the literature ... that when people are communicating in a romantic or respectful manner the pronouns would shift to Thou instead of you to convey the deliberate/aware shift in perspective. German still has Sie and Danish has De (these days only used for members of the Royal family or people over 90...)

You mean like the Tu/Vous form in French ? English also lost 'yon' to denote a distance further than 'that'. This table, that window, yon hills...

I think I'll have to digest your post and talk over the course of several days and reflect upon it

[jacob]

You mean like the Tu/Vous form in French ? English also lost 'yon' to denote a distance further than 'that'. This table, that window, yon hills...

Right ... the lingual ability to express 4+ person order structures within the grammar.

https://frenchtogether.com/you-in-french/

It seems like some languages still have it and some just lost it.

Language (or financial transactions for that matter) is the nervous system of the world. The complexity of those limits the complexity of how we think about and deal with the world. There are two worlds, internal and external. The external world has its back against the wall now, so it requires dialing up the complexity of the internal world to get out/away with it now.

[daylen]

So, this is where apparent complexity is misleading because in general there has been a linguistic erosion as the number of lines/contexts(*) have increased due to specialization and compartmentalization. This erosion is of the common tongue so that people of very different specialties can do business. Though, the complexity is still retained(+) in such lines/contexts where higher-order perspectives are gated from gen pop (intentionally and naturally through conflation when seeded). With the dissolution of specialist boundaries, such linguistic erosion may be countered by linguistic explosion. Yet such dissolution may not be feasible given the civil path taken without a substantial punctuation in strategy/structure.

(*) That is, agent(he/she) and object(it) configurations with common linguistic and economical pathways.

(+) And even heightened into ivy league and wall street towers.

[chenda]

@jacob yeah english is very unusual in having an egalitarian form of address, it still creates social awkwardness in french knowing which one to use although tu is ever more common. japanese traditionally had 17 forms of address or something.

actually your last paragraph helps me understand this much easier.

[boomly]

Maybe not an expansion pack, but a patch.

Something along the lines of an adverb or adjective, but to modify entire statements.

To indicate what perspective or state of mind a statement is coming from, add the suffix -zu to indicate the perspective.

Happyzu - the statement is your perspective from a happy state of mind. "Happyzu - the cat is inquisitive." or, the opposite "Exhaustedzu - the cat is nosy."
Or what hat you happen to be wearing "Dadzu - my child's behavior is concerning, Guyzu - my child's antics are hilarious."
"Accountantzu - this does not make sense." "Laborerzu - this is needed."
Or if you've taken on another person's perspective "Bobzu - everything's fine, nothing to worry about." (Bob's a chill dude)

To indicate that you're just relating a perspective that's not necessarily your own, add -vu, as in happyzuvu, the perspective of a happy person, but not necessarily you.
Bobzuvu would be the perspective of Bob, but not one that you've taken on.

In talking politics, prefacing a statement with "conservativezu" would indicate that it's your conservative perspective. Prefacing a statement with "libertarianzuvu" would indicate you're simply telling the libertarian perspective, not necessarily your own.

[fiby41]

In Sanskrit, verbs are conjugated differently based on whether the result of action is towards the person performing the action or not. Verbs are also classified on the basis of whether they require an object or not.
Some verbs can be conjugated in only one way due to their meaning.
Eg. one cannot 'steal' from oneself,
but something 'glows' by itself,
if the glow is induced then the verb to be used is 'lighten'.
Spanish/Russian have reflexive verbs.
These could be used to express what jacob explained as introspective context.

[boomly]

1st, 2nd, 3rd person etc. are not the perspectives or paradigms of development models.
Perspectives/paradigms are ways of thinking. They are, from a linguistic standpoint, near endless, like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs.

In English, at least, we can convert nearly any word into one of those, like adult - adulting. Or greed, greedy, greedily. To run, (going for) a run.

What's needed is a way to convert nearly any word into a "way of thinking". To indicate what "way of thinking" produced a statement, viewpoint, assertion, sentiment, etc. A way to convert any emotional state, ideology, profession, role, or various other things into a "way of thinking".