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@ Alexander Lopatin
2025-06-13 14:32:51AI companies massively influence society by projecting their values on ML models, whether we want it or not. It'd be great if at least some people in the companies knew how exactly they influence society, could make certain predictions, or even make ML models themselves predict users' worldviews and some of their behavior.
Some might argue that AI systems already do something like that. I believe they could do it much better: chatbots could be more balanced in terms of security (they are definitely overcensored) and recommender systems, for instance, could contribute to healthy personal and collective transformations (rather than just competing in ability to steal users' attention and trap it in the echo chambers).
Reductionism is an obstacle in AI development
Even most reliable knowledge doesn't solve some of the problems that are already in demand. Even least reliable knowledge still may contain something useful for our problems. While we lack reliable and noncontradictory knowledge, we can still benefit from certain synthesis of working ideas. There's approach that makes it possible to look at the knowledge from a very broad perspective, do such synthesis, and benefit from emergent properties of the synthesis.
Integral (Meta-)Theory created by Ken Wilber is probably the best known attempt to enable the possibility to form and navigate the big picture understanding in a hope to address issues of the epoch we've recently entered.
IMO it has certain challenges that make it repellent to IT:
- Fundamental psychological theories on which the Integral Theory is based are still pretty fragile; they need time to become mature enough and recognized (while it doesn't look like we have that time). There are endless edit wars on Wikipedia, which makes me feel depressing about possibilities to even introduce Spiral Dynamics and Multiple Intelligences to IT people.
- Emphasis on controversial interpretations of certain arational states of consciousness.
It's hard to address the first challenge; however, I recently discovered a new “secularized” Non-Reductionist Philosophy launched by David Long, which, among other things, uses wisdom from Integral Theory and attempts to address the second challenge. I'm glad that there are people who don't just criticize the Integral Theory, its community and Wilber's positions but are also developing the new meta-theories.
NR can also be a good way to get familiar with other meta-theories, so one could choose whatever works the best for their problems. For instance, if you're working on something as exotic as some competitor to EEG-powered meditation device, perhaps you will find Integral Theory relevant to study as well, since it's more focused on the states.
I'd like to point out a couple of moments I noticed in the video "Why Non-Reductionism Is A Better Meta-Theory" that caught my attention, as well as in some other older videos. There's not much to comment on the content itself rather than on the form of the content. This feedback might be used for improvements/elaborations in the next videos and just for everyone curious about the new meta-theory. But first
Why do I post here?
Specifically for the deep topics that relate to the current epoch, I no longer find engaging in the YouTube/FB/Reddit/Diqus/Giscus/etc. discussions useful anymore, at least due to broken and almost omnipresent AI-based censorship, that keeps “improving” at randomly shadow-banning people. How many deep and valuable opinions we no longer see?
BTW, it's possible to create Reddit-like communities here at Nostr as well, using Satellite client for example. I believe it's a better place for NR, Rebel Wisdom and many others.
References to full materials used for criticism
There are curious clips with Wilber in the video. It'd be great to have links in the description (or at least titles of the full videos if it's copyrighted material) so viewers could easier form their own independent opinions. I find it important during the age of information overload and narrative warfare. This will also improve SEO.
Emergentism FAQ
There's a strong position on emergence of consciousness; it seems it's not even a hypothesis in NR and I guess that makes some people so reactive.
I think it would be great to have an FAQ page to possibly make future debates more ecological and fruitful. Some of the things that could be elaborated in the FAQ:
- importance of distinction between philosophical theory (inductive reasoning? or actually deductive reasoning? I'm confused here) and scientific theory (deductive reasoning)
- the fact that for now counterarguments usually fall into the categories of “ignorance fallacy”, “false equivalency fallacy” and “God of the gaps” which aren't something sufficient; the whole point of challenge was to find at least a logically valid counterposition (ideally a counterposition that is sound with currently available scientific ~~facts~~ theories), not the nitpicking attacks
- what kind of emergence is meant, is it important here at all and why.
Debates moderation
Probably most of the debates converge to consensus, which are fruitful anyway. There are a few interesting conflicting debates as well. However, I found this specific conflicting debate with Matt Segall quite exceptional.
Matt's position was not understood. He was more interested in a dialogue rather than debates and I think it would be more productive. However, in this specific case, my guess is it would literally take hours to just figure out the common language on a certain concept he mentions.
My humble guess is that a combination of negotiator and moderator with a primary perceiving personality type function (if typologies work at all) could be a step to more meaningful and ecological dialogues in the future. But such negotiator/moderator should also be skilled enough to reflect most challenging parts using more “rational language” as best as possible. These people are rare. Basically I mean the style of dialogues that happened between theoretical physicist David Bohm and Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti: IMO these were the talks where both sides at some point were barely transcending limitations of their languages and focusing more on intuition in order to understand each other. Much fuzzier and spontaneous dialogues, which aren't prematurely limited by too harsh rationality. Similar thing (with shorter periods of negotiation) could be combined with debating as well.
I hope NR community will be open to understanding more perspectives and won't end up turning into something like a cold and scary crystallization of rational arrogance; that would be damaging and quite opposite to the healthy intentions of the whole project.
Final thoughts
I like the clarity and density of the presented ideas in the video, the choice of lines of development in the map and the alternative to the Integral Methodological Pluralism. I like the mentioned interpretation of “free” will, very much resonates with how I personally interpret it. Tritone-ish devilish sounds in the cons sections is a nice aesthetic choice as well.
I guess there's a lot to learn from NR, no matter what positions we hold on the “rational spirituality” and that sort of stuff. Just to avoid projections and misunderstandings: I'm in a neutral position to all the post-postmodern discourses (NR, Integral, Metamodernism, etc.); I care about these philosophies, make my own distinctions on what's healthy or not, and my positions don't necessarily perfectly match with some of the claims these philosophies make.
Thank you David Long for launching this philosophy and the movement; I'm looking forward to the next videos!
I'd appreciate reposts and all this as well, thanks!