In this episode of the Integration podcast, Sean Kelly joins Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey to go deeper into the complex thought of Edgar Morin. Put simply, Kelly says, complex thought is an invitation to a practice of the heart-mind, a way to stay connected and to stay real. Reality is complex, and making sense of it often takes ideas that seem to exclude one another. Faced with that, our habit is to simplify, which is understandable, since we often need to simplify just to get by. But as societies grow more complex, simplification turns harmful. It leads to fragmentation, and fragmentation leads to violence, which Morin understood as a broken relationship. Complex thought is the way back: a way of thinking that holds together what tends to fall apart, and, in Sean Kelly’s words, an invitation to be true to what’s real and to the full potentials of being human.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:01:52 – How Sean Kelly Discovered Morin

00:11:52 – What Is Complex Thought?

00:17:29 – Morin’s Method vs. Descartes’s Method

00:22:36 – Beyond Systems Theory: The Whole Is Both More and Less

00:32:24 – A Worldview Without Triumphalism: Homo Sapiens-Demens

00:44:46 – Consciousness and the Question of Realism

00:53:56 – What Complex Thought Brings to Integrative Metatheory

00:58:53 – What Complex Thought Leaves Out

01:01:57 – Why Hasn’t Morin Been Translated?

01:08:06 – Polycrisis and Metacrisis

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Cory David Barker joins Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey to go deeper into archdisciplinarity, the study of what the big unifying frameworks have in common. It began with a puzzle: a universal model of structure and a universal model of process seemed to rest on the same underlying recursion, a pattern Barker traces back to Turing and Church. He explains why he writes his arches as theorems and axioms, so people can disagree with them one claim at a time, and why formal science is the field big-picture thinking has most neglected.

Is comparing frameworks a way of finding what they share, or of exposing where they break? And what is it like to live inside a picture of reality that, as Barker puts it, shouldn't exist at all and yet is ridiculously organized?

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:02:28 – From Jung to a Survey of Human Knowledge

00:10:44 – The Genesis of an Arch: Recursion, Turing and Church

00:16:37 – What Archdisciplinarity Adds to the Field

00:25:01 – How Provisional Are the Arches?

00:33:28 – A Story of Reality, or a Grammar of Theories?

00:44:35 – Scanning for Similarities, or for Contradictions?

00:47:10 – What's Missing: Formal Science

00:48:20 – Does Any of This Change the World?

01:04:51 – Living Inside the Ruliad

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The New Story of Wholeness: https://newstoryofwholeness.com/

Integrative Values Charter: https://integrativevalues.org/

Integration: The Journal Of Big Picture Theory and Practice: https://integrationjournal.org/

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Andrew M. Davis joins Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey for a deeper dive into process philosophy. Does interiority emerge somewhere along the evolutionary way, as emergentists hold, or does it go all the way down, as panpsychists do? And if it goes all the way down, what could feeling possibly mean at the level of an atom? Where does Whitehead land between idealism and realism, and would he count as a metamodern neorealist? What is matter, once solidity dissolves into events? And when God arrives as the chief exemplification of the metaphysics rather than an exception to it, does that survive Occam's razor?

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:02:32 – Does Experience Go All the Way Down?

00:03:52 – Prehension: Feeling Without Consciousness

00:08:58 – Is a Rock Feeling Anything?

00:25:09 – Idealist, Dual Aspect Monist, or Realist?

00:30:26 – What Is Matter?

00:32:37 – Whitehead as a Metamodern Neorealist?

00:43:35 – The Bifurcation of Nature

00:49:13 – Whitehead's God: Primordial and Consequent

00:59:37 – Does God Survive Occam's Razor?

01:07:29 – What Process Thought Brings to the Table