Divergence

In the movie Divergent is a caste system based on type for which one is tested. This was no doubt dreamed up by the Erudites, the intellectual class. Everyone must neatly fit into a category. If they don't they are divergent and must be killed, as those with aspects of the different categories (factions) upset the neat Order of things. Interestingly, the head Erudite thinks its human nature that must be suppressed, since it doesn't fit into their perfect abstract Order.

The protagonist, Tris, is of course divergent. Thing is, we all are a mix of these categories. Even with typologies like the Meyers-Briggs we change types over the course of our lifetimes, ofttimes more than once. Even within its typology, no one is fully in one of the types but by degrees leaning into mixes of them. Which of course depends on different life cycles, environments, social contexts, etc. All of which bring out different aspects of our mindsets and behaviors.

Bottom line for this post, consistent with my ongoing criticism of kennlingus and models like the MHC, is that both of them are dysfunctionally trying to fit round pegs into square holes, into their perfect Platonic and/or Aristotelian categories like the Erudite. And the Real is divergent.

Note: I personally have strong Erudite qualities and value them. It is not the Erudite per se that does the above, just when they lose balance with the other factions and move into dysfunction and become a dominator holon. Like the difference between real and false reason.

From this old post, quoting Women, Fire & Dangerous Things:


"The classical theory of categories provides a link between objectivist metaphysics and and set-theoretical models.... Objectivist metaphysics goes beyond the metaphysics of basic realism...[which] merely assumes that there is a reality of some sort.... It additionally assumes that reality is correctly and completely structured in a way that can be modeled by set-theoretic models" (159).

He argues that this arises from the correspondence-representation model. This Scribd link appears to be a complete version of WFDT. On 160 they acknowledge that classical categories play a significant role in what we understand. And maybe some of them actually exist in nature. It's just the objectivist metaphysical interpretation that gets it wrong.

In this post DavidM58 referenced Dierkes' blog post here. Dierkes highlights some of the themes in this thread, like the following:

"But to my mind postmodernism is more than simply a cultural value system. Postmodernism also has its own social, technological, and political contexts--contexts that are missing in the US and therefore I think from much of the American integral theorists. For example, postmodernism is built around networks (particularly as seen in nature) rather than strictly vertical conceptions of the universe."

"In Pattern Dynamics, postmodernism isn't the Western counterculture of Boomers but rather organic realities like creativity, emergence, adaptation, and so on. The intrinsic value of humans in this model is one in which they have the conscious choice to incorporate these patterns, leading to a fully integrated sphere of mind (noosphere) and sphere of life (biosphere). That, to me, would be a more developed culture but that had developed by going deeper (not higher)."

"Jean Gebser is a major influence on Jeremy--Jeremy mentions Gebser in the video. Gebser did not see the worldviews he articulates as moving in a vertical developmental sequence (contrary how he is often depicted in integral theory)."

Chapter 11 of WFDT (linked above) is on the objectivist paradigm. Both it and experientialism are forms of basic realism (158) but "the classical theory of categories provides a link objectivist metaphysics and set-theoretical models" (159), thereby exceeding basic realism through representationalism and essentialism (160). The classical theory has 2 and only 2 ways of organizing categories: hierarchical and cross (aka heterarchical) (166). See the real/false reason thread showing that all of this this is admitted by the MHC. And yet its objectivist paradigm with set theory is the very basis for a kind of complexity that frames 'higher' cognitive processing and worldviews?

Bryant and the OOO crowd, and pomo more generally, has soundly refuted this outdated and erroneous system of false reason. Lakoff just adds the empirical cogsci to further demolish it. And this thread compiles a lot of these alternative views that support another kind of complexity and another kind of 'higher' (real) reasoning not much like the MHC, the latter being the main support of kennlingus' cognitively higher levels. Bonnie too is using very similar ideas, with slightly different terms and emphasis, to come to the same conclusion.

It is also no coincidence that Ayn Rand's objectivism is cut from the same cloth. And that both her and kennlingus support laissez-faire capitalism. See the anti-capitalism thread for developing that relation.

A few paragraphs up I quoted Dierkes, which linked to one of Bonnie's blogs here. A few comments of the latter consistent with this thread.

She notes science took a naturalistic turn into evo-devo, with Thompson's developmental systems theory (DST) being one example. E.g., evolution is seen not so much as progress but as biological and social adaptation to the environment. In terms of kennilingus' transcend and include in nested holarchies, it's a linear dynamic that "is neither postmodern nor modern, but harkens back to the pre-modern notions of the perennial philosophies." I.e., as LP noted elsewhere, it's highjacking a higher level by the lower.

She then launches into how biological evo was depicted as divergent, discontinuous and discrete categories, whereas the noosphere for Teilhard was depicted as nested convergent categories. While he had the notion of combining the divergent and convergent correct, he lacked pomo epistemic tools to get it right, i.e., self-organizing systems:

"Only if instead of a bounded sphere that posits a single omega point 'directing' the tangential forces, we conceive of an unbounded whole, like the universe itself expanding and enfolding in a complex, self-organizing fashion, we can derive both the apparent radial and tangential forces that Teilhard conceived, and invite Teilhard into the post-postmodern synthesis."

And kennilingus as well.

As but one example of non-teleological dynamic systems from this post quoting TDOO, 3.3:

“In Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, DeLanda remarks that ‘[s]ingularities [...] influence the behaviour [of objects] by acting as attractors for [their] trajectories.’ Here it is crucial to note that the concept of attractors is not a teleological concept. Attractors are not goals towards which a substance tends, but are rather the potentialities towards which a substance tends under a variety of different conditions in the actualization of its qualities…. In this respect, DeLanda's attractors are extremely close to Bhaskar's generative mechanisms developed in A Realist Theory of Science.”

4.3: “The point here is that, if we don't attend to the regime of attraction in which the autopoietic system develops, we fall prey to a tendency to treat local manifestations as strictly resulting from innate factors in the system, rather than seeing them as results of an interaction between both system-specific properties of the system and perturbations from the environment that are translated into information which then selects system-states. Here the conclusion seems to be that development does not have any one particular attractor in the teleological sense.”