Brian Eddy on Ken Wilber's involutionary givens

Continuing this post, Frank Visser's FB thread has a good discussion of the topic. Following are some posts from that thread:

Brian Eddy: I'm not really interested in critiquing KW on this anymore. I mentioned Wicken's work to him about 12 yrs. ago and he basically dismissed it. The problem for KW is NET (non-equilibrium thermodynamics) throws a big monkey wrench in his larger narrative. I imagine it's a tough place to be after decades of work and to garner such a following....the 'correction' will need to come from elsewhere.

James Moss: Much agreed, its very disappointing he can't take an openness to creative or evolutionary solutions with NET or Wicken, instead of rehashing dogmatic involutionary proposals.

Eddy: Yes, I agree. It's even more disappointing that he misses the opportunity for find something even richer are more exciting than what he's been working with.

NET does not invoke anything related to involutionary givens as KW does, nor even the word 'involution' for that matter. Nor is it an attempt at a TOE as IT is. It is essentially limited to how matter and energy work throughout evolution from a chance/necessity standpoint (i.e. 'Entropy'). In this sense, I like to refer to it as the 'backbone' of evolution. In my onw interpretation and comparison with KW's IT - I cannot see how there can be 'involutionary givens' the way KW uses them - that would make the Kosmos ultimately deterministic and too rigid for playfulness and creativity. Where KW refers to evolution as the 'bottom-up' holonic process feeding into 'involutionary givens' (the top-down pre-given forms), what makes more sense to me is that 'involution' is the collective/social dimension/dynamic of evolution (i.e. not 'top-down' - but outside-in). This would fit with NET and leave room for creativity, playfulness, and chance, within the local thermodynamic constraints entropy (necessity).