The cognitive prison habit

Good blog post by Dave McCloud on how we are culturally trapped in a worldview of endless growth, even some well meaning environmentalists. Growth is appropriate to a point within an overall context. But by itself it leads to where we are now with a bleak at best future.

In my 2015 paper for the Integral Theory Conference (posted here), I quoted from Edgar Morin and Peter Pogany to describe what  Bruce Kunkel has called the 'cognitive prison habits' that keep us locked in to pursuing endless growth and development at all costs."

This also applies to consciousness growth, as if it too is limitless. Recall Gidley's commentary on Gebser's integral-aperspectival:

"For Gebser, integral-aperspectival consciousness is not experienced through expanded consciousness, more systematic conceptualizations, or greater quantities of perspectives. In his view, such approaches largely represent over-extended, rational characteristics. Rather, it
involves an actual re-experiencing, re-embodying, and conscious re-integration of the living vitality of magic-interweaving, the imagination at the heart of mythic-feeling and the purposefulness of mental conceptual thinking, their presence raised to a higher resonance, in order for the integral transparency to shine through" (111).



Image schemas, as well as Edwards' different lenses, taken singly can represent the various theoretical ideologies. We've already seen how a focus on the container schema can lead to an ideology of objectivist hierarchical complexity. And how a focus on a cyclic image schema might lead to what Gebser called the mythic structure (or ideology). Gebser's integral-aperspectival (IA) structure though, at least according to Gidley (2007), is a means to allow for all previous structures to be as they are and co-exist together simultaneously. The IA is not another isolated structure that transcends and replaces previous structures, including the mental. In this sense it breaks with the pattern of progression in deficient rational. And we see exactly this type of coordination of the various image schemas in Lakoff, that each has its place, none are replaced. Same for Edwards' lenses. This produces a new kind of transparent, postmeta paradigm of multiplicty, in Deleuzes's terms, or IA in Gebser's. One that is relative according to Lakoff, but also constrained by the real.