The Conscience of the King

The Hamlet reference is deliberate and specific here. Reading more of Wilber's latest. I think I now have some understanding of what his Integral Methodological Pluralism is, and in particular what those zones are. The idea seems to be that holons tetra-exist in all 4 quadrants, and can also be examined from the 4 quadrants, and hence 8 zones, each describing a perspective. 4 internal perspectives of holons thinking about themselves in a given quadrant, and 4 external perspectives of considering other holons through a given quadrant.

Things get a little more interesting when he starts talking about Integral Post-Metaphysics. He first makes the point that these perspectives are active. They are injunctions, methodologies, not passive. You do something in each of these zones and that doing results in some sort of response, a sort a generalized datum. The perspectives are injunctions which bring forth experiences. Now here's the daring bit. He's proposing that reality is made up of these perspectives:

This Integral Post-Metaphysics replaces perceptions with perspectives, and thus re-defines the manifest realm as the realm of perspectives, not things, nor events, nor structures, nor processes, nor systems, nor vasanas, nor archetypes, nor dharmas, because all of those are perspectives before they are anything else, and cannot be adopted or even stated without first assuming a perspective.

Very interesting. So the experiment itself is the real thing, not our theory explaining the experiment, and not the 'object' itself (which may or may not exist in and of itself, but is forever out of our reach anyway.) It's actually got a bit of a quantum mechanics feel that. The experiment is what creates the reality. The injunction of measurement truly is bringing forth reality, collapsing the cloud of the possible into the data of the actual. Like Hamlet, our reality isn't known until the play is performed and the reaction drawn forth.

Furthermore, he goes on the say that you don't really know what's going on until you've poked at things from lots of different perspectives. This is where he obliterates the NOMA shield that much of mythic religion would like to hide behind. To really have a basis in truth religion has to take what wisdom it can and weave it into the 'reality' from other methodologies. Unfortunately this is going to require things like leaving behind the notion of the Bible as a literal historical document. Seems eminently reasonable to me, but I suspect that it would be a rather bitter pill to swallow for some of my in-laws and untold billions like them. This I gather was where his previous book on the subject The Marriage of Sense and Soul largely failed. I wonder how he hopes to address that in his new book.