ITC 2015

[Balder]

Meta-Integral has just sent out the call for papers for the upcoming 2015 Integral Theory Conference.  The theme for the conference is Integral Impacts: Using Integrative Metatheories to Catalyze Effective Change.

See here for details.

[Balder]

I like both.  The second image is very striking and attractive, of course, but so busy as you say that it is hard (for those not familiar with it) to pick out the Icarus theme.  Unless maybe you cropped it to make Icarus' plunge into the sea more central.

[Ambo Suno]

Shifting subject matter, David, for a moment - on your attractive and informative site, the 5 minute Eric Berlow TED talk regarding complexity is an easy pithy bite - nice.

[DavidM58]

Glad you enjoyed that Ambo!  A lot of good links on that Complexity page, I think.

Looking forward to meeting some of you in a couple of days!

[Balder]

ITC bound!  See y'alls there!

[Edward theurj Berge]

Now that y'all are back, how about some updates on ITC for those of us who could not attend?

[Joseph Camosy]

Is there a link to the papers so we can read them?

[Ambo Suno]

Hi, Joseph - let me try to paste a link from a MetaIntegral email. In it you should see other links - one to papers. (I'm going to try it to.)

https://www.regonline.com/builder/site/emailviewer.aspx?eventid=164...

Joseph, did you go? I thought you were going to present a paper on your cube-work. Maybe that was canceled - too bad.

[Balder]

What to say about this year's ITC?  It was fantastic -- and you were really missed, Edwyrd.  A number of times someone (sometimes me) observed, "It would be great to have Edwyrd here for this," when some topic related to themes you often explore (politics, development, etc) came up in a presentation or panel or an informal discussion.  Joseph was missed too -- especially for the meta-theory discussions! 

Fewer people attended this year than in 2013, but it was still a good-sized group -- and the intersubjective charge was palpable and enlivening.  There was often a giddy mix of high seriousness and serious play, with the evenings turning to the Dionysian (Saturday night the courtyards were filled with laughter, shouts, jazz trumpet riffs, and inebriated singing).  As with the last conference, there was a healthy dose of critical self-reflection on integral "shadow," and on the daunting tasks that face us, but there was also a great deal of enthusiasm and passion around pooling our creative energies to meet these challenges and enact a greater common good.  I heard a number of people remarking that they felt really challenged by the presentations and discussions to acknowledge and address their over-emphasis on the UL (whether contemplation or theorizing) and to get more engaged socially and politically, and people spontaneously started passing around sign-up sheets to build coalitions of practitioners to work on one or another issue.

My presentation on "Integral In-Dwelling" went well, and it was better-attended than I had expected.  I'm happy to report that my paper also won a best paper award ("Best Alternative to AQAL").  Terry Patten offered a mild challenge at the end -- what does all of this mean for you? What's the relevance of this? -- and that offered me a chance to lead people in an exercise on prepositions that I had thought I wasn't going to have time for.  I think the exercise helped to ground the abstraction, giving people a good felt-sense of a "prepositional" sensibility.

As I think I mentioned I was going to do, I also participated on a meta-theory panel ("The Edges of Metatheory") on Saturday and in the Critical Realism / Integral Theory symposium on Monday (where I gave a 20-minute presentation on the epistemic fallacy).  The meta-theory panel was interesting but unfortunately, to all of our loss, the Skype connection failed early on and Mark Edwards was not able to participate.  That changed the dynamics pretty significantly.

Layman did a great job presenting in the short time he was given.  He basically skipped the presentation part and went straight to a Q&A session, which he handled very well -- and in which he clearly had the interest and attention of Carter Phipps and Steve McIntosh, among others.  I was not able to see David's presentation, but I look forward to the recording...and to hearing from anyone here who may have attended it.

[Balder]

Ken Wilber had a pre-recorded video for us that we watched on Sunday morning.  I had been expecting him to talk about the "Integral Ukraine" project, but instead he talked about the epistemic fallacy -- effectively addressing folks like Sean, Nick, David, and me who have explored this in past papers.  He appeared to be reading from a text ... which I expect is the forthcoming "Sex, Karma, and Creativity" (later this year).  He offered some refinements of his view, but I do not recall enough to discuss it in much detail.  I hope to be able to review it later.  Towards the end of the video, he mentioned that he is writing again and has about 7 new books coming out very soon, including the SKC text I mentioned above (volume 2 of the Kosmos trilogy), Integral Meditation, The Religion of the Future, and a three-volume series on terrorism.

[Ambo Suno]

Hi B - I didn't retain so much either, but a couple of things stood out for me - see if I got it right more or less.

Yes the epistemic fallacy. Also he seemed to be elaborating the significance of the two zones within each quadrant. He gave most attention to the LR, and maybe that was to answer, speak to, some critiques of him that he has not given enough attention to systems and culture.

I liked how he toggled between epistemic and ontic, zones 7 and 8 (and maybe 5 and 6. And other pairs?) He asserted that these are the two native foundations for describing the world, from the inside and the outside perspectives, and they both are needed. I wish I had tracked it just a little more closely and retained it for the telling.

I think sometimes Ken does an interesting thing when he is probably in teaching mode, explaining mode. He goes over the material twice in one session. There was a moment later in his talk when momentarily I wondered if I was de ja vuing. He re-ran the 7/8, epistemic/ontic modeling - I then wondered if he had made a distinction or had come at it from a different angle and I missed it. Or was he repeating himself :) (probably not.)

He did seem to be asserting quite strongly, though maybe indirectly and implicitly, that his modeling/mapping thus far has been adequate to contain all important elements and perspectives - again, maybe, a voice to past critiques, or not.

It was interesting, and people laughed at his productivity, when after explaining that he had been down, out, and fallow with his illness for a couple of years, he mentioned that he had 7 books in varying states of publish-readiness.

I remember thinking as he read his talk (or excerpt) that his explication was tight, was succinct. It felt impressive to me.

I was glad that he presented himself visually and gave this pithy talk.

Am I off-base with any of this, Bruce, David, Layman, or anyone else? Want to add anything more about Ken's presentation?

Balder said:

Ken Wilber had a pre-recorded video for us that we watched on Sunday morning.  I had been expecting him to talk about the "Integral Ukraine" project, but instead he talked about the epistemic fallacy -- effectively addressing folks like Sean, Nick, David, and me who have explored this in past papers.  He appeared to be reading from a text ... which I expect is the forthcoming "Sex, Karma, and Creativity" (later this year).  He offered some refinements of his view, but I do not recall enough to discuss it in much detail.  I hope to be able to review it later.  Towards the end of the video, he mentioned that he is writing again and has about 7 new books coming out very soon, including the SKC text I mentioned above (volume 2 of the Kosmos trilogy), Integral Meditation, The Religion of the Future, and a three-volume series on terrorism.

[Ambo Suno]

Hi, Bruce. Here is a small riff on Elsa Maaloof that I paste here from Integral Life forum:

https://www.integrallife.com/node/267416#comment-59801

Linda, for some reason I think you would have particularly liked the Sunday morning live keynote by Elsa Maaloof. (As well as you other folk.) I was moved by so many things about her presentation and about her life of work. So much courage, intelligent action, and tenacious committment, it seems.

Her talk was very well accompanied by helpful graphs, illustrations, and photos. One graph was depicting the value-memetic history of the region of Palestine (and I don't remember if maybe more broadly ?). Her integral approach and action over time was aided and guided much by Don Beck and spiral dynamics model and understanding. He has been a significant player in this work in the region.

I was particularly thankful for one large color coded, impressive-to-me graph that filled in the areas between stage lines, across a thousand and hundreds of years of historical time. The expanding and contracting of developmental stages according to sociopolitical, technological, and religious events and epocs was easily seen. There were times when orange and green both had more substantial flourishing influence within the culture at large and times when they practically have disappeared - currently, the upper stages have a very very thin purchase.

She correlated the types of people who have most influence now with stage designations from "flame-throwers" and zealots up through moderates, pragmatists, pluralists and integral actors. Her manipulation of the visuals on the color-coded graph of these players who she encounters, as she tries to help move the peace and the cultures' wellbeing forward, helped me to get a basic strategic insight that informs their work. She inserted a jagged white swath across the graph separating moderates and those above from those below, showing who they could really work with and form alliances with. In a way, this is a 'daah', of course, but also it is a bold move, at least inside me, to know not to waste precious energy and resources, interior and exterior, on those who are destructive to the goals.

In photos, she showed very particularly some people and groups who they chose not to include and those they chose to include. Where the rubber meets the road for traction.

I paste below the abstract and bio for her from online:

Elza Maalouf, CEO and Co-founder, Center for Human Emergence Middle East:

Integral Design in the Midst of Chaos, Bloodshed, and Revolution
How does one navigate the treacherous landscape of Middle Eastern politics and corporate practice? This talk reviews the crucial design elements of large-scale systems in Israel/Palestine, informed by hands-onexperiences with feudal and tribal leaders, who hold the key to the future development of the region.
Learn how the impact of integral principles in a mid-size Middle Eastern corporation elevated consciousness levels and empowered key individuals to redefine responsible profit while simultaneously capturing higher market share.

Presenter Biography
Elza S. Maalouf is a Lebanese-American futurist, theorist, author, and public speaker. She is one of the foremost experts on the memetics of the Middle East and pioneered the use of the value systems framework and Integral Theory practices in Middle Eastern politics and business. Her newest book is Emerge! The Rise of Functional Democracy and the Future of the Middle East. She is president of the international consulting firm Integral Insight.

[Balder]

Hi, Ambo, your summary of Ken's keynote sounds good to me -- at least it rings familiar notes in my ears.  I was taken by surprise by the keynote topic (I was expecting a discussion of Integral Ukraine), but I was interested in it because my task the following day, at the Critical Realism / Integral Theory symposium, was to give a 15-minute presentation on the epistemic fallacy and discuss its relevance to IT.  So ... it was immediately relevant to me, and I was sort of kicking myself after the keynote because I was not recalling it clearly enough to engage it in much depth at the symposium.  I did gather that he was stating, firmly but respectfully, that he felt any charge of 'epistemic fallacy' was misplaced because epistemological and ontological orientations are accounted for, or included, in the inside and outside zones, respectively.  However, his argument was also a little confusing to me (or unclear), because he defined the epistemic and ontic fallacies as privileging or exclusively relying on either inside or outside zone orientations, and then defined IT as an inside view / enactive orientation, and CR as an outside view / objective orientation.  So, he is making a gesture to include both on the AQAL map, but doesn't show how both are actually integrated in Integral Theory (if IT is understood, as he said, as fundamentally an enactive approach).

There's much more to the talk, and there are a few other points I'm thinking about in relation to it, but I really want a chance to hear it or read it before I say more about it.

(About his prolific writing output:  wow!  Yes, I'm impressed.  He's done a ton of work in the last couple years, which is exciting.)