From: Sehkenenra (Sehkenenra@netzero.net)
Date: Sun Jul 07 2002 - 14:27:26 MDT
>Well, these models have the problem of trying to explain
>*everything* - both human human history and individual development.
>Theories of everything in psychology tend to be very broad and hard
>to test. Grave's model seems to be somewhere in between Ericksonian
>psychology and the Leary-Wilson circuit models (and the website
>coloring is biasing it towards the latter :-) The core ideas are
>of course fairly uncontroversial: we build on top of old
>systems/old ways of thinking, new levels are qualitative and not
>just quantitative improvements and so on.
Don't judge Spiral Dynamics by the terrible website... judge it by the good
books :)... I think the Graves models are a considerable step towards
integrating all the separate streams of developmental and evolutionary
psychology. Wilber's works are also quite interesting in this respect...
while I can't agree with all his theories, I was blown away by his 1995
magnum opus "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality"... and I'm probably one of the few
people who can lay claim to having read that book in it's entirety in a
single day. So far, I've found that Wilber is a perfect "gateway drug" to
drag skeptical young liberals out of their relativist shells and into
Transhumanism- Wilber just has a way of kicking people awake, even if his
models do leave a bit to be desired. (And I'm wondering if there aren't
more young Wilberians out there than the circle I'm building for myself...
it seems that Wilber's latest book, "Boomeritis" (which I've been meaning to
write a review of for the Extropy list), is targeted precisely at Generation
Y and their attitudes towards their parent's generation).
>What I like about Marc's model is that it doesn't try to explain
>everything, but instead just looks at cognition as a prediction
>problem. This is very close to what is being done in statistical
>learning theory and some forms of connectionism. The nice thing
>about this approach is that it is not tied to a specific organism;
>the above psychological theories/models are highly contingent upon
>the specific properties of humans, and would not be applicable to
>AIs or hive intelligent insectoid aliens.
True... but then again, a model relevant to humans and their peculiarities
is in general more useful than one that casts a wider net. We're unique
constructs (as far as we know at present), we need a unique model.
-Nicq MacDonald
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