Check whether you are flattening an inside into an outside

Notice when you explain something felt or shared only by its measurable correlates — or the reverse — and put the missing side back.

Pourquoi ça marche

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality Wilber calls the move of reducing interiors to exteriors "subtle reductionism", and in later work names the resulting view "flatland": treating experience and shared meaning as nothing but brain states, behaviour or systems. The integral claim is that the four perspectives are irreducible, so an explanation in one cannot replace the others. Checking for the collapse, in either direction, keeps a real cause from being explained away.

Comment faire

1. Pick an explanation you have been giving yourself, for example "it’s just my brain chemistry" or "it’s just how I feel about it".
2. Name which side it lives on: inside (experience, meaning) or outside (body, behaviour, systems).
3. Ask what the other side would add. For a chemistry explanation: what does this mean to me, and to the people around me? For a feelings explanation: what in my body, routine or circumstances is involved?
4. Write one sentence that includes both sides without either one cancelling the other.

Données probantes

Wilber introduced the four quadrants and his critique of reducing interior realities to exterior ones in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995). Esbjörn-Hargens’s overview defines flatland as the attempt to reduce interiors to their exterior correlates and gives systems diagrams that leave out felt experience as an example. This is a philosophical argument, not an empirical finding. (mechanistic)

Whether interior experience can be reduced to physical processes is an open question in philosophy of mind; AQAL takes one side of it. The check is useful as a prompt even if you do not share that position.

Sources

• Wilber, K. (1995). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Shambhala.
• Esbjörn-Hargens, S. (2010). An Overview of Integral Theory: An All-Inclusive Framework for the Twenty-First Century. In S. Esbjörn-Hargens (Ed.), Integral Theory in Action: Applied, Theoretical, and Constructive Perspectives on the AQAL Model. SUNY Press. (First circulated as Integral Institute Resource Paper No. 1, 2009.)

Erreur fréquente

Using the check only against science. The integral argument cuts both ways: explaining away a body, a routine or a system as "just a mindset" is the same collapse in reverse.