Pre/Trans Fallacy

Paladin

Paladin

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I bring this up here in the philosophy section to encourage a more reasoned environment devoid of the usual "us vs them" approach found in a strict theist/atheist conflict.
The point of view I personally find helpful for understanding this conflict and it's more subtle resolution is the Pre/Trans fallacy laid out by Ken Wilber.

Since I find it difficult to embrace much of the exoteric side of religion along with the lack of dialog of the esoteric common with many atheists I tend to side more with poets and artists as they seek only to diagram the human experience.

Using Ken's model it is possible for me to begin a kind of spiritual yet not spiritual inquiry, which is really nothing more exotic than just paying attention to what seems to be happening within and without.

What do you all think?
 
I find Ken's work useful for perspective-taking, but I think that pre/trans fallacy draws some rather arbitrary lines, placing less value on the pre- and more value on the trans- with a strong bias to mystical experiences (in this case anything suggesting something along the lines of unity and connectedness) and against mythical ones (those experiences that contain more personal/cultural symbolism.) I think it devalues a rational approach too, despite the fact that Ken's approach tries to fit into that category much of the time (poorly imo given the way he responds to critics.)

To me pre- post- and trans- are different perspectives that frequently intertwine. I don't see the same hierarchy that Ken does. But again, for perspective taking I like AQAL.
 
Yes I think so too, but I'm holding out on the judgment of mythic and archaic stages because of my normal relativistic perspective and knee jerk reaction to hierarchy. :)
On the plus side, as you say the idea of pre/trans fallacy neatly sums up the conflict I see in most of the dialog here on the forum.

No matter the model, it is almost like explaining third dimension reality in flatland. Any projection made is ultimately a flawed rendering, all that pointing and moon seeing thing.

Seeing the value of long practice within any of the tradtional religions seems de riguer for Wilber though.
 
No matter the model, it is almost like explaining third dimension reality in flatland. Any projection made is ultimately a flawed rendering, all that pointing and moon seeing thing.
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Yeah and I'm pretty sure Ken's said as much, not that his approach is the most inclusive one that could be taken, only that it's the best we've got so far.

Seeing the value of long practice within any of the tradtional religions seems de riguer for Wilber though.
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From what I've read, it seems like that's true so long as the long practice has a mystical direction to it (and is only more true if those advanced states coincide with advanced stages that, in my read of wilber, seem to lead toward a reduction of all of those religious particularities anyway.) I'm not convinced that a rationalist has less perspective than a mystic, nor that the shaman has less perspective than the rationalist.

At the same time, iirc Wilber said something about states and stages and pre/trans fallacy only being applicable to one of the two, guessing stages. If I'm remembering correctly then the experiences of a shaman or rationalist are not so devalued. A mystic could consistently be less enlightened, as it were, along many lines of development, than a rationalist or shaman. But, if the rationalist or shaman don't have those unitive experiences (trying to recall the Wilber-Combs Lattice) then horizontally they will forever be unable to fit wilber's definition of enlightenment.

I think one of Wilber's primary supporting premises for his model is that anything more open and unitive, be it an experience or a mode of thought, is more true. I could be mistaken. While I feel an attraction to the premise because of my own biases in that direction and because of the implications it has for human interaction, I'm not certain it's accurate. I can think of situations where being more open and unitive is a bad thing, where boundaries are healthy.
 
Yes, Wilber does pay homage to people like Maslow, Kohlberg, Gilligan, Piaget and others who have mapped out areas of consciousness in the past. These helpful models lay the foundation for much of what he puts forward.
I agree completely that there are areas where being rigid about the unitive would be inappropriate. Clare Graves thought that memes from archaic on up were "nested" within us to be called upon when needed.
And then there is the idea that you "have to be somebody before you are nobody",
hence the "pre" part of the fallacy. Perhaps some of the narcissistic behaviors found in some new age thought could be linked to that erroneous thinking.
 
Sounds like an interesting line of inquiry. Unfortunately one I haven't time to pursue. Would I be out of line to request a layman's simplistic breakdown and application? Specifically as it applies to "the idea of pre/trans fallacy neatly sums up the conflict I see in most of the dialog here on the forum."?
 
Juan,

I would actually take it a step further, in terms of the things that come up on this forum, but that complicates things a bit.

http://www.formlessmountain.com/AQAL_chart9.jpg

If you look at the stages of development, you can see different break downs. Wilber goes a step further with different lines of development (you can see how that looks on the bottom right where there are different lines for different intelligences, as it were, each passing through all of the different stages vertically, and horiziontally through various states (personally I think that bottom right graph isn't entirely clear.)) But for our purposes, look at the graph on the left andmore specifically at the grayscale line that's broken the levels down into three stages, that is pre-rational, rational and trans-rational. You can see he places more mythical perspectives of the world below rational views (text with colored background), and more mystical (again, more unitive, inclusive, open views) above those in a series of stages.

Different people on this forum are operating from these different perspectives( or in Wilber's language, stages.) Wilber suggests that, a person in a higher stage can come down to the level of someone in a lower, work at their level (the higher levels transcend and include the lower ones), but a person at a lower level would have a harder time interacting at the higher level because to the person at the lower level it's like watching 3d chess from a 2d perspective. The pre/trans fallacy issue is that you've got people at, say red, amber and magenta, (the colors help to identify stages without attaching additional meaning) who see those levels as the top (elevationism), and people who're at orange that see all of the levels above them as identical to the ones below, that if it's not rational it's irrational (reductionism.)

So let me take two individuals as examples, with names changed.

Take a hard atheist who sees all spirituality as delusional and terribly destructive. There you have someone at orange (rational) who can't distinguish between pre- and trans-rational perspectives.

Now take someone who's very enamored by a particular metaphysic, thinks it's the be-all-end-all and sees pompous arrogance and ignorance in anyone who disagrees. This person is probably very much in red in their thinking about religion (mythic/power) but has confused red for something above all of the rational stages.

There are also people who might, in their spiritual line of development, be quite far along, worldcentric, and yet when it comes to relational and moral development they're in the ethnocentric or even egocentric stages. You can see things like that happening in the new age narcicism that Paladin references (egocentric) as well as in traditional religions where really beautiful spiritual insight might be couched in very tribalistic perspectives of other communities or paths (ethnocentric.)

Hope that helps a little.
 
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Wow Dauer, that's a very concise summation!

Juan,
Quite simply the Pre/Trans Fallacy entails seeing non rational states as either regressive (in the Freudian sense) or a state that transcends the rational as in the Jungian model.
We know that a baby must begin to differentiate itself from others and enter a rational stage or it becomes "stuck" leading to all sorts of psychological disasters, like narcissistic personality disorder for example.
But to explain away any non rational state like Maslow's peak experiences as "pre-rational" is also a mistake.
Peak experiences are beyond or trans-rational.
As Dauer so expertly puts it above the atheist may chalk all non-rational experiences up to a regressive state, while the theist my do the reverse and think all non-rational states are of Divine origin.
 
I see this fallacy present in many of the conflicts here in the forum. Indeed whenever there is a debate between theist and atheist there is a little of this happening. However, most debates and arguments are not intended to be vehicles for inquiry, but just another trench warfare.
The spirit of inquiry is alive in only a few it would seem.
 
Paladin said:
I see this fallacy present in many of the conflicts here in the forum. Indeed whenever there is a debate between theist and atheist there is a little of this happening. However, most debates and arguments are not intended to be vehicles for inquiry, but just another trench warfare.
The spirit of inquiry is alive in only a few it would seem.
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Unfortunately Dauer's link is blocked where I am at, but I hope I came away with the gist.

I agree that it seems most threads are more about trench warfare. Which is sad. Opening one's cherished and heartfelt ideals to exploration demands a level of faith that most people are not up to, IMO. For some, 1% wrong means it is all wrong, and "we" can't be wrong now, can we? For others, it is about percentages and "go with the flow." Still others confuse truth for reality when the two are quite distinct unless one deliberately conbines the two, but that often demands setting aside cherished ideals, which demands a level of faith...

By far the majority of people in my experience don't have the stamina or the desire to bother. They place their money in the plate and trust the guy (gal) behind the podium to get them to the afterlife, and take their chances. Reading the fine print and proofreading for error is either too much to bother with, or actively (memetically) discouraged.

That's how it seems to me.

As for a rational / metaphysical dichotomy, I think that figures in with memetic prejudice (for lack of a better term). True rationality would allow for possibilities of the unseen, and metaphysical reality must accord with some sense of natural law (and by extension, reason). In other words, if G-d is true He must also be real; and if G-d is real He must also be true. The problem arises that G-d cannot be proven in the sense of height, width, depth, weight, or age...there is nothing we have yet devised to measure Him in any rationally *recognized" sense, even though we frequently experience Him via natural law sense. So there is this conflict of evidence that is difficult to reconcile. And egos must be stroked, so neither one can be wrong...yet (within their own narrow views) to be correct means the other must be wrong.

Yeah, I saw this long long ago, and I have struggled to overcome it with little positive outward result...
 
As for a rational / metaphysical dichotomy, I think that figures in with memetic prejudice
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Exactly so. Too bad you can't see the diagram Dauer posted, it has a picture of the spiral of memes first outlined by Graves and tweaked by his students and Wilber. One of the interesting things about this spiral is that the latest occurring memes (seen as higher up on the spiral but not "better than") tend to eschew those that came before.
It isn't until what Wilber referrs to as "second tier" memes that the value of the other memes is seen.
For example, I don't have a use for religion as such but I do see how valuable it is. This might be hard to understand for the religious as they tend to see me as being arrogant, lazy, ignorant etc.
Well, I am really but that has nothing to do with my own spiritual practice ;)
 
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