Hi Nik, Greg, and Others,

  Thanks for these notes.

  Nik, let me clarify my position. I appreciate why you might be confused, given what I said in our earlier exchanges about the difference between Wilber’s spiritual ontology and my own naturalistic ontology that simultaneously embraces the transcendent and is agnostic about ultimate reality.

  I think the most helpful way to go is to differentiate scientific versus humanistic language games/justification systems. Naturalism (versus supernaturalism or a spiritual/mystic ontology) is the language game of science and where we can rest our best/most certain knowledge claims. I can say it is true that life on earth evolved over millions of years. My neighbors in Stuarts Draft VA who believe that the Bible is the real truth and that the earth is young (i.e., thousands but not millions of years) are wrong. This is all in the realm of “logos” or science.

  That said, natural science/logos is not the only language game in town. There are, for example, pathos and mythos language games. Or, more generally, “humanistic” language systems. Consider, for example, if I say it is true that I love my kids, that is not really a scientific language game claim, but rather a claim in the domain of pathos—my unique experience of being.

  Mythos refers to the artistic, religio, mythic conceptions of the world. It is the striving for the ultimate concern. It makes different kinds of claims; it is a different kind of justification system that plays by different rules. I heard the claim as stemming from a “mythic” context. It is a beautiful way to see the world and position ourselves in the story of the cosmos. Although it requires some exposition that I will not get into, I can say that the Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System is about logos, but the overall Unified Theory Of Knowledge (TOK) has holders for pathos and mythos. The attached ppt shows the ToK aligned with logos, the iQuad coin with pathos, and the Garden with mythos.

  The debate/difference would be that if Wilber (or Greg or others) claimed that there was scientific knowledge about the claim that the unique witnessing self as a spiritual entity; if that was claimed as a scientific claim or a known truth like we know the age of the earth, then we would disagree. That is, I don’t think Wilber’s ultimate spiritual ontology has been discovered to be scientifically true and I am skeptical and agnostic about that deep/foundational ontological claim. However, when we switch over to mythos, I love the comment as placed in a mythic narrative of one’s self in the cosmos.

Hope this makes sense,
Gregg

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