Yes, but those ideas only had a limited capacity to expand and influence, based on the shape of the distributed intelligence at the time. Which means fewer people were able to grow into later stages, and fewer pocket communities that are orienting to those later stages. This is why we have so many “lost” technologies over history, because the distributed intelligence did not yet exist that was capable of preserving and distributing this kind of knowledge. It seems obvious to me that, for example, the European Age of Enlightenment, when Orange first emerged as a cultural force, would not have happened without the information systems — books, libraries, universities — that were created at the prior stage.
Back then it was ethnocentric but now it isn’t, right? Well, actually no. We know that still to this day in America, everyone is equal and has human rights, but US Citizens are more equal than noncitizens.
Correct. To a degree. Everyone still starts at square one, which means we have plenty of pre-universal enactments of civil rights in this nation. However, the fact that worldcentric universal rights even exists as a concept to be aspired to, is an evolutionary emergent. Prior to the rise of Orange values and technologies, slavery was an economic requirement for the majority of societies on this planet (including in Plato’s Greece). It was a perverse game theory, where if you don’t have slaves but your neighbors do, before long you will be overpowered and you will become the slaves. But due to the emergence of Orange values in the LL, and orange technologies in the LR — both of which were made possible through increasing literacy rates among the population — these forms of slavery became obsolete.
But again, there are deeper levels of integration into the body to various degrees that AI cannot help with.
I never said otherwise. Human beings have a wide diversity of intelligences available to them, and AI is good at simulating some of these intelligences, but not others. For some of these intelligence, the AI outperforms by a very wide margin. For others, it is clearly lagging way behind. For others still, AI doesn’t even attempt them.
But again, we are in the very, very early days here, and while it’s useful to notice the current limitations, it may be naive to think that these current limitations are permanent boundaries limiting the field itself, which continues to grow at an accelerating rate.
The bias here is rejection of artifacs that we do not understand, or view as superior. I’m sure you know that ancient epics were passed down orally. These tales transmited Orange and it’s biased to demand they be in book form.
It’s not a matter of “superiority”, it’s a matter of efficiency and volume. Oral traditions are limited in time and space, because information can only be transmitted directly from one person to another, and then that knowledge is subject to the limitations of human memory and all its confabulating tendencies. No single human being can contain even a small town’s library worth of knowledge, because no human brain is capable of that magnitude of informational storage and recall.
And I never “demanded they be in book form”, I simply noted that books are much more conducive to something like scientific thinking than oral traditions. We would not be able to maintain our current body of scientific knowledge through oral tradition alone. And yet, that oral tradition is still transcended and included in the information system itself (e.g. lectures at a university). And of course, the advantage of books is that you get a direct transmission across time and space from the author to the reader, rather than that transmission being mediated by countless intermediaries who are transmitting the knowledge orally from one person to the next.
This seems to be a kind of random social bias. If a method produces specific results over thousands of years, why would you reject it as a technology? For thousands of years there have been tried, tested, reliable and proven methods to achieve various levels of consciousness, but because it isn’t written in a book that you have access to, it isn’t technology.
I’m not sure what you are asking here. I do think there is such a thing as “spiritual technologies”. I even look at language itself as an “intersubjective technology”, and one of the very first technological innovations of our species. Language was our first informational technology (beyond grunts and gestures). And then written language and mathematics. And then Amber created a network of universities and libraries, which later allowed Orange to emerge with its own informational systems. And then electronic media (it’s often said that television is responsible for the American public souring on the Vietnam war, because suddenly we were seeing horrifying battlefield coverage from the safety of our living rooms. The same with civil rights, when the wider population started seeing Black Americans being hosed down in the streets.) Hell, the only reason we even have an image of Earth as a precious blue marble in the vast emptiness of space, a mostly-closed system where 100% of human history can be seen in a single photograph, or even in a single pixel of a pale blue dot, is only about 50 years old, and is 100% the product of the informational systems at our disposal. And I believe this image is one of the most significant and transformative symbols ever to land in human consciousness. What a wonderful, terrible species we are.
And I think this remains true with recent innovations such as the smartphone, which put a video camera into everyone’s pocket and allowed us to capture and share everyday injustices, resulting in things like the BLM movement (regardless of what our opinions about that movement may be, or how the lack of enfoldment and proportionality in social media allowed certain narratives to be selected over others.)
And speaking on a personal level, the only reason that my daughter is alive is because of modern medical technology, based on these contemporary information systems. If it wasn’t for technology, I would have lost the very center of my heart many years ago.
I simply think that, when Orange first emerged, it did so in a highly calcified mythic Amber landscape, where women were being executed for witchcraft and any number of theological superstitions ruled the day. Orange rationality was the first to differentiate the value spheres of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful from each other, which all existed in a state of pre-differentiated fusion in the Amber mythic world. And because Amber mythological notions of God were such a monumental obstacle to the emergence of Orange, Orange overstepped and eventually filtered out mythic-based spiritual interpretations of reality for objective, verifiable interpretations of reality, largely because many descriptions of the world coming from mythic religion were being shown to be completely untrue (size and age of the universe, centrality of Earth, etc.). And thus, scientific materialism was born — especially since actual state training and awakening was a deeply esoteric feature in these traditions, while exoteric amber dogmatism dominated our perceptions of the world, of our species, and of our place in the universe.
And now, the sorts of informational feedback loops available to us with present information technology allows something like an integral movement to emerge, where for the last 20+ years we have been able to find each other in the dark and forge an ongoing and self-sustaining community of like-minded, like-hearted people from all around the globe. I don’t think that would have happened if, say, Ken Wilber was limited to oral methods of knowledge transmission alone. And I very much regard this emergence as being beautiful, good, and true.
tl;dr: Technology is an intrinsic part of humanity’s ongoing evolution, and plays a critical role in that evolution by creating a series of self-reinforcing and self-organizing feedback loops with the other quadrants — with our thoughts and ideas and perceptions in the UL, with our cultural values and interpretations and sense-making in the LL, and with our actions and behaviors and efforts in the UR. Here at integral, we see how these four quadrants are not separate realities, but rather four different perspectives on the same occasion. They co-create and tetra-enact each other at every moment. There is no LL culture without any number of LR structures and conditions that support and sustain that culture over time. Therefore, choosing to deliberately downplay or omit technology from the human story, or to view it as some kind of aberration that prevents us from going back to some imagined enlightened period somewhere back in time, is something that I think leads to a short-sighted, narrow, and incomplete analysis of human emergence over the last 50,000 years.
I think that the flows of information, the systems and structures that preserve and distribute knowledge, are some of the primary factors for the emergence of new stages. I think that electronic media like radio, television, and film have exposed human beings to perspectives they may never have otherwise encountered, and this exposure resulted in things like the emergence of civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. Just like how the printing press eventually resulted in the emergence of the Orange rational stage.