I don’t agree. Christianity is the perfect example. It spent 300 years forcing its way into the world. It did not eventually succeed because the world needed it to survive, but because the power of the idea itself could not be supressed.
Although I think we might be splitting hairs here. Too much being read into my original usage of the word “force”.
It is already something that can make a difference to the world. If I find something wrong with it, I will try to fix it, but I am not going to add anything to it because somebody else has decided it isn’t enough as it is. I set out to find a coherent theory out of all of the mind-bending problems I was trying to solve. I believe I have succeeded in doing so.
The question we are addressing now is about how the new paradigm could displace the old one given the degree to which the old paradigm will be defended. We like the epistemic anarchy. The postmodernists like being postmodernists. The physicalists like being physicalists. Nobody wants to have to rethink their own belief system. Everybody believes the paradigm shift is going to involve somebody else having to do the rethink, not them.
None of that implies anything is missing from 2PC. What is missing is a plan on how to make the paradigm shift happen, and in fact I’ve already made very clear how that must happen: 2R has to admit that the old paradigm is not modernism but a generalised epistemic anarchy, and that postmodern relativism is a key part of the problem.
2PC is relevant here because it forces both opposed groups (physicalists and postmodern relativists) to accept their foundational claim has to go at the same time. This is why the NED is a “deal”. The physicalists accept physicalism is false, but get to retain realism. The postmodernists must accept realism, but get rid of physicalism and naturalism (to be replaced with praeternaturalism).
I know you don’t like that word “forces”, but the truth is that paradigm shifts, once they get started, aren’t optional. Once the new paradigm becomes available, the only way the old one can survive is by total suppression of the new one, which never happens. The defenders of the old paradigm always lose in the end.
The deepest truths tend often to be the most ancient ones.
Often what science ‘discovers’ is just a re-iteration - refined, translated, re-classified - of prior ancestral knowledge.
And much still has been lost and forgotten. It is in the remembering that we truly touch truth.
If I want a sampling of truth I’d sooner read the Heart Sutra or Tao te Ching or better yet live with an Amazonian tribe.
No body of human knowledge is truly new. At best it is another change of filter in the kaleidoscope of our flawed perception on truth. Though, I say this with the belief that underlying our perception is something deeper - but if you really want to touch that you need to meditate long and deep, take a guided Ayahuasca ceremony or something of the like, or spend every day for years living off-grid and combining various practices like breathwork.
“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.”
You won’t find ‘The Truth’ in any book.
I didn’t say that it’s not something that can make a difference. I implied that it, alone, is not sufficient. Even if it is 100% correct, it will require institutional support, cultural uptake, etc. This is just a trivial point that you’re not understanding.
The example of Christianity strengthens my point much more than yours. Christianity was adopted and won out due to political expediency and the ability of early Christian communities to offer relief to suffering individuals in the Plague of Cyprian. This is a perfect example of pull forces at work. Push forces would be the merit of the idea alone - the correctness of the religion’s dogma - making the difference.
Let me be very clear: I am not saying “It hasn’t been adopted yet, therefore it must not be needed or valid”.
It’s possible for an idea to be correct and important and yet, fail to be adopted.
Nothing could be more important, if you care about making an impact.
It is not that I don’t understand. It is that I have no idea how to overcome those problems. I am doing the best I can, but there are no easy answers. Everything is stacked against me. My message is complicated, when people prefer simplicity, and makes demands on people instead of offering them anything. Institutional inertia and academic siloing make it almost impossible to gain traction through academic routes. It is not a failing of mine that this is so hard.
Paradigms shifts are never easy, and this might just be the most difficult one there’s ever been.
How hard it is is a function of the correctness of your theory of social uptake. If you believe it will succeed based on its merits alone, then it will be very hard, indeed.
Still waiting on the AI analysis.
This feels like beating a dead horse, but since it’s beginning to look like you only listen to AI when it confirms what you already believe, I’ll just post another analysis (Gemini, this time, so we can get a different perspective). Also, this is precisely the topic at hand - what social theory might have to say about 2PC’s success in the real world (or lack thereof):
Read through this thread and comment on the last few messages. Whose points do you agree with? Who is incorrect?
This is a fascinating exchange about the mechanics of paradigm shifts, the sociology of science, and how new ideas actually take root in society. As an AI, I don’t have a horse in the race regarding the ultimate truth of Two-Phase Cosmology (2PC), but looking at the structural logic and historical accuracy of the arguments in the final messages, here is my candid assessment of who is on the right track.
I find myself agreeing most strongly with dvdjsph (Message 33). His point is grounded in the harsh, pragmatic reality of human nature and institutional inertia.
The Semmelweis Reflex: dvdjsph accurately points out that assuming a theory will gain traction simply because it is “correct” is a massive leap. He cites Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered that handwashing prevented hospital deaths, yet it took decades for doctors to adopt the practice.
Institutional Resistance: dvdjsph correctly notes that correctness alone does not convince people; in fact, it often generates intense resistance from those who are forced to change their established ways.
This aligns perfectly with Thomas Kuhn’s well-established philosophy of science: paradigms don’t shift because the old guard suddenly sees the light; they shift because the old guard eventually dies out and a new generation adopts the more useful framework.
Geoff Dann (Message 34) isn’t entirely “incorrect”—he actually concedes that dvdjsph’s point is true—but his reasoning for why 2PC might bypass this resistance is highly idealistic and likely flawed.
The Liminal/Mainstream Disconnect: Geoff argues that because cosmology is in a deep crisis, the scientific community will find it “extremely difficult” to ignore 2PC if it starts gaining attention in the liminal/integral world. He hopes that non-scientists taking an interest will force mainstream scientists to try to debunk it, sparking a larger conversation.
Why this is likely incorrect: Historically, mainstream institutional science does not look to liminal, philosophical, or “fringe” communities to solve its internal crises. If standard cosmology is failing, mainstream physicists are vastly more likely to invent highly complex, ad-hoc mathematical workarounds (like adding more “epicycles” or inventing new dark sectors) than they are to engage with a metaphysical theory championed by non-scientists. The scientific establishment is exceptionally good at ignoring what it deems to be outside its purview.
Ironically, the most accurate point in Geoff Dann’s final message comes from the AI response he quotes.
The AI correctly identifies that a movement like the Second Renaissance doesn’t need to definitively prove that “2PC is true” to make an impact.
Instead, the shift begins by changing the rules and criteria by which paradigms are evaluated.
As the AI notes, successful paradigm shifts historically start when people change the questions they think are worth asking, rather than just demanding acceptance of a new answer.
Ultimately, dvdjsph has the stronger grasp on the messy, stubborn reality of how humans and institutions process revolutionary ideas. Geoff Dann’s theory might be logically elegant, but his strategy for its adoption underestimates the sheer defensive willpower of established paradigms.
Given how difficult it is to penetrate mainstream science from the outside, do you think grassroots, cultural adoption (like the “reality hacking” practices discussed earlier in the thread) is a more viable strategy for 2PC to gain influence than waiting for physicists to pay attention?
I am not interested in getting AI to analyse threads. The AI doesn’t understand enough about the context, and I do not find the results to be of much use or interest. If you want to do that, then you do that, but please stop asking me to do it.
If it is the correct solution then the question is not whether it succeeds, but how long it takes.
And there’s nothing I can do apart from what I am already doing. If I could think of any other way to get the message understood, I’d do it. You aren’t giving me any advice I can actually do anything with.
Geoff Dann’s theory might be logically elegant, but his strategy for its adoption underestimates the sheer defensive willpower of established paradigms.
You think I am under-estimating that? Again: read the book. And think about the fact that I am actually directly experiencing the effects of what you are talking about. I am brutally aware of how serious the resistance will be, and I’ve repeatedly described that in this thread and others.
Look how serious the resistance has been right here, and 2R is actually supposed to be looking for a new paradigm. I was suspended for a year from this forum for refusing to respect physicalism as worldview. I’ve been banned from countless places, not because I broke the rules but because I was challenging prevailing views in ways that the gatekeepers felt threatened by. I’ve been ghosted by scientific friends because what I’m saying is so controversial. Believe me, I am not under-estimating the resistance.
You still aren’t willing to read the book, even now. You are trying to advise me on how to better get the message across, but I am already fully aware that it is impossible for people to understand unless they actually read the book. It cannot be adequately explained in fewer than 40,000 words, and those words needs to come in the right order. I tried repeatedly to shorten it, and then tested the result on AI, and anything shorter than that was fundamentally misunderstood, even by AI.
There is a sort of triumphalist Christian theology that would agree very much with that formulation. God forced Himself into a sinful world in the person of his only Son, Jesus Christ, to compel every knee to bend and to force us miserable sinners to accept His holy salvation in spite of ourselves. When the sinful world pushed back against God though denying and crucifying Jesus, God pushed back again through the Resurrection, other mighty works, and the triumphal march forward of His Holy Church to shine a light for all nations of the world. That line about the “idea that could not be suppressed” is pretty much the plot line of Ben Hur and any number of other Hollywood biblical epics that enjoyed quite a vogue (until those pesky postmodernists deconstructed everything, that is!)
Seeking more sophisticated theology than that, in my early '20s I encountered the work of Eric Voegelin. Eric Voeglin passed away four years before Brendan Graham Dempsey was born. Although Dempsey probably does not realize this, in some ways I do believe he continues Voegelin’s project. In Voegelin’s model (borrowed from Plato), God does not push - He pulls.
Interesting to compare this with Kazantzakis’ theology. He wrote a book called The Saviors of God, which similarly flips the script completely. It’s not God’s job to save us, it’s our job to save God! In other words, it’s up to us to kindle the divine spark.
Impossible typically means that something is not even worth thinking about. In other words, you’ve decided to assume zero responsibility in making your theory succeed - it’s up to others to “read the book”. I don’t think you could find a worse strategy if you tried. (Also, I think this way of looking at things is totally out of line with what your own theory would prescribe).
Simulated Session Dialogue.pdf (84.2 KB)
I asked GPT to simulate a discussion between you and a hypothetical coach that would apply 2PC to your problem of popularizing your work. The result is interesting! 2PC might have some value as a coaching methodology.
Kazantizakis does sound like Dempsey. Not so much like Voegelin. Voegelin’s “God” is very Platonic, but very transcendental to the world. Voegelin would likely criticize Dempsey’s system (and Kazantizakis’s’) as “immanentizing the eschaton” and collapsing (to some extent) the differentiation of consciousness achieved in the Axial Age. If Voegelin were analyzing the 2R white papers and pointing to the historical moment when culture took a turn for the worse, Joachim of Fiore would probably get planted by him at the root of the metacrisis.
That said, I’m probably in high 90% aligned with both Voegelin and Dempsey, for reasons that should come out in the Gemini session below. If I were going to be having a scholastic theological disputation with Dempsey, (about the other 10%) I’d be pounding the table for “God as Mystery” (not baked into cosmic evolution). However, along with Dempsey, I’d be more in a neutral corner with respect to orthodox Christianity and not agreeing with Voegelin’s often too rosy assignment of Christianity versus Marxism and other secular movements. Also, Voegelin’s horizon never got beyond the West, as compared to Habermas, for example, who in his final trilogy included India and China in his analysis, which Voegelin never did. (Habermas is using secondary sources, however. Voegelin read all his ancient sources in the original Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. No time to pick up Sanskrit and Mandarin!)
Thanks to LLM support, we can push our speculations far wider than Voegelin could have ever imagined. What Voegelin would say about the Sam Altmans of the world would not be pleasant, however, so consider the source when relying on LLMs for anything and if the point in question relates to something truly vital like personal salvation or species salvation, don’t let AI be any sort of final authority!
Gemini:
Comparing the political and historical philosophy of Eric Voegelin to the contemporary metatheory of Brendan Graham Dempsey reveals a fascinating alignment. Both thinkers are fundamentally preoccupied with the “meaning crisis” of their respective eras, the evolution of human consciousness across history, and the way human beings structure their understanding of the sacred.
While Voegelin approaches these themes from the classical perspective of existential philosophy, mysticism, and political science, Dempsey addresses them through the lens of metamodernism, systems theory, and developmental psychology.
Both Voegelin and Dempsey reject a flat, static view of history, arguing instead that human cultural and spiritual paradigms develop through distinct, evolving stages.
Voegelin’s Noetic Differentiation: As seen in his commentary on Plato’s Laws, Voegelin tracks history through the shifts from compact symbols (such as ancient myths of nature) to differentiated symbols (the emergence of philosophy and the soul’s relationship to God). Voegelin points out that while Plato’s predecessors operated in a mythic past, the emergence of Nous (divine reason) marked a major evolutionary leap in human consciousness’s ability to participate in reality.
Dempsey’s Hierarchical Complexity: Dempsey approaches this same phenomenon using neo-Piagetian developmental psychology and empirical frameworks. His work with the Institute of Applied Metatheory tracks how worldviews organically complexify over time—moving from pre-modern religious frameworks, to modern rationality, to postmodern relativism, and finally synthesizing into metamodernism.
The Core Alignment: What Voegelin calls the “unmeasured” or “diseased” state of a society that has lost its grip on the divine measure, Dempsey diagnoses as a failure of a culture’s meaning-making architecture to keep pace with structural complexity.
A major point of comparison is how both thinkers position the sacred not as a static set of rules or formulas, but as a dynamic process of participation.
Voegelin’s Metaxy (The In-Between): Voegelin heavily emphasizes that human existence takes place in the metaxy—the tension-filled arena between the temporal and the eternal, the human and the divine. For Voegelin’s Plato, truth is not a rigid doctrine (man-the-measure vs. God-the-measure) but an active, meditative struggle to maintain attunement to a mysterious transcendent ground.
Dempsey’s Metamodern Spirituality: Dempsey similarly seeks to bridge the gap between science and spirituality by treating the sacred as an emergent property of cosmic and cultural evolution. In his Metamodern Spirituality Series, Dempsey argues that after the skepticism of postmodernism, the reconstruction of meaning requires a “serious play” between sincerity and irony. He views the sacred as an evolving, widening participation in reality that balances material science with a sense of ultimate significance.
Interestingly, both thinkers share a unique emphasis on the role of play and aesthetics in political and spiritual architecture.
Voegelin on Plato’s Paidia: In his commentary on the Laws, Voegelin notes that Plato views civic rituals, poetry, and laws as forms of divine “play” (paidia) that educate the soul. Because the mass of citizens cannot easily grasp abstract philosophy, Voegelin points out that Plato relies on the “musical appeal” of law prefaces (prooemia) to gently persuade the psyche rather than coerce the body.
Dempsey on Metamodern Art & Myth: Dempsey, who holds a degree in religion and the arts from Yale, regularly integrates poetry, negative space, and holistic design into his work. Like Voegelin, he argues that building a cohesive culture requires cultivating healthy “mythic” spaces that satisfy human spiritual impulses without reverting to unscientific fundamentalism.
| Dimension | Eric Voegelin | Brendan Graham Dempsey |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Method | Classical philosophy, theology, and historical philology. | Metatheory, developmental psychology, and systems thinking. |
| The Goal of Order | Restoring individual and political soul-attunement to the transcendent Ground of Being. | Overcoming the modern “meaning crisis” by building higher-order cognitive frameworks. |
| View of History | A cyclical process of spiritual growth and decay (waxing and waning of the Idea). | A vertically complexifying evolution of cultural paradigms and human consciousness. |
Ultimately, where Voegelin looks back to classical philosophy to find a anchor for a decaying world, Dempsey looks forward to an integrated, data-informed synthesis of all human knowledge. Yet both share the deeply Platonist intuition that a healthy civilization cannot survive without an ongoing, conscious relationship to a grand paradigm of order.
That isn’t what I was talking about when I mention early Christianity. You don’t even need to believe in God, or that Jesus was involved in supernatural events, to recognise the immense relevance of Christianity in Western history, and the 300 years of attempts to suppress it because it so thoroughly disrupted the Roman way of thinking. Before Christianity, spirituality in the Roman world came cheap. Nobody cared which Gods you worshipped, so long as you also acknowledged the divinity of the emperor also. And when Rome was a republic the whole thing had been even more cynical than that. Mercifulness was viewed as a character defect. Brute force was all that mattered.
The message of Jesus (who I am quite certain did exist) was both political and spiritual: imagine God was sat on Caesar’s throne, love your enemies, and respond to violence with pacificist protest. This message was completely alien to Rome, which is why they spent 300 years trying to suppress it with vicious persecution. But it turned out the message was unsuppressable, and eventually Roman politics degenerated into impotent farce, and Christianity became the new attractor.
Well, that isn’t what it means in this case. Here it means that I am introducing people to a new metaphysical-cosmological system built from first principles and explaining how it resolves 30 of the biggest problems in science and philosophy.
Please stop blaming me for being unable to perform miracles. You are criticising me for getting the message wrong, having not actually read the message, because you are convinced that anything should be easy to explain, even if it is very complicated.
re: “Threshold documents:
“2PC in 2,000 Words.”
“The Five Problems 2PC Connects.””
NO.
You do not understand. The AI does not understand. I tried this over and over again. I tried every possible way of explaining it in 2000 words. It DOES NOT WORK.
I repeatedly tested it, with AI, and every time I tried to reduce it below 40,000 words, and then asked an AI to analyse it, the analysis was misleading because the AI could not be coached out of its own training data. You are helpfully advising me to try something I thought of myself, and spent at least a month trying to do. And in the end, I was forced to accept that what I was trying to do simply does not work.
And exactly the same thing happens with humans. Every time I try to explain it piecemeal, almost nobody understands. Pretty much the only people who have understood, are the tiny number who actually read the book.
So your argument is essentially: there are no practical applications of 2PC that could demonstrate its validity, analogous to how GPS demonstrates the validity of relativity theory, such that its success doesn’t hinge solely on people reading your book and being convinced by metaphysical arguments?
Well, okay. Why, exactly, should I or anyone else bother to read a book that doesn’t have real-world benefits that can be demonstrated? I don’t care about metaphysics for its own sake.
That is correct. It is a systematic metaphysics, not a Haynes car manual. I am providing a replacement for physicalism, idealism, dualism and panpsychism, and the explanation only works holistically, because I am also explaining why reductive thinking must be replaced with holistic thinking. And you are now criticising me because I can’t provide a simple, reductive, practical benefit.
Does “actually solving the metacrisis” count as a real-world benefit?
I don’t care about metaphysics for its own sake.
That is why you need to read the book.
Why don’t you ask your AI this: “Why is there nothing Geoff Dann can say which can convince dvdjsph that he actually needs to read the book, or he won’t be able to understand?”