As I my earliest memories have it, running around playing with other kids exists. So did dinner, TV, mom and dad, our dog, and quite a few other things. Nothing like “consciousess” occurred to me till I got to university. But I did check out books on dinosaurs and play with dinosaur models from around the age of 4. At what point did I become scientific? (Or did I ever, because I do appreciate @martin’s posts on Bourdieu)?
As I my earliest memories have it, running around playing with other kids exists. So did dinner, TV, mom and dad, our dog, and quite a few other things. Nothing like “consciousness” occurred to me till I got to university.
That is reasonable, yes. Because “consciousness” is everything we’re aware of we don’t have a reason to use that word in normal life. But we do have a reason to use it when questions about philosophy and religion are asked, and I don’t think we can start from anywhere else.
The reason I start with “consciousness” is because I think we need to cut off the route that leads to eliminative materialism. And to do that we need to make sure we have established what the word “consciousness” means as it is used in philosophical debates. As soon as this has been accepted then we can demonstrate why materialism is incoherent, which is the crucial step in bringing science into the new paradigm.
Sorry, I should have answered this:
I guess “becoming scientific” is equivalent to “learning how to play the language game of science”. Judging by the number of adults who are unable to do this, we can conclude that it doesn’t come naturally to people. We do have to learn it, and I guess for a lot of people this happens in their late teens.
We don’t all have to be scientists to learn how to play the language game of science, but we do have to understand how scientific knowledge fits together, and have some idea how science itself works. And as implied in my other post, some of this is going to have to change, because as things stand the language game of science involves an assumption that materialism is true.
Would I be right in thinking you’re mainly thinking of the green stage when you say it doesn’t port well to other parts of the world? That seems to me the weak point of the theory.
I believe the SD groups have done quite a lot of cross-cultural empirical work and would argue it does mostly port, so would be interested in any sources for criticisms along these lines.
The notion of the “modern” is generally theorized largely on Western prototypes. There is a vast body of literature on comparative modernizations that does not line up with tidy traditional → modern → postmodern sequencing. For example, Song China was arguably an apex of modernization for its era. (Not equaled anywhere for something like 500 years thereafter).
A lot of SD discussions around these matters conflate psychological development (AQAL UL) with social systems development (AQAL LR). That’s often not a great fit.
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Could you point to that? Graves basically didn’t leave any data afaict and Beck and Cowan’s data also seems to have disappeared after National Values Center shut down (and sadly both Beck and Cowan are no longer with us Beck having passed away in 2022).
BTW we have an thread on the forum on this (x-posted from thread on old forum)
… where the excellent John Oliver pointed me to this excellent summary https://hellametamodernism.com/but-the-data/ which has this interesting excerpt
But there’s one big problem: The data is long gone.
Wait… no data?
For whatever reason, towards the end of his life Graves threw out all but a few example essays, along with any notes from his judges that may have existed. It’s possible that some of the material is stuffed in a box in an archive somewhere at Union College, but unless and until someone finds it, that doesn’t do us much good.
There’s no real doubt that the data existed, as a number of people saw it, and Graves published a peer-reviewed paper outlining the theory based on it, and presented additional collated results at some mainstream conferences. But no one analyzed it independently in sufficient detail to verify whether the same theory would emerge for them, either by re-judging the essays or by examining the output of the original judges.
The other possible source of data would be from Spiral Dynamics practitioners, but while I have heard some statistics from such data, I am not aware of any publication of a sufficiently large data set along with the tools and methodology used to produce it in sufficient detail to allow for independent verification. [emphasis added]
PS: this is probably worthy of forking to its own topic.
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World led an interdisciplinary team that did on the ground anthropological, psychological, and economics research all over the world. My perceptions of cultural skew in common psychological models are based, among other things, on that work.