To guide discussion of that content, I ran an AI summary and asked for 10 bullet points. Proposed Second Renaissance Research Subgroup: What is the Second Renaissance - #2 by RobertBunge If you want to dispute any of those 10 bullet points, feel free!
Point #1:
- The Root of the Crisis: How do the “views and values of modernity” act as the foundational cause for our current global crises, rather than just technical or political failures?
The root of the crisis is the normalisation of the fragmentation of knowledge. It is what happens when the left hemisphere has been in total control of a society for a very long time. It manifests as a “meaning crisis”, because there is no shared foundation for collective meaning-making, but also as continual failures at the level of both politics and science. Nobody is officially responsible for integrating all of our knowledge into a coherent model, because of the way our institutions work (including both governmental and academic).
Nothing on your list mentions this, or addressed this, and there is no mystery why: you, just like almost everybody else here, are committed to ontological and epistemic pluralism. You are committed to precisely the paradigm of knowledge which is the root cause of the entire crisis, because that is how the social rules work in integral-type spaces.
There is such thing as the truth, Robert. Reality has a structure, and there is no reason why humans cannot come to understand that structure. That means there is one, and only one, correct model of the whole of reality. There cannot be multiple correct models because there is only one structure, and if we give up on the idea that this structure can be known (as postmodernism insists we must, because the alternative is “oppressive”) then we end up with the current meaning crisis and deep societal nihilism. We also end up letting the physicalists off the hook, even though physicalism is another core part of the problem, because we’ve officially sanctioned that the anti-physicalist camp will be hopelessly fragmented forever.
Paradigms do not shift until there is a coherent replacement paradigm ready to take over. That cannot happen until such time as the anti-physicalists are willing to give up on radical ontological and epistemological pluralism (i.e. postmodernism).