Jean Gebser – Society for Consciousness Studies Conference Website

On The Development of Measurement Technologies and their Effect on The Evolution of Consciousness

administrator — Sun, 19 Apr 2015 01:57:03 +0000

Zachary Stein

I argue that the historical development of measurement technologies correlates with the evolution of consciousness through a series of phases, roughly coterminous with those posited by Jean Gebser. From the first local measuring rods and bushels, through our globally standardized metric system, to today’s advances in biometrics and psychometrics, measurement technologies have not only shaped humanity’s practices, from science to economics, they also deeply reflect the structures of consciousness that have characterized cultural evolution. Gebser pioneered a method for investigating the evolution of human consciousness by looking into the perspectival structure of works of art and other cultural artifacts. I will undertake something similar by looking at case studies from historical metrology—involving details of the increasingly complex technological instrumentalities deployed for measurement—that exemplify the profound transformations in consciousness that accompany radical innovations in measurement. I also suggest some processes by which metrics shape consciousness, and vis-a-vis, positioning measurement as part of a multi-dimensional dialectic of consciousness evolution. This sets the stage for speculations about how future measurement technologies will impact the evolution of consciousness, with a focus on psychometrics (standardized testing and psychological profiling) and biometrics (customized medicine and retinal security scans). I suggest that we are entering an era of hyper-measurement, when more parts of ourselves and our lives are implicated in complex measurement practices than ever before. The effect will be to deepen the self-referentiality and multi-perspectivalism of post-modernity, and to hasten the coming of emergent integral a-perspectival forms of praxis, problem-focsed metrological pluralisms, and the ever louder reassertion of the inevitable and ineliminable immeasurables.

Dr. Zachary Stein

zakstein.org

Eco Philosophy and the Feminine Divine; Biogenesis, Psychogenesis, Cosmogenesis; Towards an Integral Futurology

administrator — Sun, 19 Apr 2015 00:59:28 +0000

Barbara Karlsen

Just as there has been a time on Earth when human life and mind were not yet embodied, the higher planes of consciousness may also be waiting their time to become a part of our ordinary embodied reality. The human body in symbiosis with Nature and Cosmos provides a coherent, and unifying ontology for establishing a higher order of consciousness; a state of creative potentiality marked by a common primal power that inhabits and informs the prima materia of all living organisms. Situating the body in an active site of primal consciousness (Nature) and externalizing our formative consciousness (embryogenesis), we influence everything germinal to becoming human. Participation in this context could be said to characterize the fullness of integral or unified consciousness. Through such participation, one could discover a source of wholeness ordering one’s existence and expression that knows no human, theoretical, temporal or spatial differentiation. Like Gebser’s view of evolution and that of Sri Aurobindo, the notion that the ultimate potentials of human consciousness are enfolded in the Origin- make it possible for us to conceive of reorganizing new developmental lines by tuning in to our human origins. This view sees the world of the human and the cosmos as an interwoven primordial reality, where higher and higher forms of consciousness evolve out of a process of involution and evolution of varying planes of consciousness. At each transition, the new power not only evolving out of the old, but also transforming whatever preceded it in creative interaction of pluralism. The blueprint ‘ a supramental knowledge” as Sri Aurobindo describes it, based on a fully conscious identity with the whole. This Supramental knowledge could be said to characterize the fullness of unified consciousness. As consciousness mutates toward its innate integrality, it drastically restructures human ontology, and with it civilization as a whole (Gebser, 1989).

barbarakarlsen@gmail.com