WillCameron

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Facing the Cloud of Unknowing Tom Murray’s paper is best exemplified in Thomas Lawrence, the protagonist of the movie Conclave. Thomas’ greatest strength is his willingness to face doubt and uncertainty. That doesn’t necessarily mean he enjoys the process. In fact, the virtue of his doubt is the pain he’s willing to wrestle with. The gift of this virtue is captured in the 14th century book, The Cloud of Unknowing: “I urge you, go after experience rather than knowledge. On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you, but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest.” While it could be easy to read this as religious dogma’s attack on knowledge, science, and reason, I think it is far better to read it as call for epistemic humility. Murray defines epistemic humility as: “the blunt confrontation with how, when it comes down to it, the certainty that one holds for much of one’s beliefs and knowledge is bewilderingly undeserved.” To face the cloud is to become conscious of how the way in which we construct knowledge defines how we relate to our own ignorance. This leads Murray to a deep analysis of different stages of development that humans go through. For example, if we’re a Conformist, then we construct knowledge in a way deeply influenced by our culture. As such, we’re likely to fear our ignorance most when we risk ostracism and to feel most certain when what we’re saying aligns with our group. Epistemic humility is possible for any stage of development, but so is epistemic arrogance. Development happens within the cloud, at the edge of our knowledge and understanding. One must love oneself not despite one’s ignorance, but precisely because one has discovered one’s ignorance. As difficult as it can be, especially at first, you want to cultivate a love for unknowing. Here, unknowing is not simply knowing that we do not know, but learning to shed beliefs that are wrong or unfairly certain. Murray writes the following: “Negative capability […] includes the ‘informed and active humility’ […], in which the sources of indeterminacy are better understood so that knowledge can be more adaptive and resilient. It is not enough to acknowledge that ‘the map is not the territory’ […], but we must understand as precisely as we can how/where/when/why our maps differ from the territory” When we’ve come to love unknowing enough to walk willingly into the cloud, we find ourselves in a quiet place to rest. What is this paper for? This paper not only serves as a good introduction to developmental psychology, but gives you many ways to look at how stages actually work. It covers paradoxes, biases, and virtues that stages experience in a way that is incredibly actionable. Development takes time no matter what. The process of moving from one stage to the next is a multi-year endeavour. With this paper you can at least understand better where you are, where you’re going, and how you can take the first steps. That said, development is something that must happen through living your life and speaking with people. It’s easy to get stuck in an ivory tower built atop the judgment of others. That is a way we use dev-psych to limit our own development. We cultivate a deeper love for ourselves through cultivating a deeper love for others. We do that by meeting them in the marketplace as the flawed human beings we all are. How does this fit into my project? Developmental psychology is one of the pillars of my work and, if you’ve been reading my other essays, you’ve likely grown weary of my continual call for us to face the open horizon of romantic possibility. Put concretely, the fact that the manosphere settled on evolutionary rather than developmental psychology was one of the worst tragedies of post-patriarchal masculinity. I’m certainly not against evo-psych. I think there are very real biological constraints and affordances that must be accounted for. However, dev-psych is not only a way that we can understand what lies on the open horizon, but how we make sense and meaning about the horizon itself. Understanding why evo-psych has been so limiting for the manosphere requires a complex enough perspective to see how we’ve reified, perhaps even deified, the primordial man. Murray’s very project is to deconstruct and reconstruct such reifications in an iterative process that converts them into the tools we use to carve new paths toward better selves that make better futures that make better selves. He and I invite you to walk with us on that journey. ------ If you'd like to follow me on Substack, you can find this article here.

If you don't find balance now, you will have far more difficulty when you're so successful and have contracts, fans, and media breathing down your neck. I've gone through the workaholic, "I'll actualize when I have the money, I'll hangout with friends when I have the money", etc., etc. If you really want to make that sacrifice, then that's your choice. The fact is that success takes sacrifice no matter what, but recognize that it is sacrifice. Understand that you won't realize the profundity of those sacrifices until it hits you like a brick and you're frozen with grief at how for granted you took what you've lost. You have to make the decision now what you're willing to sacrifice knowing you won't understand the gravity of it until much later. Even you reading this now will not prepare you for that moment. Maybe it'll all be worth it, but it will still be a sacrifice. My own path has led me to seek balance now rather than later. I'm not trying to sprint to success, but become the person I want to be in the process of seeking success. I've also reconstructed what success means beyond achievement, money, or recognition. I would of course be lying if I said these things didn't still matter, but they're far less potent than they use to be and other values have come to take priority.

At the same time he's also very motivated by unresolved trauma, or at least has been. Given his books it seems like he's resolved some of it, but at the same time he's pushed his body to the point that it's literally falling apart. Barring medical advancement he will likely be immobile in the next decade and in constant pain. Sure, he may be one of the most resilient people who have ever lived, but he also clearly demonstrates the consequences of unresolved trauma in self-destructive behaviour and putting too many of your skill points in one domain. Ironically, pure resilience has destroyed his body. He is someone to learn from, but not to imitate.

Glad to see you talking about Vervaeke, Leo. I'm currently going through his After Socrates series and it's quite good too. A nice rounding out of Awakening that gets more into the practical side of things while offering some more theory. I'm surprised you haven't interacted more with the metamodern/liminal web.

It took me a long time to move beyond the paradigm Owen gave me. Your work was a big part of keeping myself from ever getting too deeply into it, but it was definitely my primary paradigm for most of my 20s. I'd say reading Byung-Chul Han and Rachel O'Neill's ethnography on the pickup community were the last nails in the coffin. It's necessary to learn pickup to a certain extent, but it's a toxic strategy for a toxic terrain. Owen is likely among the most sophisticated and ethical that the worldview can offer.

The issue isn't necessarily status. It's how a specific culture defines what deserves status. Western culture, especially in the US, defines status in a very materialistic fashion. Other cultures may value the most collaborative or most giving. Status seeking behaviour can be beneficial at a certain stage of development, you just want to be conscious of which status games you're playing. Play the status games that move you beyond status seeking.

What exactly do you think Owen gets wrong? Just curious what your perspective on him is. Thank you.

I think the range of attractive behaviour is larger than pickup can often make it seem to be. It is one process for getting sex fast, but that can sometimes fall for goodhardt’s law. Sex as a measure of quality relationships is only a good measure for sex. Queer theory, feminism, and postmodernism more broadly can help round a lot of overly modernist pickup theory out.

The Integral Stage with Layman Pascal and Bruce Alderman. I think they’re two fantastic mystic philosophers who use Integral Theory while not being contained by the business of Integral and the leadership of Ken Wilber. They primarily have conversations with various people aligned with or adjacent to Integral, or who have a roughly 2nd tier perspective. This is a conversation of them talking about their respective metatheories:

If you want me to delete this I can. I make videos about post-patriarchal masculinity using neo-piagetian psychological development, Jungian psychology, metamodernism, and solarpunk. In this playlist I discuss my model of masculine conformity in our culture. The conformism of traditional masculinity fights the anti-conformism of progressive masculinity, powered by Epithymia, the algorithm-driven nihilistic hedonism that has us addicted to stimulation and outrage. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEIR0Pct14Ek2nkKOkwXKBAnP0SgfB-48&si=BtgTk8pPilY5nzr9 In this video I finished a multi-part critique of Red Pill using Cook-Greuter’s model and Gilligan’s work on sex differences in moral reasoning. https://youtu.be/e1JGk266P9c?si=QIZqGrOGcXmR57Sl

Mind if I share my own? I make videos about post-patriarchal masculinity using neo-piagetian psychological development, Jungian psychology, metamodernism, and solarpunk. I’ve very much been influenced by your thinking.

Ah my apologies. I use a proxy. I didn't realize it would link that.

I got into an exchange in my youtube comments. I was talking about the interaction of science and myth, and the commenter criticized that view. Their perspective was that science is an empirical process and attempting to talk about myths of science doesn't do justice to how the process actually comes to discover truths about the world. There view was that viewing science as a process is not a myth about science, as you'll see below I disagreed with this. I wanted to share what I said to get your perspective on whether or not my understanding is actually up to par. I appreciate the help! Here it is: The idea that myths are value-laden stories is not my original redefinition, but comes from the work of many from disparate fields that have converged on something to the effect of the following idea. We have to remember that the human mind is narratological, and so we construct meaning about the world in the form of narratives. Values are what arranges the landscape of things into a forum for action. If I am hungry I value food and so signals of food are going to be highlighted within the landscape of things so that it can become a forum for useful action. Whether through the use of images, tastes, and scents, or with actual language, the organism will then remember the trail and process applied in a narrative sequence so that it can get to that food again in the future. Myths then are not merely collections of allegorical and symbolic fantasy, but specific representations of a specific forum of action given a specific set of higher order values. I can have a myth involving the symbolism of the Hero, but the superficial features of that Hero can change drastically depending on the culture I'm in. From heroic dictator who uplifts our noble people through conquest of "barbarian" peoples to low-born rogue who steals from the rich oppressors. The purpose of such myths, or value-laden stories with symbolic representations, are again, to guide us through the landscape of things such that it becomes a useful forum for action toward the fulfilment of certain goals. If I seek a heroic dictator I am going to be inspired toward very different ends than if I seek a liberator from the dictator. What's more, the scientific process, however empirical, is going to be used for very different ends. Think about how that might change the funding of various areas of research. Sure our science is discovering provisional truths, but of the provisional truths it could discover, it has now been directed in a very different direction. With this definition then we can better understand how both science as absolute truth and as process are myths - value-laden stories with symbolic representations for transforming landscapes of things into useful forums for action. You've said that I am conflating myth and science, but I am differentiating and then re-integrating them. Yes, science is not myth, but the moment we begin to use science we have inevitably re-engaged science with myth. We need to distinguish between them if we want our science to work well, but my point is that they do inevitably interact. For example, if I value reliability, accuracy, and falsifiability then those are turning the landscape of empirically observable things into a forum for action as scientific inquiry. We then have not-entirely-true symbolic representations such as the atom as a solar system, we also have heroes as the humbly exploring scientist, villains as the plagiarizing data fabricator, and even god as the objective, material world that exists beyond our rational view-from-nowhere and can be accessed unmediated for the discovery of truth (not saying every scientist believes exactly that, but just making a point). However empirical, rational, and scientific that myth may seem, it is still a myth - a value-laden story containing symbolic representations meant to transform the landscape of things into a forum for useful action. And that's really my point in making this series - to highlight how we are a mythologizing species and however empirical our methods, our cognition is mythological. We have to reckon with those aspects of our mind if we want our science to work as intended because we inevitably shuttle our myths into the process of science. Even though they should be thought of as different things (notice the value statement there), you can never remove the scientific process from myth as long as humans are using it. Thanks again for reading. How could I be less wrong?

Somebody already talked about this today in this thread - actualized.org/forum/topic/103971-women-don’t-love-you-they-love-the-life-style-you-can-provide/?__cpo=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYWN0dWFsaXplZC5vcmc My response to their post follows: I think the mistake that people often make when discovering tragedy is that they start thinking everything is "really" tragic. One of the ways that the neuropsychologist Iain McGilchrist has talked about the left brain hemisphere's dominance in our culture is in the left hemispheres need for perfection. So for example, the Platonic Forms are envisioning some metaphysically "more real than our reality" realm in which the perfect form of everything we see exist. All chairs we see are the baser instantiations of the perfect Platonic form of "chair". How this manifests in our culture can often be seen in terms of morality. People realize that perfect altruism can't exist because even in the case of self-sacrifice you do it because you believe it is a good thing to do, and so you feel good knowing you sacrificed yourself for a worthy cause. This realization makes them nihilistic because they think that at base everyone is selfish. The issue here is that we've become so hooked on the "perfect" altruism, that anything less is interpreted as being the worst opposite. We're either perfectly altruistic or we're all the basest form of selfish, which makes sense because it is the mirror image of perfect. It's like the anti-Platonic form or anti-perfection. The truth is that this perfection that the left hemisphere is focused on cannot exist and so comparing ourselves to an impossible perfection we can never reach is foolish. The reality is that true altruism cannot exist, but that doesn't take away from the very real ways in which people asymptotically approach altruism. If someone does something good for you they didn't just do it because they were selfish, but because they actually wanted to help you, even if they also benefitted from that. While selfishness is one motivator, reducing all of our motivators to mere selfishness is to deny the complex reality of all the various reasons we do things. Again, it is the left hemisphere that breaks the world down into parts and hyper-fixates on the one that it believes matters most. It is the right hemisphere that is able to hold reality at complexity, and see that just because one motivator is selfishness, doesn't mean there aren't other motivators that matter just as much and sometimes even more. We have to take in the gestalt, the whole, if we want to understand human motivation. So applying that to the question you have, yes women obviously have standards, but so do you. Are there women whose physical appearance would have you reject them no matter how good of a person they were? Does that mean you love the beautiful woman you marry any less? Our standards create the conditions by which we can create a good, satisfying relationship and it is within that context that "true love" can flower. However much there were standards that needed to be set, that love is no less real because what you consider "real true love" is a perfection that cannot exist. Why create resentful, bitter ideologies around non-existent realities?

It can't be forced, but it can be cultivated. Here's a simple exercise I did when I was recovering from body image issues. I'd stand in front of the mirror after weighing myself and say, "I love you no matter how much you weigh" or "I love you no matter what you look like". A negative thought would arise and rather than hating or rejecting that thought, I'd say, "thank you, I love you even if that's true. I appreciate you trying to help." You have to recognize that even the most hateful thoughts in your head are just trying to help. They have been splintered off and given self-negative or other-negative roles based on the experience that fragmented them. From that perspective then, they really do deserve your love, appreciation, and forgiveness. In some cases you must even ask them for forgiveness. We think we should respond to self-hate with hate, but that just becomes more self-hate. Love your self-hate and you are adding more love. That doesn't mean you agree with those parts, but you just calmly thank them and love them, and then continue to love whatever part you feel you can't love, whether that's weight, a lack of money, a lack of social skills, a lack of intelligence, a lack of whatever. One thing to be careful of is whether or not this exercise becomes overwhelmingly dysregulating for your body. If you find that this happens then take a break and go meditate, trying your best to recenter yourself and calm your agitated body down. It'll be hard work no matter what, but know and honour your limits. Self-love is a verb, so do the actions that make you feel more loving of yourself. One thing I do is take a hot bath with a book and relax as best as I can. Learning to love yourself won't make your dating struggles magically go away, but when done in tandem with nose to the grindstone action, this self-love will absolutely help you improve faster, and help you attract and be attracted to value-aligned, conscious women. By the way, I just wanted to commend you for your response to this thread. You put yourself out there to express your concerns and when people responded to you in sometimes hostile ways you kept your cool and took in their criticisms. Definitely feel proud and self-loving for that. Being assertive and standing up for your perspective is an indispensable tool in life, but so is knowing when to soften and integrate the perspectives of others. I think you've demonstrated that well here.