Outline of A Brief History of Everything

Introduction

• Sex vs. Gender
• Sex characteristics can not be erased
• Biological differences so essential they invade cultural differences
• Differences between genders now accepted
• Genders should each be more like each other
• Must value sex/gender differences, not eliminate them
• Testosterone's biological determination: fuck or kill
• Oxytoxin: women's biological determination: relationship drug
• Quick sex vs. relating
• Men must be educated to be sensitive
• Women must be taught autonomy
• Evolution of genders: they go beyond what went before: transcend and include

• Male-oriented society: patriarchy
• Inescapable circumstances/unavoidable arrangement
• Decontruction of patriarchy: a state of affairs no longer necessary
• Standard response: men dominant pigs/women sheep
• Future: co-creation of social forms by men and women

• Five or six stages of human consciousness
• Biological constants
• Herding society/miscarriage example of necessary patriarchy

• First map evolutionary constants
• Second how these influenced cultural evolution
• Using this knowledge to see what should be

• Common threads through evolution from matter to life to mind
• Spirit-in-action: the entire process of unfolding
• Higher stages of consciousness a part of evolution

• Ascending: otherworldly, glorifies the One and Emptiness
• Descending: thisworldly, glorifies the Many and Form
• Flatland: sensory and empirical; no potentials
• Descended World: sense only
• Nonduality: tying the two worlds together is the goal
• Kosmic War: each side tearing the Kosmos to suit their needs

CHAPTER 1

• Will trace evolution of all from Big Bang
• Orienting generalizations: commonly held, agreed upon fundamental generalizations that help us see a topic in perspective
• Example: 3 stages of human development: pre-con, conventional, post-con, most people agree that this is a general pattern we all grow through

• Kosmos: the patterned nature or process of all domains of existence, emphasis on pattern and away from the physical, sensible world
• Kosmos is not just the physical, but the emergent and the process
• Characteristics of evolution: twenty tenets or patterns

• Tenet 1: Reality is composed of holon or whole/parts
• Atomists vs Wholists: the answer? neither
• Holons all the way up and down, infinitely
• What all holons have in common: the twenty tenets

• Tenet 2: all holons share certain characteristics
• Maintaining wholeness and partness
• Maintaining wholeness: Agency
• Maintaining partness: Communion
• Failure to do so: extinction: cease to be
• Agency and communion: horizontal capacities

• Self-transcedence and self-dissolution
• Wing example, punctuated or emergent evolution, inexplicable
• Self-transcendence: nobody knows how it happens: drive built into Kosmos

• Four drives summary: agency, communion, self-dissolution, self-trans
• Other twenty tenets trace play out of four drives
• Unity of evolution: continuous and discontinous
• Continous patterns throughout evolution
• Discontinous emergents by evolution

• Emergence of new holons: self-transcendence
• Reductionism
• Ultimate catagories (Whitehead): creativity, one, many
• Or (Wilber) creativity and holons
• Tenet 3: holons emerge
• Self-transcending creativity: Spirit
• Chance in traditional science undermined by Big Bang
• Science: chance and infinite time create the universe
• Chance is what the self-transcendencing drive of Kosmos overcomes
• Telos: Kosmos has direction, a formative drive
• Kosmos' ground: Emptiness, Kosmos' drive: Form into Holons
• Emptiness, Creativity, Holons
• Spirit or Emptiness is unqualifiable, but not inert and unyielding

• Religious Creationists

• Tenet 4: Holons emerge holarchically
• Hierarchy: dominator and natural
• Natural hierarchy: order of increasing wholeness
• Pathological/dominator hierarchies

• Holism that dumps all hierarchy or holarchy
• Feminist and ecophilosophers who claim ranking is oppressive
• Performative Contradiction: fallacy of creating ranking when ridding of it
• Holons inescapable

• Tenet 5: Each emergent holon transcends but includes its predecessor
• Nature is a process of transcend and include, transcend and include

CHAPTER 2

• Lower in higher, higher not in lower: hierarchy
• Test for establishing hierarchy: if you destroy a holon, all higher will be destroyed too
• Hierarchy is therefore not a relative "value judgement"
• Test used to establish hierarchy of: physio, bio, and nous spheres

• Depth: number of levels of hierarchy
• Span: number of holons on a level
• Level is arbitrary, placement is not
• Tenet 8: evolution produces: greater depth, less span
• Common confusion: bigness or size or span valued as depth, backwards
• Since the higher transcends and includes the lower, less of higher

• Spirit is the highest level; transcends and includes all
• Ever-present at every level; the paper on which all holarchy is written

• Environmental ethics
• We are made of lower holons, so must preserve them i.e. in self interest
• Mystical experience of All: Kosmic consciousness
• Flatland holist focus on equality of being and miss perception of depth that undermines the idea of "intrinsic value"
• concept of hierarchy can be used to make practical decisions about how to live

• Tenet 12: the basic drive of evolution is to increase depth
• Consciousness: what depth looks like from within

• The end of evolution

CHAPTER 3

• Foraging societies: no difference in status
• Invention of father: bridge between family, reproductive and hunting, productive
• Carrying capacity of tribes; pre-agriculture

• Ecological soundness of early societies

• Our origins in the tribe

• Move to horticulture: matrifocal
• Ecofeminists and horticultural societies
• Ecomasculinists vs ecofeminists

• Dialectic of progress

• Shift to agrarian society, patriarchy, sexual polarization
• Male production/female reproduction
• Post-scarcity and the rise of other industry, military, contemplation,

• Modernity and Industrialization
• Women's movement
• Attuning to the ecology: potential for mass destruction

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