INTEGRAL WORLD MAILING LIST
 
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Newsletter Nr. 1.396
Amsterdam, August 13, 2025


The Drive That Wasn't There  Ken Wilber's Science Problem and the Culture of Intellectual Apathy Around It - Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Ken Wilber's recent book Finding Radical Wholeness repeats, almost verbatim, an idea he has been promoting for decades: that the universe harbors an “intrinsic drive” toward greater order, complexity, and consciousness. In doing so, he once again enlists the names of respected scientists—such as Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine and complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman—as if they were allies in his metaphysical project. And once again, he reduces the Second Law of Thermodynamics to a straw man, implying that the universe's arrow is not toward disorder but toward “winding up.”

This is not merely a scientific error; it is an entrenched pattern of misappropriation that Frank Visser and others have been critiquing for years. What is striking is Wilber's seeming deafness to these sustained objections, and the almost total absence of critical scrutiny among his student base. It is a case study in intellectual apathy—how a community that prides itself on “integral thinking” can live comfortably with a scientifically indefensible foundation for its worldview.

Read more:
https://www.integralworld.net/visser557.html