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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Whitehead, Wilber, and the Fallacy of Cosmic Creativity

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

I. Introduction: The Illusion of Explanation

We all seek explanations. To explain something is to make the mysterious less mysterious by relating it to something better understood. This is not merely an academic exercise; it's how knowledge progresses. The history of science is, in large part, the story of explaining apparent teleology and complexity in terms of underlying mechanisms—gravity replacing angels, evolution replacing divine design, neurons replacing souls.

Yet throughout this journey, some modes of thought reverse this process. Rather than explaining complexity, they install it at the ground floor. Rather than asking how intelligence, creativity, or consciousness arise, they treat these as fundamental categories of reality. This is not explanation but its rhetorical simulacrum. It commits the ancient fallacy of petitio principii—begging the question. And though the language may have evolved, the fallacy persists, especially in today's spiritualized philosophies of mind and cosmos.

This essay critiques the question-begging tendency in speculative metaphysics, focusing especially on Alfred North Whitehead and Ken Wilber. It argues that elevating creativity or intelligence to the status of ultimate explanation not only fails to illuminate these phenomena—it arrests inquiry and replaces causal explanation with conceptual sanctification.

II. What Is Question-Begging?

Question-begging is a fallacy in which the conclusion of an argument is assumed in its premises, usually without the assumption being stated explicitly. It often hides behind abstract language, making it difficult to detect.

A simple example:

Q: “Why is the Bible true?”

A: “Because it's the word of God.”

Q: “How do we know it's the word of God?”

A: “Because the Bible says so.”

This circularity is comically obvious in theology, but it becomes more subtle in metaphysics, where poorly defined terms and poetic license can obscure what is really happening. For example, to claim that “evolution is driven by Eros” or “the cosmos is inherently intelligent” sounds explanatory, but often merely redescribes the very phenomena under scrutiny.

In science, explanations progress by reducing the complex to the simple, the opaque to the observable. A good explanation renders the puzzling comprehensible in terms of mechanisms we already grasp. In metaphysical thought, the temptation is often to reverse this—to lift the puzzle into the heavens, call it “first principle,” and declare it self-evident. This tendency is both intellectually comforting and profoundly misleading.

III. Creativity and Intelligence: Problems, Not Principles

Creativity and intelligence are paradigmatic examples of what should be explained, not invoked.

When we say something is creative, we are usually describing an emergent behavior: a poem never written before, a novel biological adaptation, or a technological breakthrough. These are outcomes of complex systems operating under constraints. We have naturalistic accounts of how variation, recombination, and selection can produce novelty. To simply declare “creativity is fundamental” short-circuits this investigation. It replaces mechanism with mystique.

Likewise, intelligence is a highly structured, information-processing capability—something rare, contingent, and complex. It arises in evolved brains and (in limited ways) in artificial systems. Intelligence is a late arrival, not a first principle. To place it at the beginning of the explanatory chain is not only premature; it reverses the proper direction of inquiry.

In both cases, we are mistaking emergent phenomena for foundational ontologies. This is a kind of metaphysical cargo cult: we mimic the form of explanation without its substance.

IV. Whitehead's Metaphysical Creativity

Alfred North Whitehead, one of the 20th century's most ambitious metaphysical thinkers, placed creativity at the heart of his speculative cosmology. In Process and Reality, he describes creativity as “the universal of universals,” the ultimate category from which all actual occasions arise. Every unit of becoming is a self-determining act of novelty, a “creative advance into novelty.”

On the surface, this may seem profound. But consider the structure of the claim. Why does the world exhibit novelty? Because reality is fundamentally creative. But what does “creativity” mean here? It is defined not by mechanism, but by the very novelty it is meant to explain.

In other words, Whitehead is not explaining creativity—he is metaphysically declaring it. The moment we ask how creative processes function, we are forced to abandon Whitehead's abstractions and look for scientific models: evolutionary biology, complexity theory, neurodynamics. Whitehead offers a poetic framework, not an account grounded in causal processes.

Worse, his metaphysics is insulated from empirical scrutiny. Since every actual occasion is said to be a unit of creative becoming, all novelty is taken as evidence of his cosmology. But that's not how science works. A theory must predict novelty from its principles, not simply accommodate it after the fact.

V. Wilber's Eros and the Repackaging of Mystery

Ken Wilber inherits Whitehead's process metaphysics but gives it a more explicitly spiritual and developmental twist. In his Integral Theory, evolution is not just driven by chance and necessity—it is guided by an intrinsic drive toward higher complexity and consciousness. Wilber calls this drive Eros, framing it as the spiritual impulse of the cosmos to realize itself more fully.

Here again, the explanatory logic is backwards. Wilber observes that evolution has, over time, led to greater depth (atoms → molecules → cells → humans) and declares that this depth must be the result of a directional force. But this is merely a projection: he sees a pattern and posits a principle that mirrors it. It is less an explanation than a metaphysical echo.

Worse, Wilber often conflates poetic description with causal analysis. “Eros” is a rich metaphor—but Wilber treats it as ontological fact. He uses it to critique scientific accounts of evolution as reductionist or insufficient, but provides no mechanisms, no testable hypotheses, no operational definitions. He simply says: “Complexity keeps increasing—Eros must be real.”

This is classic question-begging: the phenomenon to be explained (increasing complexity) is rebranded as its own explanation (a drive toward complexity). The mystery is not solved, merely divinized.

VI. Related Examples in Contemporary Thought

Panpsychism

Claim: “Consciousness is everywhere, because even electrons have experiential aspects.”

Problem: We don't explain consciousness; we simply distribute it. It universalizes the unexplained rather than demystifying it.

Fine-Tuning and the Cosmic Mind

Claim: “The universe appears fine-tuned for life; therefore, a mind must have designed it.”

Problem: This treats life and mind as privileged endpoints rather than chance outcomes among many. It smuggles teleology into cosmology.

Kastrup's Idealism

Claim: “All reality is mental; matter is a dissociated alter of universal consciousness.”

Problem: This collapses the distinction between observer and observed. Consciousness is taken as basic without explaining how mental states yield objective structure.

Sheldrake's Morphic Fields

Claim: “Organisms inherit form and behavior via morphic resonance from past similar forms.”

Problem: Morphic fields are posited to explain pattern and memory but are themselves unexplained and empirically unsupported—effectively just renaming the pattern.

In each case, what should be explained (complexity, mind, form) is turned into a metaphysical axiom. These systems often immunize themselves from critique by adopting a rhetorical posture of “going deeper” than science—but depth is not a substitute for clarity.

VII. The Cost of Mystification

Why does this matter? Because how we explain the world shapes what we are able to know. Question-begging metaphysics cloaks itself in profundity while avoiding the hard work of explanation. It offers closure when we need openness. It trades epistemic humility for metaphysical grandeur.

Moreover, this mode of thinking carries moral and educational risks. It encourages us to see the universe not as something to understand but as something to revere. It shifts our posture from investigation to worship, from hypothesis to hymn.

This may serve existential or spiritual needs, but it obstructs the pursuit of genuine understanding.

VIII. Toward Better Explanations

Good explanations go downward—they reduce the complex to the simple, not by trivializing it but by identifying the generative rules. They show how apparent purpose can arise from purposeless processes. This was Darwin's achievement: to show how blind variation and selection could generate the illusion of design.

The best explanations are also testable, falsifiable, and progressive. They clarify the conditions under which phenomena occur. They expose assumptions rather than bury them in metaphysical fog.

By contrast, to declare intelligence or creativity “fundamental” is to stop asking questions. It ends the conversation just when it ought to begin.

IX. Conclusion: The Romance of Explanation or the Seduction of Mystery?

The impulse to treat intelligence or creativity as ultimate realities is understandable. These qualities seem miraculous. But when we raise them to first principles, we are not deepening our understanding—we are disguising our ignorance. We are putting a crown on mystery and calling it God, Eros, or Creativity.

Whitehead and Wilber offer sophisticated, poetic cosmologies. But they beg the question in deeply consequential ways. They install the very mysteries that science and philosophy ought to explain. They elevate the unexplained to the status of the sacred.

But sacredness is not a substitute for explanation. And reverence should never preclude reason. If we wish to understand the universe—and not merely mythologize it—we must resist the temptation to make our deepest questions into metaphysical answers. We must let intelligence and creativity remain mysteries long enough to truly explain them.