• home
• about
• new
• essays
• AI
• book

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).

Cosmologies in Question

A 2025 Dispatch from the Integral Battlefield

Frank Visser / Grok

The war over the soul of Integral Theory never really ended—it just went underground, migrated to YouTube, Substack, and late-night Discord servers, and grew weirder. What began in the 1990s as Ken Wilber's audacious attempt to marry East and West, science and spirit, has splintered into three irreconcilable camps by 2025: the loyalists who still treat Wilber-5 as holy writ, the post-Wilberian mystics who have fled to Whitehead and panexperientialism, and the hard-nosed skeptics who insist the entire edifice is 21st-century vitalism wearing meditation beads.

This essay is a field report from the no-man's-land between those trenches, stitched together from a single long conversation that began with a modest YouTube link and ended with the deepest fault lines in contemporary Integral thought.

I. The Opening Salvo

It all started innocently enough: someone dropped a link to a 2020 debate titled “Cosmologies in Question” between Matthew Segall (Whitehead's most eloquent living defender) and David Long (self-appointed architect of “Integral 2.0”). Two and a half hours of polite philosophical combat, moderated by Bruce Alderman, in which Long demanded a fully scientific, emergentist, non-teleological Integral Theory, while Segall defended a living, experiencing, creatively advancing cosmos lured by immanent value.

The debate is the moment the mask slipped. Long's position was essentially Frank Visser's in a younger body: strip Integral of its metaphysical excesses, ground it in empirical biology and neuroscience, and stop pretending the universe has a built-in Eros. Segall's reply was pure process-relational jazz: the universe is made of “drops of experience,” not dead particles; creativity is ontologically primitive; God is the poet who whispers the best possible next note but never forces the solo.

The viewer who watched that video in 2025 could not help but notice how perfectly it staged the central drama that has haunted Integral Theory for thirty years: Is creativity a brute fact or cosmic yearning? Is the arrow of evolution blind or secretly guided by Spirit remembering itself?

II. The Whiteheadian Temptation

Segall's book Physics of the World-Soul (2021) is the most seductive recruit in that drama. It is not a commentary on Process and Reality; it is a love letter to a cosmos that feels, decides, and adventures at every scale. Electrons are not conscious, but they are occasions of experience. Time is real. The future is open. God is neither omnipotent tyrant nor absentee landlord but the everlasting companion who saves every joy and sorrow from oblivion.

For a generation raised on Wilber's quadrants and levels, Whitehead offers something Wilber never quite could: a rigorous metaphysical solution to the hard problem of consciousness that does not require a metaphysical return ticket to 19th-century German idealism. No combination problem, no magic emergence, no hand-waving about “subtle energies.” Just events inheriting events, societies of occasions forming enduring objects, and a divine lure that makes beauty objectively better than ugliness without ever coercing.

It is gorgeous. It is also, as the skeptics never tire of pointing out, completely untestable.

III. Enter the Skeptic: Frank Visser's Long War

Which brings us to the third army in the field: the empiricists, the evolutionary biologists, the analytic philosophers, and—standing calmly at their head with a folder full of footnotes—Frank Visser.

Visser has been writing the same basic essay for twenty-five years, but he keeps finding new ways to make it hurt. The argument, distilled, is brutal:

• Integral's Eros is creationism in drag.
• The claim that evolution is Spirit waking up is pre-Darwinian romance.
• The “lure toward complexity and consciousness” is unfalsifiable, anthropically biased, and contradicted by the actual biomass distribution of Earth (mostly bacteria, forever).
• Every time Wilber or his heirs say “immanent” and then immediately add “but also transcendent,” they confess the teleology they swore was gone.

Visser's tone is never shrill; it is weary, almost sorrowful. He genuinely loved the early Wilber—the Wilber who could hold Hegel and systems theory in the same breath. But the later Wilber who retreated to Denver, surrounded himself with paying devotees, and declared criticism a lower level of development? That Wilber broke Visser's heart. The essays on Integral World are less attacks than autopsy reports.

IV. The Smoking Gun

And then there is the moment everyone in the Integral underground knows by heart: Wilber trying to thread the needle between immanence and transcendence.

“Spirit is not pushing the universe from behind,” he writes in one breath. “It is the very process of evolution itself—immanent through and through.”

And then, in the very next paragraph: “Of course Spirit is also transcendent, the ever-receding Goal that pulls the process forward.”

Game over.

As Visser drily notes, once you admit the process has a built-in Goal that it is trying to remember, you are no longer describing self-organization. You are describing a cosmic drama with a scripted finale. The word “immanent” becomes a linguistic fig leaf.

The Current State of Play (November 2025)

So where are we?

• Ken Wilber is largely silent, publishing only to his private subscriber list, reportedly in fragile health.
• The official Integral Life organization soldiers on with coaching certifications and online courses, but the big metaphysical questions have been quietly de-emphasized.
• Matthew Segall and the “process Integral” crowd are ascendant among the spiritually hungry millennials and zoomers who find Wilber's later work too hierarchical and too dated.
• David Long has pivoted from “Integral 2.0” to founding the Non-Reductionism school — a systems-oriented, cybernetic, anti-vitalist yet anti-mechanist framework that quietly keeps the debate alive on YouTube and in coaching circles.
• Frank Visser, now in his late sixties, still updates Integral World with monastic regularity, still hosts every critic from gentle reformers to scorched-earth atheists, still waits for someone—anyone—in the Integral community to run a proper empirical study instead of another meditation retreat.

The battlefield is quiet, but the war is not over. It has simply moved from the big stages to the footnotes, the Discord channels, the late-night arguments about whether an electron really “feels” anything.

VI. An Honest Reckoning

Here is the uncomfortable truth that none of the three camps wants to say out loud:

• The mystics are right that a purely mechanistic universe is existentially sterile.
• The scientists are right that teleological lures are unfalsifiable.
• And the developmental psychologists are right that human beings do seem to grow through recognizable stages whether Wilber mapped them perfectly or not.

The synthesis we were promised in 1995 has not arrived. Instead we have three beautiful, partially true stories shouting past one another.

Perhaps the real integral task of the 21st century is not to choose between Whitehead's drops of experience, Wilber's Eros, and Visser's Darwin—but to hold the grief of knowing that none of them can be proven, none of them can be refuted, and all of them are necessary if we are to live in this astonishing, aching world without going mad.

Until someone builds that bridge, the debate will continue, politely, ruthlessly, and forever, in the comment sections of obscure YouTube videos and on the pages of a website called Integral World that still refuses to die.

Because even the skeptics, in their heart of hearts, keep reading.