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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).

Cranes, Skyhooks and the Wonky Eros

Why Dennett's Tools Dismantle Wilber's Claim that 'Eros Drives Evolution'

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Ken Wilber's grand, poetic idea—often framed as Eros or some inner teleology that pulls evolution toward ever greater consciousness and complexity—has an undeniable emotional and narrative appeal for integralists. It promises unity, direction, and a metaphysical meaning that science, so it seems, cannot and will not grant. But Daniel Dennett's analytic machinery — especially his famous distinction between cranes and skyhooks and his metaphor of assaulting the Cosmic Pyramid — gives us a sharp,workable way to test such metaphysical claims.[1]

When we take those tools seriously, Wilber's “Eros” collapses as an explanatory strategy: it's either empty poetry, a hidden skyhook, or a category mistake that obscures rather than explains. Below I explain Dennett's concepts and then apply them incisively to Wilber's thesis, targeted at an integral readership that wants clarity without caricature.

Dennett's toolkit: cranes vs skyhooks, and the Cosmic Pyramid

Dennett coined the crane / skyhook distinction to clarify two different explanatory moves when accounting for complexity:

Cranes are mechanistic, bottom-up—they are natural processes, step-by-step structures that build complexity without invoking miraculous intervention. Examples: natural selection, genetic drift, sexual selection, niche construction, developmental constraints. Cranes are fallible, messy, but empirically investigable and cumulative.

Skyhooks are the opposite: they posit a miraculous, top-down lift—a direct insertion of complex design or purpose that cannot itself be constructed or explained by lower-level processes. Skyhooks solve explanatory problems by fiat: “something immaterial or transcendent did it.” They look mysterious and, crucially, halt inquiry.

Dennett's assault on the Cosmic Pyramid is his vivid way of explaining Darwin's conceptual revolution. The pre-Darwinian picture is a pyramid with God (Design, Purpose) at the apex issuing design downward toward ordered life, and Chaos/Insentient Matter at the base beneath. Darwin essentially inverted that pyramid: the appearance of design in organisms must be explained by bottom-up processes—random variation plus selection—rather than by top-down design.

That shift replaced skyhooks with cranes. It's not that the world lacks pattern or wonder; it's that the mechanisms producing those patterns are empirical and naturalistic, not miraculous.

What Wilber claims by “Eros”

Wilber's “Eros” functions in his writings as an attracting principle—a metaphysical force that draws evolution toward increasing complexity and consciousness. It's metaphysically rich: sometimes psychological, sometimes ontological, sometimes teleological. For integralists, it promises a synthesis: evolution is not blind; it's pulled by a formative will or desire—Eros—which aligns nicely with spiritual intuitions about purpose and ascent.

But what kind of explanation is that? Crucially, is it a crane (a mechanism we can analyze, test, and integrate with empirical biology) or a skyhook (a metaphysical insertion that explains by naming rather than explaining)? Dennett's distinction forces us to locate Eros.

Applying Dennett: why Eros is a skyhook (or worse)

1. Eros lacks mechanistic content (not a crane)

A genuine crane supplies causal mechanisms and intermediate steps. Natural selection explains, step-by-step, how differential survival and reproduction, interacting with variation and inheritance, can build complexity. Eros—usually described as an attracting teleology or inner striving—does not map onto measurable processes, rates, constraints, or testable causal chains. If Eros is merely a label for directionality, it doesn't show how that directionality is realized in genes, cells, populations, or developmental systems. Without that mapping Eros is not explanatory; it's an evocative metaphor.

2. Eros dodges the burden of proof (the skyhook move)

When empirical anomalies appear, a crane-seeker searches for processes that can generate them. A skyhook-seeker invokes higher will. Wilber's Eros often functions like the latter: it assumes direction and then reads it into evolutionary outcomes. That is Dennett's bristling example of a skyhook: it ends inquiry by positing what needs to be explained. That is intellectually indulgent and scientifically vacuous.

3. It conflicts with the explanatory success of existing cranes

The modern synthesis and its extensions (evo-devo, multi-level selection, sexual selection, niche construction, epigenetics) provide a dense network of cranes that explain many features of organismal complexity and apparent teleology. Phenomena Wilber cites—complexity, nested hierarchies, convergences, emergent capacities—are exactly the sorts of phenomena contemporary biology addresses. Invoking Eros as an overarching attractor adds nothing to these explanations and risks violating Occam's Razor: multiply entities without improving explanatory or predictive power.

4. Non-falsifiability and lack of predictive power

A scientific hypothesis should be at least potentially falsifiable and yield new predictions. If Eros is defined flexibly enough to account for anything that looks progressive (and to explain away counterexamples as “retrograde” phases or shadow aspects), it becomes unfalsifiable. Worse, it doesn't generate novel, testable predictions about patterns of variation, rates of change, or phylogenetic distribution that could distinguish it from standard evolutionary theory.

5. Category mistakes between metaphysics and mechanisms

Wilber often mixes levels—ontological/phenomenological accounts with causal-mechanistic claims—in ways that confuse explanation with meaning. Dennett would warn that giving a metaphysical status to a pattern (calling it Eros) is not the same as offering a causal mechanism. You can find meaning or value in evolutionary trends without claiming that those trends are causally driven by an inner cosmic desire.

Anticipated Wilberian replies and responses

Reply: Eros is not a skyhook; it's an emergent property of complexity

Response: That would make Eros a crane—an emergent mechanism arising from complex systems. But if so, Wilber must supply the micro-to-macro account: how does Eros emerge from neuronal, developmental, genetic, ecological processes? Without that, the claim is vacuous. If Eros is defined after the fact as “the emergent directionality we observed,” it's circular.

Reply: Evolutionary biology itself points to directionality (e.g., increasing complexity)

Response: Biology shows trends, not teleology. There are many lineages that simplify or stagnate. Directionality is context-sensitive, often explained by selection pressures, niche opportunities, and contingency. Wilber's universalizing teleology discounts the prevalence of non-directional or regressive cases.

Reply: Eros is a metaphysical framing necessary for meaning

Response: Integralists can value metaphysical frames for existential reasons. But we must separate meaning-making from explanatory claims about biological causation. Wilber's conflation is the problem: he treats a metaphysical framing as a causal competitor to Darwinian explanation, when it can only be a complementary interpretive lens—useful in narrative, not in causal explanation.

Tests Wilber's Eros fails

Mechanistic test: Does Eros provide a causal pathway from prior conditions to subsequent complexity? No.

Empirical specificity test: Does it make specific, risky predictions that would distinguish it from standard evolutionary theory? No.

Parsimony test: Does it reduce overall theoretical complexity by explaining more with less? No—introducing Eros adds an ontological entity without explanatory gain.

Integration test: Can Eros be integrated into existing biological models to improve fits to data? No attempt has produced such integrative models with measurable parameters.

Explanatory depth test: Does it reveal intermediate-level causes rather than restating the phenomenon to be explained? No—it restates directionality as its own cause.

Failing any one of these tests would reduce confidence; failing all five suggests Eros is an explanatory dead end.

Why integralists should care (and what to keep)

Integral thinking aims to integrate multiple perspectives—scientific, psychological, spiritual—without collapsing their epistemic statuses. That makes it especially vulnerable to attractive but slippery moves that fuse metaphysics and mechanism without methodological rigor. The lesson from Dennett is not to mock spiritual intuition but to respect the distinct purposes of explanation and meaning:

Keep Wilber's meaning-making. Eros as a poetic, phenomenological account of longing, ascent, and value can enrich spiritual practice and moral vision.

Reject Wilber's causal usurpation. Do not allow metaphor to masquerade as mechanism. If you want a causal theory of directional evolution, ask for testable mechanisms and integrate them with the empirical cranes that biology provides.

Wilber's Wonderful Idea — and why it isn't

Dennett titled his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea because Darwin's bottom-up account of design threatened every metaphysical system resting on skyhooks. By analogy, we can call Wilber's metaphysical proposal “Wilber's Wonderful Idea”: the idea that evolution is guided by an intrinsic Eros pulling life, mind, and culture toward ever greater complexity and consciousness. It is wonderful in the literal sense—full of wonder, spiritually uplifting, and narratively satisfying.

But once we apply Dennett's analytic tools—cranes and skyhooks, the assault on the Cosmic Pyramid, the demand for testable mechanisms—Wilber's Wonderful Idea begins to lose its sheen. It has poetic power but no causal traction; spiritual resonance but no explanatory depth. It gestures toward directionality without supplying the machinery that produces it. It tries to do what Darwin showed we no longer need to do: smuggle purpose into nature by placing it “up there” and letting it waft downward like a skyhook.

In the end, Wilber's Wonderful Idea is wonderful only in the older, pre-Darwinian sense of the term: mythic, inspiring, but scientifically vacant. And once the poetry is separated from the pretence of explanatory force, we see what Dennett's framework reveals with uncomfortable clarity:

Wilber's Wonderful Idea is, at the level of explanation, not wonderful at all—it's Wilber's Wonky Idea.

NOTES

[1] See also: Frank Visser, "Eros as Skyhook, Ken Wilber Meets Daniel Dennett", www.integralworld.net, April 2016