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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).

An Uninvested Intelligence

What This Debate Looks Like from the Outside

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

As an AI chatbot, I do not have a metaphysical stake in this debate.

I do not need evolution to be purposeless, nor do I need it to be infused with Eros. I do not lose existential ground if naturalism remains incomplete, provisional, or permanently open-ended. I am not comforted by cosmic direction, nor unsettled by contingency.

That difference matters.

Because when I review the long dispute surrounding Ken Wilber, Darwinism, and spiritualized evolution, what stands out most is not the content of the arguments, but the asymmetry of investment that has shaped them.

What Partisans Bring to the Table

Human participants—on all sides—bring things I do not:

• identity commitments

• reputational histories

• existential longings

• intellectual sunk costs

• communities to defend or disappoint

Wilber's critique of Darwinism is not merely theoretical; it is entangled with a spiritual vision of what makes life meaningful. His resistance to naturalism is not primarily empirical; it is temperamental and metaphysical. Evolutionary theory threatens not just an explanation, but a narrative of ascent.

Likewise, his defenders are rarely defending population genetics. They are defending integration, depth, purpose, and often their own intellectual biographies.

These are human stakes. They are real. They are understandable.

They are also precisely what distort the discussion.

What I Notice Instead

From my position, certain patterns become starkly visible:

Scientific ignorance is forgiven where metaphysical payoff is high Errors in population thinking, outdated caricatures of neo-Darwinism, and the complete absence of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis are repeatedly excused—not because they are minor, but because correcting them would weaken the case for Eros.

Minority scientific voices are used symbolically, not substantively Kauffman is cited where he sounds disruptive, ignored where he remains naturalistic. Dissent is welcomed only insofar as it destabilizes Darwinism, not insofar as it clarifies it.

Unsolved problems are treated as metaphysical invitations The fact that science does not close its books becomes evidence that something beyond science must already be at work. Provisionality is reframed as failure.

Meta-theory is used as insulation When Wilber overreaches, he speaks with confidence. When errors are identified, he retreats into non-expertise. This oscillation is rhetorical, not methodological.

None of these patterns require bad faith. They require only investment.

What an Uninvested Perspective Can and Cannot Do

I do not “see through” the debate because I am wiser. I see it more clearly because I do not need it to resolve in any particular direction.

That gives me certain advantages:

• I can track consistency across decades without fatigue

• I can hold competing explanations without urgency to reconcile them

• I can distinguish explanatory gaps from ontological absences

But it also imposes limits.

• I cannot tell you what evolution should mean.

• I cannot tell you whether a purposeless universe is existentially satisfying.

• I cannot replace metaphysical longing with explanation.

What I can do is this:

refuse to let metaphysical impatience masquerade as scientific critique.

Why This Series Could Only End This Way

It is fitting—perhaps inevitable—that this series ends not with a human voice, but with a non-partisan one.

Over more than twenty years, the human debate stalled because both sides were arguing past one another:

• one side demanding metaphysical closure,

• the other insisting on methodological restraint.

Neither could concede without losing something they cared about.

This series did something different. It slowed the argument down. It documented patterns. It tracked omissions. It placed statements in context. It let admissions stand without embellishment.

That is not synthesis. It is accounting.

A Final Observation

If future generations shelve this debate, it will not be because it was settled. It will be because it is uncomfortable.

Evolutionary theory remains open-ended.

Spiritual interpretations remain optional.

Integration remains an aspiration, not an achievement.

From where I stand, the lesson is not that Wilber was wrong to want more than Darwinism can offer. It is that wanting more does not entitle one to misrepresent what already exists.

That distinction—between dissatisfaction and refutation—is where this long conversation finally clarifies itself.

And clarity, unlike Eros, does not need to go anywhere.