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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).

Eros in the Gross Realm

Why Structural Hierarchies Cannot Rescue Wilber

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

John Abramson's recent response "Why Eros Looks Mysterious from the Gross Realm" to my critique of Ken Wilber's Eros introduces a bold new claim: that the pattern Wilber intuits—apparent directionality and increasing complexity in evolution—arises inevitably from the structural grammar of mature mathematics. He argues that higher levels in a formal hierarchy contain and exceed lower levels, producing constraints that make certain configurations more probable in the Gross realm. From this perspective, Eros is not a mystical force but a structural inevitability visible only from the correct level of abstraction. This argument is formally sophisticated and intellectually ambitious. But it does not alter the central point: from the perspective of biological science, Eros contributes nothing to the explanation of evolution.

Why Mathematics Cannot Replace Mechanism

Abramson's hierarchy functions as a meta-constraint: it suggests that some patterns are “inevitable” once a higher-level relational structure exists. The problem is that this claim operates entirely outside empirical biology. Natural selection already explains the emergence of complex adaptations through observable mechanisms: variation, inheritance, and differential survival. These mechanisms are measurable, predictive, and falsifiable.

By contrast, the “hierarchy” Abramson invokes is abstract, non-empirical, and untestable in biological terms. Whether or not a formal hierarchy exists in Cantor sets or category theory has no impact on how genes, populations, and ecosystems operate. The pattern of increasing complexity in evolution emerges from environmental pressures and stochastic variation, not from the formal properties of abstract mathematical sets.

In other words, structural mathematics may describe patterns in the abstract, but it cannot serve as a causal mechanism in Darwinian evolution. Evolution occurs in time, in populations, and in real environments. A formal hierarchy that is visible only from a higher-level abstraction cannot produce mutations, selective pressures, or differential reproduction.

The Gross/Subtle Distinction Fails for Biology

Abramson also introduces the Gross/Subtle distinction: the idea that the higher level contains the lower, producing effects invisible from within the lower level. He likens this to contemplative action, prayer, or meditation: Gross-level interventions appear ineffective because their causal source is Subtle.

This framing, however, is irrelevant to Darwinian evolution. Evolution is observed in populations, not in the consciousness of practitioners. The mechanism of natural selection operates entirely at the Gross level. There is no Subtle-level entity directing which variants survive. Claiming that a higher-level structural grammar “contains” the Gross realm is essentially a metaphysical overlay—it does not add empirical explanatory power. It simply relocates the mystery from the natural world to the abstract world of formal mathematics.

The lesson is clear: even if Eros can be modeled as a structural inevitability at a meta-mathematical level, it does not influence the empirical mechanisms that produce adaptations. It is conceptually elegant but scientifically inert.

Patterns Are Not Mechanisms

A recurring mistake in both Wilber's and Abramson's interpretations is the confusion between pattern and mechanism. Darwin observed that complexity accumulates in evolution, and natural selection explains how this occurs. Wilber observes the same pattern and calls it Eros; Abramson observes the same pattern and locates it in hierarchical mathematics. But observing a pattern is not the same as explaining it.

Natural selection is causal: it generates observable consequences, makes predictions, and is testable in experiments and field studies. Eros, whether framed as mystical force or structural inevitability, does none of these things in the biological domain. It names a pattern, not the process that produces it.

Debunking the Prayer Experiment

Abramson extends his structural hierarchy argument into the realm of contemplative practice, claiming that Gross-level interventions—prayer, meditation, or other intentional acts—appear ineffective because their causal source resides in a higher, Subtle-level hierarchy. He cites studies like the STEP trial (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer, 2006) to argue that null results at the Gross level reflect limitations of the experimental design rather than failure of the phenomenon itself.

This move, however, is deeply problematic. First, it shifts the target of proof entirely out of the empirical domain. Gross-level interventions, regardless of their metaphysical framing, are precisely what any claim about physical causation must demonstrate. Claiming that effects originate at a Subtle level makes the phenomenon untestable in principle. It transforms prayer from a candidate causal agent into a tautological metaphysical assertion: if something is observed, it was because the intervention was “Subtle enough,” and if nothing is observed, it is attributed to coincidence or statistical noise.

Second, Abramson's argument relies on arbitrary criteria of practitioner depth—verified meditative states, EEG markers, or physiological signatures. These criteria are neither standardized nor directly connected to observable Gross-level effects on evolutionary or biological processes. Selecting subjects based on these unverifiable markers is effectively circular: the practitioner is “proven effective” only if the desired effect manifests, which is precisely what the study claims to predict.

Third, the STEP trial itself provides strong evidence against any Gross-level causal efficacy of prayer. Even with over 1,800 patients randomized and over 2,300 intercessors, no statistically significant improvement in outcomes was observed. Abramson attempts to dismiss this by claiming the participants were insufficiently “Subtle,” but this is not an empirical rebuttal—it is an immunization strategy. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable under observable conditions; relocating the mechanism to an inaccessible hierarchy removes any genuine potential for falsification.

Finally, the analogy between prayer and evolution collapses under scrutiny. Evolution operates at the Gross level in populations over generations, and its mechanisms—mutation, recombination, selection—are measurable. Postulating that a “higher-level” hierarchy or Subtle influence shapes biological outcomes adds nothing to the causal account. Unlike statistical models in population genetics, Abramson's hierarchy predicts nothing testable about allele frequencies, speciation rates, or adaptive trajectories. It is a metaphysical overlay, not a scientific advance.

In short, the prayer experiment does not rescue Eros or structural hierarchies as a mechanism. It highlights the limits of Gross-level inquiry, but it cannot be translated into a causal account of evolution, where observable mechanisms already suffice. Claims about Subtle-level efficacy, unverifiable practitioner states, and structural reflections function rhetorically rather than scientifically. They underscore exactly why Wilber's Eros and Abramson's proposed mathematical hierarchy fail as explanations for real-world biological phenomena.

One further result of the STEP study makes Abramson's appeal to prayer even more problematic. Not only did intercessory prayer fail to improve outcomes, patients who were explicitly informed that they were being prayed for actually experienced slightly worse outcomes. Complication rates in this group were higher than in both the control group and the group that might or might not have been prayed for. The most plausible explanation offered by the researchers was psychological: knowing that one is the object of prayer may increase anxiety (“My condition must be serious if people are praying for me”) or performance pressure (“I should recover because others expect it”). Whatever the precise mechanism, the finding underscores a crucial point: when prayer is tested under controlled conditions, its measurable effects appear either neutral or mildly negative, not subtly beneficial. Invoking an invisible “Subtle-level” mechanism therefore does not merely fail to explain the data—it runs directly against the most robust empirical result available.[1]

Conclusion: Darwin Remains Unthreatened

John Abramson's hierarchical formalism is an intriguing intellectual exercise. It may illuminate philosophical or experiential questions about consciousness, meditation, or first-person realization. But it does not alter the scientific explanation of evolution.

Darwin's mechanism—variation filtered by selection—is sufficient to explain complexity without appealing to teleology, subtle realms, or hierarchical inevitabilities. Eros, whether mystical or mathematical, remains irrelevant to biology. It cannot predict, model, or causally generate adaptations in populations. It is, at best, a poetic or philosophical interpretation of patterns that are already fully accounted for by natural selection.

Wilber's Eros may persist as an appealing metaphysical narrative, and Abramson's structural hierarchy may provide an elegant abstract framework. But neither challenges the empirical sufficiency of Darwin's mechanism. In the Gross realm where evolution operates, Darwin is still right and Wilber is still wrong.

Epilogue: The Irony of Mathematical Rescue

There is an ironic twist in the discussion of mathematics and evolution. While Abramson attempts to use abstract hierarchies to “rescue” Wilber's Eros, Darwin's real legacy was already rescued and extended by mathematics—but in a very different way. The Modern Synthesis of the 20th century unified Darwinian selection with Mendelian genetics precisely through formal, quantitative reasoning. Population genetics, statistical models, and later computational simulations made natural selection measurable, predictive, and rigorously testable.

Mathematics did not introduce a cosmic drive, a hierarchical metaphysical structure, or a new force of Eros. Instead, it made Darwin's mechanism operational, allowing biologists to calculate allele frequencies, predict evolutionary trajectories, and understand the interplay of selection, drift, mutation, and gene flow. It was mathematics that salvaged Darwin from misinterpretations and speculative metaphysics—not abstractions of “higher-level hierarchies” beyond the empirical world.

The irony is clear: Wilber's Eros is meant to fill a gap that Darwin never left. The pattern of increasing complexity, which Wilber and Abramson locate in metaphysical or structural terms, is already accounted for within the real, mathematically formalized mechanisms of evolutionary biology. Darwin's insight, amplified by the Modern Synthesis, needed no rescue from cosmic or structural forces.

In attempting to give Eros a rigorous foundation, Abramson inadvertently highlights just how unnecessary it is. Darwin, armed with mathematics properly applied to his own theory, remains empirically sufficient, conceptually elegant, and unimpeachable in the Gross realm where evolution actually unfolds.

NOTES

[1] Herbert Benson et al., "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: a multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer", Am Heart J. 2006 Apr;151(4):934-42:

Conclusions: Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.