Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Harmonizing Evolutionary Convergence

Glossary Menus

Integral Operating System

Ken Wilber, the pre-eminent integral philosopher, coined the term Integral Operating System (IOS) in Integral Spirituality in 2006 to mean “a neutral framework” that “can be used to bring more clarity, care, and comprehensiveness to virtually any situation”.

Ken subsequently ran a 10-part online training course, titled ‘Superhuman Operating System’, on how his followers could reach what he calls their ‘superhuman potential’, following this instruction: “Download a Revolutionary New Operating System for Your Mind that Illuminates the Full Spectrum of Your Higher Potentials, and Awakens the Greatest Possible Version of You.”

AQALHe introduced his basic IOS in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality in 1995 as a four-quadrants model, called AQAL, short for “all quadrants, all levels”, which is short for “all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types”, illustrated here as a two-dimensional example of the Cross of Duality in Integral Relational Logic.

Because this universal system of thought has emerged in consciousness through a thought experiment in which I imagine that I am a computer that switches itself off and on again without any bootstrap program to load the operating system, Integral Relational Logic can be regarded as the ultimate Integral Operating System.

So AQAL is a guest operating system, more like operating systems running under IBM’s Virtual Machine operating system (VM) in the 1960s and 70s, still evolving, than VM, itself. So, Integral Relational Logic is to AQAL, as VM is to modern operating systems, like macOS, Windows, Unix, and Linux, which is running this website.

As a rider, it is important to note that Integral Relational Logic, as an all-powerful Integral Operating System, provides a solution to a problem that many philosophers believe to be unsolvable. This is the Theory of Everything, which Ken wrote about in 2000, saying:

This book is a brief overview of a Theory of Everything. All such attempts, of course, are marked by the many ways in which they fail. The many ways in which they fall short, make unwarranted generalizations, drive specialists insane, and generally fail to achieve their stated aim of holistic embrace. It’s not just that the task is beyond any one human mind; it’s that the task is inherently undoable: knowledge expands faster than ways to categorize it. The holistic quest is an ever-receding dream, a horizon that constantly retreats as we approach it, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that we will never reach.

Christian de Quincey agreed that humans could never reach the end of the rainbow in Wholeness, when he wrote a critical appreciation of Ken Wilber’s Collected Works in 2001, then the managing editor of the Noetic Sciences Review, the journal of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He wrote that the genuine theory of everything is unattainable:

Because you cannot create a model or a map that contains itself. Where, for example, would the four-quadrants model fit into the four-quadrants model? Mathematical and logical proofs developed by Bertrand Russell and Kurt Gödel—along the lines that no set of all sets can itself be a set of the same logical category, type, or level—invalidates the claim. Both Alfred Korzybski and Gregory Bateson immortalized this dilemma with the phrase “the map is not the territory.” In this case (Wilber’s TOE), not only the map, but more crucially, the consciousness that created the map, cannot be found in its own creation. To attempt to make room for it would involve us (and Wilber) in a logical infinite regress. This meta-critique applies to any TOE, of course, not just Wilber’s.

Yet, by generalizing the abstract modelling methods of information systems architects underlying the Internet, it is quite possible to include the map in the territory being mapped, as the introductory page on Contextual Foundation & framework illustrates and explains.

Etymology

See integrity, operate, and system.