What Is Complex Thought? A Deeper Dive into Edgar Morin with Sean Kelly

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Sean Kelly joins Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey to go deeper into the complex thought of Edgar Morin. Put simply, Kelly says, complex thought is an invitation to a practice of the heart-mind, a way to stay connected and to stay real. Reality is complex, and making sense of it often takes ideas that seem to exclude one another. Faced with that, our habit is to simplify, which is understandable, since we often need to simplify just to get by. But as societies grow more complex, simplification turns harmful. It leads to fragmentation, and fragmentation leads to violence, which Morin understood as a broken relationship. Complex thought is the way back: a way of thinking that holds together what tends to fall apart, and, in Sean Kelly’s words, an invitation to be true to what’s real and to the full potentials of being human.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:01:52 – How Sean Kelly Discovered Morin

00:11:52 – What Is Complex Thought?

00:17:29 – Morin’s Method vs. Descartes’s Method

00:22:36 – Beyond Systems Theory: The Whole Is Both More and Less

00:32:24 – A Worldview Without Triumphalism: Homo Sapiens-Demens

00:44:46 – Consciousness and the Question of Realism

00:53:56 – What Complex Thought Brings to Integrative Metatheory

00:58:53 – What Complex Thought Leaves Out

01:01:57 – Why Hasn’t Morin Been Translated?

01:08:06 – Polycrisis and Metacrisis

What is Archdisciplinarity
Really? with Cory David Barker, Nick Hedlund & Brendan Graham Dempsey

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Cory David Barker joins Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey to go deeper into archdisciplinarity, the study of what the big unifying frameworks have in common. It began with a puzzle: a universal model of structure and a universal model of process seemed to rest on the same underlying recursion, a pattern Barker traces back to Turing and Church. He explains why he writes his arches as theorems and axioms, so people can disagree with them one claim at a time, and why formal science is the field big-picture thinking has most neglected.

Is comparing frameworks a way of finding what they share, or of exposing where they break? And what is it like to live inside a picture of reality that, as Barker puts it, shouldn't exist at all and yet is ridiculously organized?

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:02:28 – From Jung to a Survey of Human Knowledge

00:10:44 – The Genesis of an Arch: Recursion, Turing and Church

00:16:37 – What Archdisciplinarity Adds to the Field

00:25:01 – How Provisional Are the Arches?

00:33:28 – A Story of Reality, or a Grammar of Theories?

00:44:35 – Scanning for Similarities, or for Contradictions?

00:47:10 – What's Missing: Formal Science

00:48:20 – Does Any of This Change the World?

01:04:51 – Living Inside the Ruliad

Alfred North Whitehead's Process Philosophy: A Deeper Dive with Andrew M. Davis, Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Andrew M. Davis joins Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey for a deeper dive into process philosophy. Does interiority emerge somewhere along the evolutionary way, as emergentists hold, or does it go all the way down, as panpsychists do? And if it goes all the way down, what could feeling possibly mean at the level of an atom? Where does Whitehead land between idealism and realism, and would he count as a metamodern neorealist? What is matter, once solidity dissolves into events? And when God arrives as the chief exemplification of the metaphysics rather than an exception to it, does that survive Occam's razor?

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:02:32 – Does Experience Go All the Way Down?

00:03:52 – Prehension: Feeling Without Consciousness

00:08:58 – Is a Rock Feeling Anything?

00:25:09 – Idealist, Dual Aspect Monist, or Realist?

00:30:26 – What Is Matter?

00:32:37 – Whitehead as a Metamodern Neorealist?

00:43:35 – The Bifurcation of Nature

00:49:13 – Whitehead's God: Primordial and Consequent

00:59:37 – Does God Survive Occam's Razor?

01:07:29 – What Process Thought Brings to the Table

Metamodernism: A Deeper Dive with Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm joins Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey for a deep dive into metamodernism. Where does a worldview actually live, in an individual or in a culture, and what do we do with the fact that people are rarely as consistent as the concept assumes? Does a false belief become real the moment it makes something happen? How does a theory of language written for scholars end up shaping the way a whole country argues about facts? The answers keep turning on ontology, and on what "real" is being contrasted with in any given sentence, a question Storm thinks most of us skip. And what does any of this ask of us in the middle of a metacrisis?

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:01:27 – Is Metamodernism a Worldview, or a Metatheory?

00:03:32 – Where Does a Worldview Actually Live?

00:11:48 – Could Metamodernism Reach the Culture?

00:32:46 – Does Metamodernism Need a Realism?

00:36:39 – Storm's Case Against the Word

00:38:19 – Bhaskar's Demi-Real: False Beliefs With Real Effects

00:42:38 – Post-Truth, or Competing Epistemic Authorities?

00:53:37 – Existence Without Reality: Numbers and the Hole in a Donut

01:04:36 – Metamodernism and the Metacrisis

What Are Big Pictures Actually For? w/ Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, Nick Hedlund, Brendan Graham Dempsey

Sean Esbjörn-Hargens joins Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey for a deep dive on Complex Integral Realism, and a bigger question surfaces: what does integrative metatheory actually do in the world? The maps are enormous, and the applications so far are small and slow. Does a bigger picture hand you more leverage, or mostly a clearer view of how little leverage you have? One answer is that the payoff runs through the person doing the looking, where becoming more integratively literate changes how you read a situation long before you try to intervene in it. Another is that a big picture can be normative rather than only descriptive, as in critical realism's emancipatory strand, which names real social pathologies and asks what a better arrangement would concretely look like along with how we would get there from here.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:02:02 – What Is Integrative Metatheory Actually For?

00:04:35 – Origins of Complex Integral Realism

00:07:11 – "I Haven't Seen a Good Application Yet"

00:11:06 – Managing Expectations About What Big Pictures Do

00:15:37 – Integral Life Practice and Emancipatory Social Science

00:20:32 – Concrete Utopianism: Protopia and the Theory of Transition

00:22:35 – Becoming Integratively Literate

00:27:32 – The Who, the How, and the What: Why Method Gets Ignored

00:32:09 – Can Science and Philosophy Be Kept Apart?

00:38:43 – Toward a Complex Integral Realism 2.0

00:43:21 – Where Metamodernism Stands Now

00:53:02 – What CIR Leaves Out: The Anomalous

00:59:52 – What Counts as a Metatheory?

01:04:31 – From Perspective Taking to Perspective Seeking

A Closer Look at Visionary Realism with Nick Hedlund & Brendan Graham Dempsey

Nick Hedlund describes Visionary Realism as an attempt to sketch a worldview adequate to the complexity and sacredness of reality, one built on reverence, humility, and listening. In this episode of the Integration podcast, he talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about what stands in the way: the split Kant first named between what's knowable and what's real, a divide Hedlund traces forward into postmodernism and treats as the hidden engine of the metacrisis.

Visionary Realism grew out of Ken Wilber's integral theory and Roy Bhaskar's critical realism, though Hedlund is clear that neither survives the encounter unchanged. His answer to the Kantian split runs through Bhaskar's distinction between the world as it is and the world as we know it, arriving at a reframing he calls "constellational containment," where mind sits nested within the world rather than sealed off from it. Along the way he makes a case for reading Piaget as a realist, and turns to what "visionary" is doing in the name, drawing on the Promethean myth and Bhaskar's reminder that the world doesn't depend on us the way we depend on it.

Hedlund is also candid about what's still missing, including a fuller theory of value and Bhaskar's later, more spiritual work, an area he's only begun opening up. The episode closes on philosophy as a way of life, and on Hedlund's own question of what his essence actually is. Visionary Realism, he says, is "a philosophy I can live by."

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:02:22 – What Visionary Realism Is

00:07:33 – Promethean Fire and the Limits of What We Make

00:11:41 – The Split Kant Left Behind

00:18:32 – Where Does a Dog Exist?

00:30:44 – Mind Nested Within World

00:46:09 – Participatory, Process, Pluralistic

00:52:19 – What's Still Missing

01:00:19 – Spirituality Without Losing the Secular Mind

01:09:04 – A Philosophy to Live By

Roy Bhaskar's Critical Realism: A Closer Look | w/ Leigh Price, Nick Hedlund, Brendan Graham Dempsey

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Leigh Price sits down with Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey to go further into critical realism than her IAM Research Forum talk had room for. She traces Roy Bhaskar's philosophy through its major phases, from transcendental realism through dialectical critical realism, where his concept of absence resolves long-standing puzzles in the Hegelian and Marxist dialectic.

From there, she unpacks what's often called Bhaskar's "spiritual turn," the philosophy of metaReality: its account of non-duality and re-enchantment, and its debt to the African concept of Ubuntu. She also shares her own contribution to the field, an argument that critical realism functions as a form of systems theory, one it's rarely been credited for.

Price describes the historic dialogues between critical realists and integral theorists, where real synthesis emerged alongside real tension, and recalls working alongside Bhaskar directly, including an unfinished chapter on human flourishing he asked her to write shortly before he died.

The episode closes on critical realism's relevance to the metacrisis, including the case that most of us already reason like critical realists in practice, and what it would take to actually shift the root metaphors we use to make sense of the world.

Timestamps

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:02:15 – The Phases of Critical Realism: From Transcendental Realism to Dialectics

00:03:52 – Discovering Absence: Bhaskar's Breakthrough Beyond Hegel and Marx

00:15:34 – Bhaskar, Marx, and Freud: Emancipation and the Roots of Dialectic

00:22:12 – The Philosophy of metaReality

00:32:05 – Critical Realism as Unrecognized Systems Theory

00:38:24 – Critical Realism Meets Integral Theory

00:52:48 – What's Missing: The Unwritten Chapter on Flourishing

01:02:33 – Critical Realism and the Metacrisis

01:07:29 – Closing Reflections and Gratitude

Going Deeper into Integral Theory | with Bruce Alderman, Nick Hedlund, & Brendan Graham Dempsey

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Bruce Alderman returns for a deeper look at integral theory, continuing the conversation he opened at the IAM Research Forum. Joined by Brendan Graham Dempsey and Nick Hedlund, he traces Wilber's path into integral theory from its roots in transpersonal psychology through the five moving parts of the AQAL model: quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types.

Alderman then turns to where the model runs thin. He walks through its weak connection to evolutionary biology and philosopher Mark Edwards' critique that integral quietly conflates the individual and the collective, tracing how a framework built to hold everything together can end up flattening real differences.

Yet Alderman argues these limits open onto something generative. He introduces his own toolkit for reading any big framework: a lightly-held approach to categories he calls the "a-categorical imperative," and "heno-ontology," a way of letting frameworks like integral theory and critical realism each hold their own ground without one swallowing the rest.

The episode closes on a question left open for the whole Integrative Metatheory 2.0 project: one new synthesized map, or several frameworks working side by side?

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:01:41 – A Primer on Wilberian Integral Theory: From Transpersonal Roots to AQAL

00:16:05 – Where the Model Runs Thin: Science, Evolution, and Mark Edwards' Critique

00:22:05 – Mapping What Came After Wilber

00:29:24 – Inside Bruce's Grammar for Reading Big Ideas

00:44:00 – Heno-ontology: Holding Multiple Frameworks at Once

00:48:00 – Pushback: Does This Flatten Ontology and Epistemology?

00:54:47 – One Map or Many? The Open Question for Integrative Metatheory 2.0

01:17:56 – Closing Thoughts and What's Next

From Matter to Mind: Inside the Unified Theory of Knowledge | Gregg Henriques, Nick Hedlund, Brendan Graham Dempsey

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Dr. Gregg Henriques joins Brendan Graham Dempsey and Nick Hedlund for a deeper dive into the Unified Theory of Knowledge. His earlier presentation at the IAM Research Forum established the philosophical context; this conversation goes inside the model itself.

Key themes include the Tree of Knowledge in depth: the four cones of complexification and how matter, life, mind, and culture emerge as distinct information-processing domains. The conversation also takes up two levels of consciousness and what UTOK has to say about panpsychism, before turning to the RAFTing model (Relating, Acting, Feeling, Thinking) as a practical framework for psychology. Dr. Henriques closes by reflecting on UTOK's limits and what it stands to gain from engagement with other metatheories.

Modernity's greatest achievements came without a coherent worldview to guide them. Without an adequate foundation for what is real and what we value, coordinating at the scale we now inhabit remains an open problem. That, Dr. Henriques argues, is precisely what UTOK is working to address.

Timestamps:
00:00:00 – Introduction: Continuing the UTOK Conversation
00:02:52 – Unpacking the Tree of Knowledge Diagram
00:15:15 – The Emergence of Mind: From Organism to Culture
00:32:12 – UTOK and Consciousness
00:46:05 – The Hard Problem and Perspectival Epistemic Portal
00:55:10 – The RAFTing Model as Applied Psychology
01:09:07 – The Real-World Stakes of Metatheory
01:09:33 – UTOK's Limits and What It Still Needs

Why Integrative Metatheory 2.0 Now? | Robb Smith, Nick Hedlund, Brendan Graham Dempsey

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Robb Smith joins Nicholas Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey to make the case for Integrative Metatheory 2.0. Drawing on a project that began with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens' meta-integral work in 2010-2013, they explore how frameworks like critical realism, Edgar Morin's complex thought, and metamodernism entered the conversation alongside integral theory, and what it now takes to bring them into genuine dialogue.

Key themes include a typology of metatheories (philosophical, scientific, and synthetic), the causal force of worldviews in shaping our understanding of and response to planetary-scale systems, and why AI and other accelerating developments make adequate conceptual foundations more urgent than ever. The group also takes up negative transfiguration as a core commitment: the aim is for frameworks to genuinely learn from and alter each other, rather than collapse into a single grand synthesis.

The conversation closes on what success looks like for the project: frameworks that change as a result of dialogue, and the emergence of a shared grammar adequate to navigating between disciplines and philosophical traditions.

Timestamps:

00:15 Introduction and Project Overview

02:48 The Project's History: From Meta-Integral to IMT 2.0

05:40 The "So What?" Critique

13:47 Modernity Scaled the Planet on a Fragmented Worldview

20:41 Worldview, AI, and the Question of Agency

46:08 A Typology of Metatheories

54:22 What Does Success Look Like?

57:07 Negative Transfiguration

What Is Meta-Studies? w/ Mark Edwards, Nick Hedlund, & Brendan Graham Dempsey

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Mark Edwards joins Brendan Graham Dempsey and Nick Hedlund for an in-depth conversation on metatheory, meta-studies, and why methodological rigor is essential for navigating the global metacrisis. Edwards, one of the most influential contemporary scholars in integrative meta-studies, clarifies what metatheory is (and is not), why “big pictures” require disciplined methods, and how meta-studies can function as a kind of earth-system social science.

Key themes include the distinction between method and methodology, the role of absence and critique in generating new metatheoretical lenses, and the limits of progress-oriented and altitude-based frameworks. Edwards also reflects on epistemic humility, domain specificity, and pluralism — particularly the importance of taking indigenous and non-Western knowledge systems seriously in big-picture theorizing.

The discussion culminates in a wide-ranging reflection on the metacrisis, understood not only as a systems failure but as a planetary-scale trauma response, and on the future of meta-studies as a field grounded in what Edwards calls disciplined imagination.

0:00 Introduction

3:55 What Is Metatheory (and Why It Matters Now)

04:17 “Meta-Studies” as a Clearing in the Global Noosphere

10:51 Why Methodology Is the Missing Piece in Metatheory

13:52 Method vs Methodology

15:58 Scientific Methods for Metatheory

17:56 George Ritzer’s Four Functions of Metatheorising

19:50 From Meta-Methodology to Meta-Validity

21:18 Metatheory as a Human Universal

24:16 Moving Beyond Canonical “Great Thinkers” to Discover New Lenses

24:16 Absence as a Driver of Innovation in Metatheory

35:59 Integrating Across Domains Without Losing Rigor

42:08 The Problem with Altitude: Critiquing Progress-Oriented Metatheories

47:11 Indigenous Worldviews and the Problem with Cultural Stages

51:47 The Metacrisis and the Need for Metatheory

59:49 The Future of Meta-Studies: Disciplined Imagination

Integration for Transformation w/ Robb Smith, Nick Hedlund, & Brendan Graham Dempsey

Robb Smith discusses the need for integrative conceptual work in today's world with Integration journal Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Hedlund and Managing Editor Brendan Graham Dempsey. Why do the interconnected challenges of the metacrisis demand integrative solutions? How are emancipatory struggles aided by embracing critical metatheory? What do the very patterns of knowledge integration suggest about a bold new story of wholeness? Finally, the three outline the vision and scope of the new journal and explore the nature and uses of an "integrative metatheory 2.0" beyond postmodernism.

0:00 IAM in the Context of Radical Social Morphogenesis

12:39 A Meta-Systematic Metacrisis in Need of Meta-Systematic Analysis

20:21 The Problems We Face and the Stories We Tell

31:39 Advancing a Worldview for Long-Term Good

38:56 Critical Metatheory and Emancipatory Struggle beyond Postmodernism

49:20 Knowledge Integration and a New Story of Wholeness

1:02:34 Integration: The Journal of Big Picture Theory and Practice

1:08:52 Integrative Metatheory 2.0 in Service of Planetary Flourishing

1:21:00 Competing Worldviews in the 21st Century for AI and Value Alignment

1:29:01 Conclusion

The Evolutionary-Developmental Perspective w/ Clément Vidal

Dr. Clément Vidal discusses the work coming out of the Evo-Devo community and his contributions to theorizing the concept of worldview before unpacking the core aspects of a so-called "cosmic evolutionary" worldview, whose ideas resonate deeply with the integrative worldview being developed by the Institute of Applied Metatheory. We unpack his ideas around cosmological artificial selection and its connection to various forms of metaphysics, as well as how value(s) relate to this cosmic picture.

0:00 Introduction

0:58 What is the "Evo-Devo" Research Community?

5:05 The Problem with (and Promise of) "Progress"

11:51 Evo-Devo Research Questions

14:53 Evolutionary Philosophy and the Question of Worldview

20:59 Criteria for Comparing Worldviews

26:05 The Nature of an Evolving Universe: The Origins of Fine-Tuning

34:33 Cosmological Artificial Selection

52:04 Cosmological Variation in a Multiverse?

55:25 Evolution, Development, Complexity and Value

1:08:47 Worldview Competition and Cultural Evolution

1:14:10 Conclusion