As said before True nature of Reality is using Being against itself and is like saying the being nature of being, it really does not mean anything even though it sounds as if it does. What we have to do is realize that both aspects appear in relation to Being and Existence. Existence is ultimately non-dual which allows us when we grasp that to escape the illusion and the fiction of Being in relation to existence. But the Real Truth and the True Reality is only seen when we realize that existence is neither aspect nor anti-aspect, i.e. neither true nor fictitious, AND neither real nor illusory. The aspects relate to existence by their negation. Existence is nondual and thus is the subject of enlightenment under the interoperation of emptiness in Buddhism or void in Taoism. The true nature of reality or the real nature of truth only has ultimate meaning with respect to existence. In existence they mean the same thing because Existence is singular while Being is made up of Universals and Particulars.

First of all saying True nature of Reality, is a problem because both of them are aspects of Being. Being is illusion. But Existence also has the same aspects without the illusion. So instead of using one aspect against the other we can contrast them both in terms of how they show up in existence which is different from how they show up in Being. In Being the differential between aspect and anti-aspect is emphasized. In Being we have the quintessence which is both aspect and anti-aspect at the same time. But existence is neither aspect nor anti-aspect at the same time. The nature of existence is nonduality, which shows up either under the interpretation of emptiness or void. Either way the nature of existence is interpenetration and thus that is the true nature of reality when we take away the illusion of the difference between aspect and anti-aspect.

Saying what reality is in isolation really does not get us anywhere, everything has meaning in context. So the context for Reality are the other aspects of Being which are Truth, Identity and Presence. It turns out that the other aspects give the grounding for formal systems, and their relations with each other give us the properties of formal system which are consistency, completeness and clarity (wellformedness). When we bring the formal system into contact with reality via testing then we get three more properties which are verifiability  validity, and coherence because those are the relations between reality and the other aspects related to the formal system. Reality is about testing. Via testing we verify and validate a given formal system in relation to reality. The best way of talking about this is that of Robert Rosen in Life itself where he shows that causality and logical connection are both forms of entailment and thus category theory is a good way to think about the connection of the formal system to the natural world. So Reality is just one aspect which gains its own meaning by its difference between itself and the other aspects and though its relation to them based on the properties of formal system and their properties in relation to testing against nature. It should also be mentioned that there are meta-levels of Being: Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild and Ultra and that all the aspects transform emergently at each of those meta-levels. Thus Reality is different depending on the meta-level you are approaching it on. And this is why reality is so hard to pin down. It participates in the higher logical type theory of Russell which defines different types at different meta-levels to resolve the paradoxes and absurdity of Being. The types at each meta-levels are the emergent transformations of the aspects of Being.

On the criteria of having produced something that leads toward enlightenment as the understanding of nonduality then it is a failure, because it is based on an intensification of nihilism and thus sophistry. Failure to enlighten, to provide insight, but rather instead selling category systems that are meaningless because they are supposed to cover everything but really only intensify duality is the worst sort of failure as it leads people astray.

See for more explanation  . . .

Integral Theory: What is wrong with Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory?
What is the Integral Theory?

Because he is a cult leader himself.
Integral Theory: What is wrong with Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory?

Deeper into Nihilism . . .
See my answer to What is the Integral Theory?

Integral Theory: What is wrong with Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory?

Integral Theory is a sham. It is a poor excuse for not thinking.

Now that we got the basic negative attitude toward it out of the way, we can look at the phenomena more dispassionately.

Integral Theory is the opposite of noduality. Integral Theory doubles dualism to create a four-fold category system that supposedly covers everything in the universe. It is supposed to be “integral” because it covers everything in this huge umbrella categorization. That categorization is based on the doubling of the basic mind body duality of the western tradition, the I-it, into the We-everything. Non-duality on the other hand questions exactly these kinds of distinctions and posits that there is an alternative to them that is not comprehended by that doubled distinction.

There is nothing “Integral” about Integral Theory.

If we use the B. Fuller definition of Integral which is basically Tensegrity and one step up from Synergy, then what is Integral is something that has dynamic structural resilience. Doubled dualistic distinctions just don’t have them. Dualisms are not robust because they cause the world to fall apart into realms that cannot be put together again.

We do not need a big categorical umbrella that covers everything. It is nihilistic because it levels everything to itself, and thus covers over differences that do not fit.

So what is Integral Theory, it is sophism, pure and simple and Plato warned us about sophism. But of course if you don’t know anything about our tradition then that warning is falling on deaf ears.

What is better?

Well just plain old dualism is better than the intensification of Dualism that so called Integral Theory proposes.

But what is much better than dualism is nonduality. Non-duality says Not One! Not Two! Not Many! and certainly Not Four!

What it does is that it problematizes making  any distinction at all in the first place, even a distinction that would posit “Oneness”.

An example from modern philosophy is Badiou’s idea of the Multiple in Being and Event. It is the heterogeneity prior to countability. It is based on his critique of Deleuze’s so called false heterogeneity of the rhizome in the Thousand Plateaus or Anti-Oedipus behind which is a Univocal Being. Instead Badiou substitutes Set Theory as the basis of understanding Being, but posits something before the difference between the empty set and the null set, the basic dichotomy out of which set theory produces the numbers.

But there are many nondual systems in other traditions, like for instance the idea of Emptiness in Buddhism and the idea of Void in Taoism, or even more sophisticated ideas such as those in DzogChen or Fa Tsang’s Hua Yen Buddhism.

The best work on the complexities about making distinctions is that of G. Spencer Brown in Laws of Form along with the work of Bricken and Hellerstein. Basically this is a rediscovery of Pervasion Logics of India within our tradition.

So lets talk about Sets and Masses. These are duals of each other, where Sets emphasize difference between Particulars within a neutral upper level structure called a Set. On the other hand masses emphasize the sameness of instances within an emergent mass. Both of these have their own logics. The logic of sets are syllogistic and the logic of Masses is pervasion logic. This pervasion Logic is the type of logic developed in China and India independently but is more or less unknown in the West but appears more or less as Venn Diagrams in our tradition. Interestingly higher level Venn diagrams are incommensurate and so that means that Pervasion Logic has a hidden complexity that set theory lacks.

The nondual between these I have called Ipsities in an Aggregate, where the Aggregate is an instantiation of a Multiple of Badiou. Examples of ipsities in an Aggregate are flocks of birds, schools of fish etc., where the ipsity is a Kantian singular. Anything taken as Suchness in relation to its nondual heterogeneity with respect to other things with which it has a Wittgensteinian Family Resemblance would be an Ipsity. We indicate them by saying This or That with respect to the indicated Thusness.

Now most natural things are ipsities in aggregate swarms. The way that these are understood traditionally are as Tattvas from the Shavite tradition which became the Dharmas in Buddhism.

So from this it becomes clear that nonduality does not mean that we cannot say anything, or indicate or conceptualize what it means. Rather nonduality has structure and can be talked about like we talk about dualities. We choose to talk about things in terms of duals in our tradition and that is not the only answer, with a little bit of care we can indicate the nondualities around us without falling into dualistic fallacies where we are talking about nonduals in dualistic ways.

Statements we know from the Buddha are examples of this kind of nondual talk, where it is called skillful means. The example is the Tetralemma in Buddhism which was honed into a logic by Nagarjuna.

We say X, not-X, both X and not-X, and neither X nor not-X not all at one time as Aristotle said in his Metaphysics but one statement at a time as appropriate in a conversation such as those held by the Skeptics like Sextus Empiricus. The Skeptic like the Buddha is one whose speech ultimately closes to become equivalent to silence. This silence of the Buddha on questions like what whether there was a god or not, and other antimonies showed that there was an alternative to the antimonies of Reason which leads to dualism and nihilism. Nihilism is the production of artificial extreme dualistic opposites that are in conflict and contradiction with each other, which we realize are really the same. See Rosen’s Nihilism.

Emptiness is what is beyond or prior to the distinctions of the Tetra-lemma. So it is something that cannot be touched by distinctions, and thus it problematizes all distinctions. What is indistinct is suchness, and when we indicate it then thusness, and when we distinguish it then it becomes this or that.  Emptiness is the answer to nihilism that uses nihilism against itself. Nihilism must start out with distinctions that it intensifies into nihilistic opposites. But if we do not accept the first distinctions by which the nihilistic opposites are built up then we disarm the production of nihilism and do not allow it to arise in the first place. Emptiness tries to get us to go back to that original already always lost origin prior to making distinctions in the first place. In nihilism the dualisms, or doubled dualisms when we realize that they are the same then we experience alienation and anomie, i.e. loss of meaning and loss of our position in the group that accepts the nihilistic distinctions we come to reject. if we don’t allow the nihilism to arise then we don’t experience that loss of meaning and our place in the world that nihilism leads to. Buddhism tries to help us see how that is possible, as does Taoism, DzogChen, Zen, Hua Yen Buddhism, Sufism etc. in different ways.

But we do not have to appeal to Non-dual traditions beyond our own to come to the same realization. What we have to do is to reject dualism, and the intensification of dualism like we see in so called Integral Theory, and cling to the nondual in all cases. Nonduality is in Logic as the discontinuities between the Logical Operators. Once you realize that the discontinuities between and, or, nand, nor is real and cannot be gotten rid of by any kind of argument logical or otherwise, then it is just a matter of realizing that it is emptiness that makes up those discontinuities, and the discontinuities in their essence were merely the Void before the striations of the Logical Operators arose. So there are two kinds of nondual interpretations of Existence which are Emptiness and Void, where void is prior to the arising of the differences between the logical operators and emptiness is what exists as the real distinctions between them once they have arisen. DzogChen says that this difference itself is a duality and thus moves to resolve it back to suchness.

As Badiou says the One and Plurality arise out of the Multiple via the appearance of the ultra-one (with Ultra Being). The arising of the Ultra One is an emergent event. Emergence is the dual of Nihilism and thus hyper-Nihilistic. So Ultra Being is a singularity in existence that distinguishes Emptiness and Void. The only way to get around this is to posit that there are deeper nonduals beyond Emptiness and Void which we can call Manifestation. This is the tact taken by DzogChen and Fa Tsang in Hua Yen Buddhism and by Sufism in Islam. We use Manifestation in the sense defined by Meister Eckhart, see The Essence of Manifestation by Henry. Eckhart was in our tradition and so we can appeal to him to understand deeper nonduals within our own tradition without having to appeal only to non-Western sources. But of course Eckhart was influenced by “Heathan” Sufis. But since Islam is just a nondual heresy of the Western tradition, by going to Sufic sources we are not really leaving the tradition, but only appealing to its Other, which based itself on its own Othering of dualism.

All this is to say that the way we can know what Integral Theory is, is by understanding it in relation to nondual traditions and their formulation of the nondual. And when we do that we realize that conceptually it is an intensification of dualism, and thus an intensification of nihilism, and therefore not a good route to go down from a theoretical point of view. The reason it is popular is that it takes the dualism of the Western Tradition and doubles it and then presents it back to us as if it were something new. It is nihilistic when we realize that it is merely the repetition of the dualism that got us into trouble in the first place which was the dualism between mind and body, which is the premise for the Republic of Plato as a decent into Hell. Socrates is going down to the harbor of Athens to see a new foreign goddess brought into the city for the first time. It is on his way back from this descent into Hell that he is stopped forcefully and the dialogue ensues at the home  of his host about the nature of Justice, but which basically sets up all the structures necessary to articulate the Western worldview. But all these structures are based on the primary distinction between mind and body, which is precisely what Descartes instituted as the basis for Modern Philosophy which he instituted which was taken up by Kant and has been in place ever since producing the major problematic of the Western Philosophical tradition which has worked to overcome that dualism in different ways. Integral Theory reveres this problematic and produces an category system that merely intensifies the dualism rather than trying to overcome it. So all the progress our tradition has made, for instance in the attempts of Heidegger to get beyond subject/object dichotomy with the idea of Dasein in Being and Time is lost. And what we get instead is a nihilistic classification system that really does not tell us anything we don’t already know about the world, and thus locks us in even deeper into the inherent nihilism of our tradition rather than setting us free of it to make non-nihilistic distinctions as nondual traditions attempt to do.

In effect so called Integral Theory is poison for the intellect. The fact that so many have eagerly drunk that cool aide and stopped thinking due to ignorance of their own tradition, is not surprising, but is a sad commentary on the anti-intellectualism of our age and just how lost we are as what Nietzsche called the Last Men who just stand blinking . . .  blinking . . .

I think what most people don’t realize is that Wilber’s theory is an intensification of dualism. It distinguishes between subject and object (I-it), and then intensifies that by taking it to the group level of we-things (its). This is an intensification of the subject-object dualism, and thus a step back philosophically into a more intense dualism. An alternative is nondual philosophy such as is explained by David Loy in his book Nonduality. And now we have to say not just nondual but non-integral in order to avoid the intensification of dualism by taking it from the individual to the group level. For an example of a nondual philosophy see Nondual Science Institute

See also Kent Palmer’s answer to What is the Integral Theory?
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Answering the question of Corrie K. Campbell:

The first level of dualism is I-it, and does not recognize Buber’s distinction between this and I-thou.

Second level of dualism is We-things, which merely introduces unthinkingly plurality on both sides of the equation, intensifying the I-It duality stated at the first level.

Now plurality introduced this way is a quirk of English and is no way universal, and so to create a whole categorical system based on it is on fairly shaky grounds to begin with. But then to take this arbitrary pair of crossed dichotomies and somehow think it describes “reality” is somewhat ludicrous. Philosophically it is overly simplistic and untenable. But of course it is popular with new age types who do not know their own tradition and are basically ignorant of philosophy in general.

Most disturbing this step backwards into intensified duality is presented as if it were a way to understand non-duality, which is false. In this sense it is a farce. There are a lot of peddlers of non-duality out there who have no idea what they are talking about and Wilber is one of them. But what is so ironic is that while he talks occasionally about non-duality (as being all four modes together) what he is really doing is taking a step back from the progress made in the western tradition already, and not understanding the import of truly nondual philosophical systems at the same time.

So to me this whole thing is akin to snake oil. Utterly useless. Leading folks into greater ignorance, and a great example of the intensification of nihilism. It is a also an excellent example of where not thinking will get you, i.e. lost deeper in the mire of dualism, even worse than the Western tradition is on its own, all in the name of taking in everything and categorizing everything, when actually he is merely sucking the meaning out of all the system he is trying to encompass, many of which are actually meaningful in themselves, but merely become accouterments in his overarching system based more on hubris than any real insight.

It is sad that the general public that takes these ideas of intensification of dualism seriously are so ignorant of their own tradition, and the other traditions that are being exploited in this imperialistic categorization of everything that Wilber can pontificate on these issues without being laughed out of the room. This is in stark contrast to the French for instance who have contributed significantly to the understanding of our tradition over the last sixty years or so since WWII. Americans taken in by this new age rubbish just do not know how ignorant they are, not just of their own tradition which is being ignored, but of the other oriental traditions that are being exploited. Isn’t it time we put away childish toys, and actually did the hard work of coming to terms with our own tradition, and the other traditions that have genuine nonduality and tried to understand at a more profound level, which will never be captured by categorizations what is at stake?

Our dualistic tradition, cannot escape the train crash that is going to happen when it has to come to terms with actual nonduality. Intensifying nihilism and dualism will not save it but is merely denial. What is actually happening is that many significant Buddhist texts are now being translated that were preserved in Tibet. This Tibetan tradition which has been part of a living tradition since the Buddha, is a formidable opponent of the Western Dualistic view enforced throughout our history by Inquisition and  murder and genocide of all advocates of nondual positions, as well as radical dualists like Wilber.

Normally what happens is that Western scholars just do not study oriental philosophies and so it is then easy to avoid the uncomfortable ramifications of those approaches to knowledge. But in our globalized post-colonial world where we have access to primary texts the best of which are those of Mipham, eventually scholars are going to realize that Buddhism is far more sophisticated than Western philosophy, and they will have to deal with what Hinduism dealt with long ago with the advent of the Buddhist Heresy which is the fundamental significance of nonduality. And when that occurs not only dualism but all the superficial intensifications of dualism born out of denial will be wiped away, and we will have to start over to understand who we are the core of our existence beyond the illusions of Being.

At that time it will be incumbent upon us to focus on taking what I call the homeward path, which is the path of realizing the nondual kernel of the Western worldview itself as a resource for dealing with the shattering of the illusion of dualism and its intensifications. I am advocating leaving childish things like Wilber’s overweening and bloated categorical imperialism behind and to attack this problem ingrained dualism genuinely from its Western roots sooner rather than later.
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Further response to comments

I don’t think psychoanalysis of me will make Wilber’s work any more interesting or valid. If you are adherent, then I suggest you look at the ingredient of the concoction you are buying, prior to consuming it. Until you asked I was leaving it more less for people to read between the lines, but since you asked that suggested I needed to be a bit more viperous.

Snake oil it should be noted was something that Chinese workers used to sooth their work worn muscles, but it was taken up by Whites, who added all sorts of crazy ingredients. Eventually there were so many kinds of snake oil that those who prided themselves on actually doing something worthwhile put their ingredients on the bottle, and that is where the idea came for putting ingredients on products that were sold. There needs to be a little truth in advertising with respect to pseudo-philosophies of this type. SeeHow Snake Oil Got a Bad Rap (Hint: It Wasn’t The Snakes’ Fault)

They attempt to comprehend everything, as sure sign of sophism.

They intensify nihilism, in this case by doubling dualism, rather than coping with nonduality which is the key point to be contrast with dualism.

They are ignorant of their own tradition, i.e. know nothing about the progress made in Western Philosophy, which by the way dwarfs these pseudo philosophies.

They do not build on what went before but pretend to bring something new, when it is in fact just false pandering to the ignorance of the masses in the form of supposed knowledge.

They actually make things worse rather than better for those who embrace these false ideas, because they think they understand something when in fact they are made more ignorant by the idea.

Sure sign is when everyone accepts it without question that they are substantive, even though no one can say why.

Categorical systems like this with no substance is where we began with the Pre-Socratics, so it is as if they are staring all over again.

They are imperialistic like old dogmas because they intend to include everything in their category system.

They do not question where the categories come from, or what allows these distinctions to be made, other than they were made by fiat by the sophist.

They ignore all the warnings that Plato gave us about sophistry.

They are examples of the intensification of nihilism, i.e. eventually those who adhere to them will accidentally learn something about philosophy and see that they are meaningless and at that point they will produce alienation and anomie due to their inherent emptiness.

Actual philosophers are not understood in their times, cf Socrates, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, etc. They are engaged in attempting to make non-nihilistic distinctions within their traditions on the cutting edge. They assiduously to the extent any philosopher can try to avoid sophism, but occasionally engage in it ironically, and sometimes fall into it by accident after trying to avoid it. They are not running for a popularity contest, or trying to sell books by saying what others want to hear, but instead say things that others do not want to hear like Ken Wilber does not know anything about anything because he tries to talk about everything and pretends to know how to categorize everything in his ‘system’.

Philosophers start with the premise of their own ignorance as Socrates established, and they work on the problem of their ignorance exclusively. And then eventually they discover what Socrates did that they are the only ones who do know anything because at least they know what they do not know. Everyone who pretends to know, is in fact just fooling themselves and others.

Ken Wilber is an excellent example of someone who not only does not know, but in fact increases everyone’s else’s ignorance because they follow him into that unknowing, unknowingly, thinking he must know something because he says so.

When I realized that the basic point that Wilber makes was to increase dualism rather than to confront nonduality then I thought it was a good idea to point it out, especially when I realized how unpopular it would be, because he is almost universally approved. I am afraid that someone has to burst the bubble by calling a Sophist a sophist.

It is not a blind spot in myself. In fact for a long time I was totally disinterested in Wilber, because he had nothing to say of any interest. But then I discovered that he was actually taken seriously by someone who should know better, and so I decided that I should actually speak our just so the chorus of applause was not universal, because someone needs to say the simple fact that this emperor of categorization has no clothes, i.e. no ideas worth repeating. The fact that he uses nice buzzwords like Integral is all the more reason to be suspicious. And our suspicions are confirmed when we discover that this word actually has no meaning because it is used to describe everything he does.

And we know that we are on the right track when we see his marketing apparatus in action selling mentoring for a fee by himself and his adherents. If people would just read Plato, and his challenge of the Sophists of his time, then people would save lots of money, and also know that if they are to find the truth they must do it via their own thought and hard work themselves confronting their own ignorance, rather than buying snake oil (‘enlightenment’ or in this case endarkenment like core mentoring to gain sublime Integralness) from every shyster that comes to town.

If they are charging for it you should be wary. Only data and information can be sold not knowledge, nor yet wisdom. You have to work yourself for the latter. That is why we pay to go to college, because knowledge is work one does oneself. There are many small time sophists in college class rooms But there are also many more good teachers that do their best to lead their students to knowledge as they understand it, but they cannot make them drink at that fountain. Those that teach well impart information and techniques of learning, but one forges knowledge oneself, and this is also true of wisdom only that is much more rare and occurs when knowledge confronts reality in a lifetime of experience that allows one access to the non-representable intelligibles beyond the representations that we come to know.

Sophistry says instead that it can confer knowledge and wisdom for a small fee. In school just because a tea her teaches a subject they do not guarantee that the sudden will get it, but instead they devise tests to attempt to gauge how much the student has learned. The tests are about knowledge, information, skills, techniques, but nothing guarantees that all this turns into knowledge for the student, but the chances are much better if the curriculum is passed by the student successfully.If they are charging for it you should be wary. Only data and information can be sold not knowledge, nor yet wisdom. You have to work yourself for the latter. That is why we pay to go to college, because knowledge is work one does oneself. There are many small time sophists in college class rooms But there are also many more good teachers that do their best to lead their students to knowledge as they understand it, but they cannot make them drink at that fountain. Those that teach well impart information and techniques of learning, but one forges knowledge oneself, and this is also true of wisdom only that is much more rare and occurs when knowledge confronts reality in a lifetime of experience that allows one access to the non-representable intelligibles beyond the representations that we come to know.

Sophistry says instead that it can confer knowledge and wisdom for a small fee. In school just because a tea her teaches a subject they do not guarantee that the sudden will get it, but instead they devise tests to attempt to gauge how much the student has learned. The tests are about knowledge, information, skills, techniques, but nothing guarantees that all this turns into knowledge for the student, but the chances are much better if the curriculum is passed by the student successfully.

Let me give an example of a very popular book that is in fact good, which is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance]. In that book the author is struggling with understanding and he takes us along for the ride, literally. The fact that he attributes his idea of Quality to Plato rather than Pepper is a small point compared to what he teaches us about Gumption and about having the gumption to confront our own ignorance, and to learn knowledge and wisdom ourselves from that. An excellent example of someone who shows this in an outstanding way is Eric Hoffer the longshore-man philosopher who shows us that anyone from any walk of life can obtain this knowledge, wisdom, insight, realization one must forge oneself.  Hoffer had the kind of Gumption that Persig identifies. And this is an exemplary characteristic of the Pragmatic American philosophical tradition which includes Peirce, James, Dewy, and Mead but is most pure in Hoffer. See Eric Hoffer.

Well, this is a very interesting article. It appears that the rush to monazite Quora is gaining steam.

If the user engagement situation stated in the article is true, then the adding of features such as those mentioned in the article I content is not the problem and I don’t believe that this is the real issue with Quora, as I have been saying for some time.

Let me try to state the problem as I see it once again.

Quora has a poor design when it comes to the core mission of Q&A. This is the problem, not the fact that it is not integrated with Facebook and other services.

In my view Quora should stick to the core mission and do it well, and modify the design so that it actually works with respect to Q&A well.

The problem is that the design does not take into account the fundamental history of Q&A in our culture and tradition. As I have said previously many times it is this ignorance with respect to the understanding of the nature of Q&A that causes problems on the site for users and I would bet it is what causes the engagement factor to not grow.

What does this mean?

The first problem is that Questions float freely without having any context. Each question is atomic and just like all other questions. Thus there is no dynamic associated with questions and answers on Quora.

Our whole Western philosophical and scientific tradition is built on the fact that there is a dynamic between questions that leads somewhere. Questions and answers on Quora do not lead anywhere. There is no overall dynamic that comes from asking questions and answering them on Quora.

In our tradition that overall dynamic is called a dialectic. The whole tradition is based on dialectics. But there is not dialectical meta-organization to Quora and thus Quora is static rather than dynamic, and thus it is not very interesting, as I have said repeatedly in my complaints about the design of Quora.

Ok, then how do we fix this?

First there has to be a context for questions, which is called a problematic. Questions without context can have only limited meaning. It is really the problematics that are important and not the questions. Therefore, problematics need to be added which are the context for the questions.

Problematics are areas of research, open problems and the response to them are approaches. Picking an approach puts you into a paradigm.

If you add probelmatics and approaches as a foundation then that would give a departure point for the movement of from question to answer to new questions and new answers.

Thus questions need to be able to be linked to approaches to problematics. Given an approach to a problematic then what are my questions, and then what are the answers to those questions.

I am not suggesting you get rid of free floating questions. but what I am suggesting is that you change the design so that the Q&A can be attached to Problematics and Approaches if the users wish to do so.

It should be possible to have a discussion about what are the problematics worth pursuing and what are the most fertile approaches to those problematics and what questions arise given a certain approach.

Next it is necessary to make it easy to connect or chain questions and Answers. Either a question can spawn other questions, or answers may spawn other questions. This would allow a dialogue to take place between participants.

This dialog needs to be supported as a first class citizen, in some way similar to that which Branch is providing. Discussion needs to be a first class citizen on Quora, not something relegated to comments, which no one looks at.

You need to get rid of collapsed answers based on lowest common denominator opinion. Rather you should institute a reputation system similar to that on StackOverflow, but perhaps less complex and take the reputations into account with respect to a subject in the voting. Questions as well as answers should be open to voting up and down, but voting down should not collapse answers. This is because answers that are not popular may be more correct than answers that are popular. Knowledge does not always follow popular opinion.

Finally, the emphasis should be not on opinion but on knowledge production. In other words science and the rest of the tradition is built on knowledge production mostly happening in academia. But what if knowledge could be produced by crowdsourcing? This would actually be a great leap forward in our tradition. This only will occur if mere opinions can be turned into grounded opinion, and then that turned into knowledge.

How does that happen. Traditionally it happens though the dialectic. What is the dialectic, it is questions and answers, grounded in a problematic and an approach, but where the questions and their answers can be connected and branch where questions can generate further questions and answers can generate further questions, and thus you get a teleonomic (Cf. J. Monod Chance and Necessity) dynamic. Following these branches from question to question or question to answer to further question is a narrative that leads somewhere. People can construct these choose your own adventure type branching narratives together, and the result of that may be knowledge or at least informed opinion.

Allow each user to prune those branches for themselves, and then use the pruning to inform how those narrative branches are ranked by the system and shown to other users who stumble upon the branches in their exploration of the site.

The other problem is how to see the forest for the trees. In other words one needs a global view that allows one to see the overall growth of the fractal structure of the chained Q&As. Where is the activity happening, what narrative bracnhes are more often kept and what is the reputation of those that are keeping certain branches while pruning others.

What I am suggesting is something like what Herman Hesse called the Glass Bead Game.

Things that should be gotten rid of on Quora is the collapsing of answers. Let users decide what answers they would prune and then use that plus their reputations with regard to a subject to determine how the questions and their answers are displayed to users just discovering a question and its answers.

Get rid of the point system as it stands because it is meaningless. If you are going to have a point system make it mean something significant. For instance use the points to enforce the building of narrative fractals. In other words give points if one answers questions at different levels of a narrative chain in sequence.

People like building with Legos. Right now we have legos (Q&A atoms) that cannot be put together into anything. What is necessary is a way to assemble them into structures, i.e. dialectics, and then to see what one has built in an overview once it is fully formed and while it is growing too.

This is my prescription for Quora. Actually knowing something about how Q&A works and informing the design with that knowledge is the answer to the problems with Quora. If you built a system that allowed people to build knowledge structures together then people would become engaged. Just seeing a lot of opinions about a specific question ultimately is not that interesting. People want to build something, and they would like to do it together. And if knowledge was the result then that would be all the better because that would give a context for people to learn.

When you go take a class the teacher builds a narrative with respect to the subject they are teaching. You don’t go into a class and take random facts about the subject and throw them together. Teachers ask questions and students answer them as the testing of their knowledge. But the knowledge itself is delivered in a narrative. If we could build those narratives together then we could teach each other, and that would result in knowledge rather than mere  opinion. We would then have something significant to write to the wikis associated with the questions, we could write what we learned there, the abiding knowledge that we gained together.

Quora has the potential to be something interesting. But as it is its growth is stumped by a poor design given ignorance of the dynamics of Q&A within our philosophical and scientific tradition. Solve that problem and you will get the user engagement that you seek. Don’t solve that problem and Quora will become a ghost town as soon as someone produces a system that actually does understand this dynamic. it is the dynamic that each of us is taught in school though our education. You must leverage off of what people already know about learning, and knowledge acquisition, and knowledge production. Compared to knowledge opinion is of little interest. Knowledge is interesting because it is something stable in our experience. Everything else is in high flux besides our knowledge. Knowledge too is in flux but at a much slower rate and that is why it is possible to use knowledge as a reference point for living our lives within a complex social environment that we all function within. Without knowledge we would all be lost. Without some way to produce knowledge together as part of Quora, Quora is lost. Its design is the sign of this lostness. But it is fairly easy to solve that problem, align the Quroa design with what is known about how Q&A functions in our tradition.

Quora has not greatly impacted my life.

Mainly due to the superficiality of it all. I really only answer questions I am asked these days. Once I realized that the substantive answers I attempted to give were going to end up voted down and collapsed, I realized that either Quora was not ready for me or I was not ready for Quora. Which I am not sure. But it is good advertising of my internet published works among folks that might be interested. So I persevere, in spite of my doubts about the whole thing. Saddened by the fact that it is a poor design, for a question and answer site, and the whole problem of the lowest common denominator ruling. Not that it matters much. There are just more important things in the world than Quora.

I believe that Quora will fade away, once someone figures out how to design a Q&A site so that knowledge can be generated communally online, instead of mere opinion, running rampant with no limits, especially those of empiricism or reason, in sight, nor dialectical interaction which would mean that conversations actually go somewhere. Quora it seems is a sign of the alienation we all feel toward so called “social media” which is actually “anti-social”, in the sense that we do not know who we are talking to, and will probably never meet them, and really do not care who we are talking at. Quora solves the problem of engagement. With Quora you do not have to engage anyone, but merely answer the questions and watch the stock price of your answers go up or down, based on voting, which has nothing to do with the veracity of your answer, or whether it contains any knowledge or not. Rather it is whether it pleases the many, whoever they are, that counts on Quora.

Quora taught me that there are stupid questions. I always believed the maxim that there are no stupid questions that you often hear, until I saw the abysmal quality of the questions on Quora. What is amazing is that despite the awful questions that abound on Quora there are still some very good answers even to these bad questions.

This tells me that people either don’t really want to know anything, because when they get a chance to ask questions of a willing group of answerers they don’t have any good questions. Or people just don’t know enough to ask good questions. So there is either a lack of curiosity, or a lack of education, or both that is a dominant theme on Quora. Despite this long suffering answerers of questions toil away answering questions night and day and doing a pretty good job of it, given what they have to work with. Here is the scary part. I tried to seed some of the philosophy topics with actual questions that meant something. But I try not to answer my own questions, because I want to see what others have to say. But every once in a while I find a great question, and get excited, but then likely as not I realize later that this is one of my own questions, that I forgot I asked. That is what I find weird about Quora. People don’t seem to know that you must know something in order to ask decent questions. And they don’t seem to have the curiosity to get that background knowledge, but rather they are pleased to ask meaningless questions, as if they want to be fed pabulum, in predigested forms rather than struggling to know something themselves. It makes me think that all those horror stories about our educational system are actually true, and we are the result.

If you do not prepare for the answer, then you will not understand the answer when it comes. Preparation is study of the topic for which you seek to get an answer. Knowing what question to ask is half the battle in learning. I want us to learn together, but learning together means that the questioner needs to be just as engaged as the one answering the question. And we seldom see this on Quora. I figure that if people send me reasonable questions, they must really want answers, and so my measure of questions is whether I am asked them. Questions posed without context or problematic, free-floating and isolated from each other are in fact more or less meaningless.

It is this nihilism of the isolated and free floating questions of little intrinsic value or significance on Quora that make me think that Quora is a blip on the radar, while we wait for a more sophisticated system that actually allows the group generation of knowledge online. When that appears we will wonder what Quora was just as we have difficulty today remembering what MySpace was . . .

Contrarian Answers on Quora: SeeContrarian answers on Quora