In this presentation, Dr. Lawrence Cahoone introduces Ordinal Naturalism — his non-reductive account of nature that integrates hierarchical systems theory, emergence, and Justus Buchler’s pluralistic metaphysics of “natural complexes.”

Beginning with an outline of the five “orders” of nature — physical, material, biological, mental, and cultural — Cahoone presents them both as distinct domains of phenomena and as stages in the historical evolution of nature, marked by increasing complexity over time.

From there, he retraces the philosophical path that leads to this view: from Columbia Naturalism and objective relativism, through the late-20th-century rejection of foundationalism, to contemporary theories of emergence and partial reduction (Wimsatt, Anderson, Simon, Kauffman, and others).

Key questions explored include:

• What does it mean for something to be real?
• Can reduction and emergence coexist?
• Do the natural sciences have priority over the social sciences?
• How can we avoid both reductionism and mystical holism?

Cahoone argues for a layered, interdependent, evolving reality: nothing floats free, nothing is causally isolated — and yet each domain (biology, mind, culture) retains its own integrity.

Timestamps

00:01:11 – The Five “Orders of Nature”

00:07:43 – From Modernity to Systematic Metaphysics

00:09:10 – The Rejection of Foundationalism

00:12:40 – Columbia Naturalism & Objective Relativism

00:15:28 – Justus Buckler’s Natural Complexes & Ontological Parity

00:18:22 – Q&A: The Whole, Ultimacy & Naturalism

00:28:01 – Emergence and Hierarchical Systems Theory

00:29:33 – Wimsatt on Reduction and Partial Explanation

00:36:39 – Defining Ordinal Naturalism

00:41:04 – Train Tracks: Contextualism vs Hierarchy (What’s “Prior”?)

Dear friends,

The IAM Research Forum is a new recurring space for our scholarly community. As things progress, these sessions will serve as opportunities for our scholars to present their work, share updates from working groups, and discuss projects moving towards publication.

In this session, Gregg Henriques presents Natural Philosophy 2.0: a proposal for reviving natural philosophy as a unifying framework capable of integrating modern science, mind, meaning, and value into a coherent worldview.

Dr. Henriques argues that while modern science provides an increasingly sophisticated cosmology, it still fails to offer a fully integrated worldview — particularly when it comes to mind, consciousness, value, and lived human experience. To address this, he introduces a directional framing (down / back / up / over, with out-and-in) for situating empirical science, emergence, evolutionary history, psychology, and meaning-making within a single orienting structure.

The discussion ranges across emergence and downward causation, big history and “combogenesis,” the problem of psychology, critical realism, information-processing revolutions, and how a renewed natural philosophy might help bridge the Enlightenment gap between objective knowledge and subjective life.

The second half of the session opens into an extended Q&A, where IAM scholars discuss the proposal in real time — pressing on questions of emergence and downward causation, critical realism, big history and combogenesis, the “problem of psychology,” information-processing revolutions, and how these ideas translate into lived understanding.

Discussion contributors include: Bonnitta Roy, Lawrence Cahoone, Mark Edwards, Michael Mascolo, Nick Hedlund, Brendan Graham Dempsey, Robb Smith, and Tyler Volk.

Timestamps

00:01:51 What Is Natural Philosophy 2.0?

00:03:07 The Core Orienting Frame: Down / Back / Up / Over

00:05:30 Natural Philosophy 1.0 and the Rise of Modern Science

00:08:18 Science and Philosophy Split Apart: What Was Lost

00:11:00 Why “Natural Philosophy” Is Re-Emerging Today

00:15:21 Core Claim: Science Gives Us a Cosmology, Not a Worldview

00:18:51 The Enlightenment Gap: Mind, Value, and Meaning

00:22:41 Q&A: Do the Social Sciences Already Situate Us in the Social World? (Mark Edwards)

00:33:41 The Problem of Psychology and Ontological Ambiguity

00:36:35 Q&A: Critical Realism: What’s Already Solved, What Still Isn’t? (Nick Hedlund)

00:44:58 Methodological Origins of Natural Philosophy 2.0

00:50:22 “Combogenesis” as a More Specific Alternative to Emergence

01:06:20 Clarifying What Counts as Emergence

01:11:25 Q&A: What Is the Right Unit of Analysis for Mediated Mind? (Mark Edwards)

01:16:33 Information-Processing Revolutions as a Driver of Causal Emergence (Brendan Graham Dempsey)

01:36:46 Humility, Participation, and Grounding the Framework in Lived Experience (Bonnitta Roy)

01:46:22 Closing Reflections

Dear friends,

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.

Timestamps

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

Dear friends,

In a new episode of the Integration podcast, Robb Smith joins Integration Journal Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Hedlund and Managing Editor Brendan Graham Dempsey to discuss the urgent need for integrative conceptual work in today’s world. Why do the interconnected challenges of the metacrisis demand integrative solutions? How can emancipatory struggles be strengthened through critical metatheory? What do emerging patterns of knowledge integration reveal about a bold new story of wholeness? Together, they outline the vision and scope of the new journal and explore the meaning and applications of an “integrative metatheory 2.0” beyond postmodernism.

Listen on your favorite podcast app

Timestamps

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

Dear friends,

For the inaugural IAM Research Forum, Brendan Graham Dempsey, Nick Hedlund, and Robb Smith lay out the mission of IAM (Institute of Applied Metatheory) as a space for integrating knowledge across disciplines through “Integrative Metatheory 2.0” in the context of global metacrisis. Together, they explore the fractured state of knowledge in both the sciences and humanities, introduce the concept of the metacrisis as a crisis rooted at the level of worldview, and share IAM’s vision and strategy for 2026 and beyond.

The IAM Research Forum is a new recurring space for our scholarly community. As things progress, these sessions will serve as opportunities for our scholars to present their work, share updates from working groups, and discuss projects moving towards publication. For this first session, we wanted to set the context and offer a grounding in the mission and frameworks that hold our work together.

Recorded January 8, 2026

Timestamps

0:00 – Introduction: Fractured Knowledge & Crisis in Academia (Brendan Graham Dempsey)

8:06 – The Metacrisis: A Time Between Worlds (Nick Hedlund)

18:51 – Integrative Metatheory 2.0: Alpha, Beta & Gamma Modes

22:25 – The Institute of Applied Metatheory: Mission & Vision (Robb Smith)

27:36 – 2026 Strategy: Kernel, Middleware & Applications

33:28 – Invitation to Scholars & Closing Remarks

Dear friends,

We’re excited to announce the launch of Integration, a new podcast featuring thinkers forging connections across domains, traditions, and levels of analysis in pursuit of deeper coherence and actionable wisdom. In particular, it unpacks and promotes the work of scholars contributing to Integration: The Journal of Big Picture Theory and Practice, a peer-reviewed, inter-, trans-, and archdisciplinary journal committed to advancing the integrative study and applied use of metatheory and systems thinking for engaging with the unprecedented complexity of the 21st century. It also features scholars whose work is making vital contributions to this broader field.

In the first episode, Brendan Graham Dempsey and Dr. Clément Vidal discuss the work coming out of the Evo-Devo community and Dr. Vidal’s 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. They 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

Dear friends,

I am thrilled to introduce you to the Faith Development Pathway Initiative (“FDP”), the Institute of Applied Metatheory’s newest social impact project. Led by Brendan Graham Dempsey, the Faith Development Pathway is a groundbreaking initiative aimed at developing the world’s first open-access protocol for the developmental maturation of faith and ultimate concern. In addition to the written overview below, I also invite you to view the recent IAM Insider where Brendan walks us through some of the early findings coming out of the project.

Overview

As you may know, IAM’s mission is to apply big picture thinking to foster an Integrative Worldview and promote human flourishing in the 21st century, and this project sits at the very heart of that mission. Drawing from the legacy of James Fowler’s stages of faith and advancing it through the application of neo-Piagetian hierarchical complexity scoring, the FDP systematically maps the evolving cognitive and existential architecture of human meaning-making. It offers a rigorous developmental framework capable of tracing the trajectory of faith formation from early mythic structures to more reflective and integrative modes of understanding.

The ultimate aim is to rationally reconstruct the topography of healthy faith development over the lifespan and make this knowledge available to a wider audience. Through accessible tools, developmental assessments, and applied pedagogies, the FDP will equip educators, spiritual leaders, curriculum designers, and social entrepreneurs with a scientifically grounded, spiritually attuned developmental protocol. The initiative is conceived as an incubator for a future Faith Development Institute that can house, refine, and disseminate this protocol across disciplines, faith traditions, and global contexts.

The Opportunity

At the heart of the Faith Development Pathway (FDP) lies a recognition of a largely unacknowledged but urgent global dilemma: humanity lacks a coherent, empirically grounded understanding of how faith itself develops. While faith and ultimate concern are among the most powerful forces shaping human lives and civilizations, they are too often treated as static belief systems rather than dynamic developmental processes. This reification results in widespread misunderstanding, disillusionment, rigidity, and intergenerational conflict across religious, spiritual, and secular communities alike.

Existing religious education, spiritual formation, and philosophical inquiry rarely incorporate the cognitive-developmental insights that show how our ultimate concerns evolve with life experience and structural capacity. As a result, institutions meant to support growth too often stifle it, triggering faith crises, ejections from communities, or regressions into fundamentalism. Without a widely recognized developmental framework, efforts to reform or deepen spiritual life remain vulnerable to fragmentation, oversimplification, and stagnation.

Transformational Thesis

The central thesis of the FDP is that faith—understood as the structure and content of one’s ultimate concern—is not a static possession but a dynamic and reconstructable developmental process. When faith is studied and supported as a staged, life-long maturation, new doors open for empowering human beings to grow in existential wisdom, psychological integration, and spiritual coherence. By marrying the empirical precision of hierarchical complexity science with the existential depth probed by faith development research, the FDP establishes a robust, interdisciplinary bridge between psychological science and spiritual development.

This transformation is not merely conceptual; it is pedagogical and practical. With the FDP, educators and leaders can gain access to empirically grounded maps and metrics of meaning-making that can guide the design of faith-nurturing curricula, interventions, and lifelong learning programs. These tools will help individuals cultivate ever-deepening forms of responsibility, transcendence, and compassionate universality. FDP thus represents a crucial step in aligning the science of developmental psychology with the soulful aims of human spiritual flourishing. Such materials would be key resources to responding adequately to the crisis of meaning at the heart of the metacrisis.

What’s At Stake

The implications of the Faith Development Pathway are immense. At stake is nothing less than how societies understand and nurture the existential core of the human being. In an age of increasing polarization, religious disaffiliation, and meaning crises, the FDP offers a developmental alternative to both dogmatic rigidity and nihilistic despair. It holds the promise of building spiritually literate cultures—ones capable of honoring tradition while facilitating growth, holding difference without dissolving into relativism, and cultivating sacred commitments without exclusionary zeal.

If successful, the FDP will seed a new generation of spiritually and psychologically mature leaders, educators, and citizens who can navigate the challenges of pluralism, ecological crisis, and cultural fragmentation with nuance, empathy, and developmental insight. Without such a framework, humanity risks continuing to misinterpret faith as a fixed worldview rather than a lifelong journey. But with it, we may finally be able to respond to one of the most essential human questions—What is of ultimate concern?—with the depth, dignity, and developmental clarity it deserves.

Loving regards,

Robb

P.S. If you have been looking for a way to leave a legacy impact by supporting the world’s most powerful Archimedean transformational levers, exemplified by projects like the Faith Development Pathway, please be in touch about joining IAM’s Legacy Circle. IAM’s support continues to grow due to visionary funders who want to see the Integrative Worldview come to life, and we are committed to keeping the momentum going.

What if the future of civilization rests in the hands of those who know how — and where — to give?

In this visionary episode of IAM Insider, Josh Leonard joins Robb Smith to unveil his new developmental map of philanthropy, created using the Context AI platform. Together they explore how philanthropic institutions — uniquely positioned between government, business, and civil society — have the potential to become the most powerful levers for long-term systems transformation.

Perspective Shift:

1. The meta-crisis requires meta-philanthropy. Fragmented problems (climate, polarization, inequality) are actually interlocked failures of perception and system design. They can’t be solved with isolated grants. Philanthropy must evolve into a meta-strategy that integrates culture, consciousness, systems, and feedback.
2. Philanthropy isn’t peripheral — it’s central to civilization’s future. Most people see philanthropy as auxiliary — a compassionate extra to patch systemic failures. In reality, philanthropy is a primary steering mechanism for society, especially in an era when both governments and markets are structurally incapable of long-term vision.
3. The biggest leverage point for systems change isn’t nonprofits — it’s funders. Philanthropic foundations are often seen as passive supporters of nonprofit work. But the real transformational fulcrum lies upstream — in how funders shape strategies, demand outcomes, and bridge knowledge with action. Philanthropy isn’t just writing checks — it’s writing the future.
4. Empowerment philanthropy corrected for strategic blind spots — but now it has its own. Strategic philanthropy brought rigor but lacked cultural sensitivity. Empowerment philanthropy brought equity but often lacks coherence and inclusivity of ideas. Integrative philanthropy arises not by rejecting either, but by transcending and including both.
5. Legacy is no longer about buildings — it’s about steering civilization. In an age of collapse and breakthrough, the most meaningful legacy isn’t a wing named after you — it’s knowing your capital helped move the arc of history toward wholeness. Today’s visionary funders are tomorrow’s Medicis.

Josh introduces the concept of integrative philanthropy, the emerging next stage in the evolution of giving, which transcends both the technocratic rigor of strategic philanthropy and the equity-driven activism of empowerment philanthropy. He walks us through a multilayered quadrant map that reveals how each aspect of the philanthropic ecosystem — from leadership vision to funding models to cultural values — is evolving across developmental stages, and where the pain points are that signal readiness for transformation.

As global systems teeter under the weight of the metacrisis, Robb and Josh argue that philanthropy is perhaps the only institution in society with the freedom, foresight, and capital to steward truly long-range change. But it requires a new level of strategic intelligence, developmental awareness, and epistemic humility — all of which are built into the integrative approach.

Whether you’re a funder, nonprofit leader, systems thinker, or cultural futurist, this episode offers an urgent call to action — and a profoundly hopeful map for how we might evolve the way we support what matters most.

Read Bruce’s white paper here:
Polarization and the Algorithmic Undertow: Integral and Critical Realist Perspectives

In this foundational episode, Bruce Alderman joins Josh Leonard to explore one of the most insidious forces driving today’s cultural fragmentation: the algorithmic undertow. Drawing from his recent white paper, Bruce introduces this powerful metaphor to describe the slow, invisible pull of digital systems—algorithms, platforms, attention economies—that subtly yet profoundly shape our beliefs, behaviors, and social worlds.

Using the lenses of Integral Metatheory and Critical Realism, Bruce and Josh unpack how algorithmically mediated environments are not only polarizing society, but also distorting our cognitive tools, creating isolated demirealities that feel whole but are structurally incomplete. Together they explore how these forces are eroding shared meaning, weakening democratic discourse, and transforming the very nature of human sense-making.

But this is not just a diagnosis—it’s also a call to action. Bruce lays out a four-quadrant framework for reclaiming depth in the digital age, offering concrete steps we can take as individuals, communities, and systems to restore wisdom, presence, and shared reality.

If you’ve ever felt like reality itself is fracturing—and you’re looking for tools to reweave it—this conversation is essential.

How do we measure the depth of human meaning-making across history, traditions, and intellectual paradigms? In this fascinating presentation, Brendan Graham Dempsey introduces the Cultural Complexity Index (CCI) initiative, a pioneering research project launched by the Institute of Applied Metatheory and Sky Meadow Institute that empirically maps how humans structure knowledge, solve problems, and make sense of their world.

Utilizing the Lectical Scale, a highly refined framework for measuring hierarchical complexity, the project analyzes sacred and significant texts from different historical periods. Its early findings suggest fascinating correlations between social complexity and the evolution of meaning-making, while also challenging some common assumptions about cognitive development in different historical eras.

What do we mean by “culture”? While integral theory typically enacts “culture” as representing our collective interiors (LL), the CCI investigates a broader dimension — the complexity of symbolic information processing as a whole. CCI’s use of the term aligns closely with Gregg Henriques’ description of “culture” as representing the human noosphere in general, the sphere of knowledge, symbolic representation, and individual sense-making, rather than the Lower-Left (LL) quadrant of Integral Theory, which focuses on relational, intersubjective, and cultural meaning-making. While the two are connected and often isomorphic with each other, they require distinct methodologies to be properly analyzed.

This is important because, as Brendan points out, he is not making claims about a given culture’s overall developmental center of gravity, but rather on the cognitive performance of certain individuals within a culture, as measured by the Lectical Scale.

Brendan’s presentation covers the theoretical foundations, core methodology, and preliminary results of the study — particularly its examination of texts from forager and archaic societies. In the ensuing discussion, participants explore crucial questions, such as:

• The origins of the CCI framework and how it measures individual cognitive complexity,
• How cognitive complexity relates to cultural evolution—but why they are not the same thing,
• The shift from mythic narratives to rational-scientific models—and how each stage builds upon the last,
• The hidden structures of symbolic meaning-making and how they shape everything from politics to personal identity,
• How the CCI helps dispel myths about cultural development, such as challenging the notion that early societies were incapable of producing later-stage artifacts or ideas, and clarifying the sequential-but-nonlinear nature of human evolution

For integral thinkers, the CCI aspires to provide both empirical validation and refinement of existing developmental models. While supporting key developmental insights, it also suggests nuanced updates to conventional correlations between social and cognitive complexity. Most importantly, the findings point toward practical applications — helping to frame new “stories of wholeness” that are adequate to the challenges of our time.

This research represents a significant step in bringing empirical rigor to cultural evolution theories while refining and deepening our understanding. By applying careful measurement and analysis, it enhances our understanding of both our developmental past and the challenges of constructing more complex and integrative meaning systems for the future.