A Model of Ontological Development
In this post I present a model of human psychological development based on increases in the structural complexity of ontology. Or more simply, it’s a model about how human minds grow in terms of how complex their models of the world are. It breaks down development into 8 stages that build on each other, and spans from birth to what, for lack of a better term, we might call enlightenment. I think you’ll find it useful if you’re interested in better understanding how human thinking changes and grows throughout a lifetime, in developing yourself, or if you notice some confusion that humans seem to change in meaningful ways as they age but don’t already have a strong gears-level model of how that works.
The model rests on several claims about the world:
- Humans engage in psychological development throughout their lives.
- This psychological development is marked by phases that are different from each other in kind (a difference in “type signature”) along certain key dimensions.
- This difference in kind is due to increasing structural complexity of one’s models (ontology) in reference to the reality (the ontic) being modeled.
- One can progress towards greater complexity.
- This greater complexity confers the disposition to live a better life, contingent on integration of the insights this complexity offers.
For this post I assume you already agree with Claim 1 as it’s not very controversial. For evidence of Claim 2 and Claim 4 I defer to both content linked in the Background section and the writing of David Chapman. For Claim 3 I defer to my previous post, “Phenomenological Complexity Classes”. And for Claim 5 I present myself (you can see some of my personal story around this in the “Phenomenological Complexity Classes” post) and basically everyone else who has improved their lives through self-help, positive psychology, and Buddhist practices leading to awakening.
With these claims in mind, I then present my current best general model of what this psychological development looks like. If you’re familiar with the “Phenomenological Complexity Classes” post (just “PCC” hereon), this is basically version 2 of that.
