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Eighteen Months On
From Protocol v1.2 to v4.1
Hello All,
I hope this message finds you well as Montreal moves into spring. The last newsletter from the institute went out in November 2024, before the AI-assisted research infrastructure described below was operating. A great deal has changed since — the institute’s research has expanded, the publication arc has substantially deepened, and the methodology itself has become a subject of the work. This update picks up that thread.
A note on the personal side first.
My father was recently admitted to the hospital. He had been scheduled for a full work-up this summer, but a sharp change in his mobility brought things forward, and his health has continued to decline since. He is now transitioning into long-term care. I am coordinating with his medical team on both the clinical and logistical sides of the move.
Those who have followed the writing here will already know something of the family ground this work has always been written from. I rewrote the About section of this Substack earlier this month to bring more of that ground forward, and I would point readers there rather than rehearse it again here. What I want to add in this update is the piece I have not made explicit before. Readers of For Jason Haines: On Loss, Recovery, & Why I Write with AI will remember the institutional lineage that crosses through Goddard College — my father, William White, Francis Charet — and readers of Am I Building an Exoskeleton for My Mind? will remember that Metapattern comes from Gregory Bateson’s concept of the pattern which connects. What I have not said is that those are in fact the same narrative thread. The Metapattern concept came to me through my father’s counseling work, which he developed during his MA at Goddard, before Jason died in 1983. The Metapattern Institute is a direct extension of that work, and the research I am doing now is a continuation of a long conversation with him.
I want to extend deep gratitude to the medical staff caring for my father with real attention through a hard transition, and to the friends who have been showing up — calls, messages, presence. It is difficult to convey the full extent of my appreciation in a format like this, but the care has mattered, and you know who you are.
The institute itself has had a productive start to the year. Work has been moving on multiple fronts, and I want to share two architectural developments first.
AI-Assisted Research Infrastructure
In A Descent into Facticity and When the Body Becomes the Laboratory, both published in early February, I documented the AI-assisted research infrastructure I had been building since late 2025 — a multi-project AI ecosystem working as scaffolding for cognitive work my body could no longer sustain on its own. Those essays articulated what I was then calling Protocol v1.2, and they treated the protocol itself as a hypothesis my biology was testing.
What I called Protocol v1.2 in February has continued to develop through several iterations, and the working architecture is now operating at v4.1. Each revision came when the body or the work pushed back against its prior arrangement, and the architecture has grown capacity it did not have at the start of the year.
What v4.1 supports that v1.2 could not: multiple AI projects with differentiated functions, retrieval-first discipline as standing operational protocol, distributed drafting across projects by domain, continuous documentation through session logs and theoretical notes, and drift-pattern documentation with corrective protocols. The infrastructure has matured into something stable enough to support a substantially expanded research program — and the structural work below is what that maturation has made possible.
Institute Research & Development Stack
The institute’s research is organized along six axes that together articulate the institute’s version of digital humanities. The work is in service of a new form of integral humanism — post-secular, integral-pluralist, oriented to human flourishing.
The six axes are:
Integral Facticity [+] Enactive Fallibilism
Health Informatics [+] Integral Human Development
Digital Ethnography [+] Political Anthropology
Digital Technology [+] Integral Humanism
Digital Curation [+] Knowledge Management
Library Management [+] Information Science
Each axis pairs a domain of digital-humanities inquiry with a philosophical or methodological frame that grounds the work.
Several pieces of webcopy have been brought in line with this articulation across April. The Substack About section rewrite went up earlier in the month — the more personal pass I described above. Today, the institute’s Theory [+] Praxis page has been substantially rewritten — extending the research-axis framing first articulated in the November 2024 newsletter, with deeper body copy across each axis and Integral Facticity [+] Enactive Fallibilism brought onto the page in research-axis form alongside the other five. The About page has been expanded alongside it to make Integral Facticity load-bearing as the institute’s methodological grounding rather than as theme. The substrate the institute rests on draws on Maritain’s mid-twentieth-century integral humanism, Dallmayr’s integral pluralism, ACT’s psychological-flexibility and perspective-taking architecture, Habermasian post-metaphysical thinking, and Canadian speculative philosophy.
The applied program through which the research operates across the axes is the Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT) program. Readers familiar with the Substack archive have seen IACT articulated since the November 2024 corpus and the February 2026 methodology essays. What is new is that the institute’s research and development now organizes around four IACT programs in genealogical relationship rather than as a single program.
IACT-1 — Integral Awareness & Commitment Training is the ground program: the auto-ethnographic research program articulated in the November 2024 publications and developed substantially through the February 2026 methodology essays. It carries multi-domain delivery scope across consulting, therapy, training, recovery, and coaching, with delivery architecture in development. Everything else in the institute’s research program rests on this ground because the methodology — auto-ethnographic from the researcher’s own facticity — begins here.
IACT-2 — Integral Action & Commitment Training (Integral Political Praxis) carries the institute’s political-praxis work. It emerges directly from IACT-1: the same human substrate of values-and-commitment work that grounds the auto-ethnographic research program, now applied to the question of how political and social engagement actually proceed under conditions of pluralism, polarization, and post-secular democratic life. The substantial published essay arc from February 2025 through March 2026 — including Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Through and Beyond the Threshold, Beyond the Master Signifier, Philosophy and Religion after Habermas, and Revisiting Lukács’s Destruction of Reason — represents the canonical body of IACT-2 work to date. The program engages integral political praxis through a synthesis of Habermas, Dallmayr, Hayes-ACT, Haidt, Maritain, Wilber, and the Canadian speculative tradition.
IACT-3 — Integral Awareness & Computational Technology carries the institute’s work on AI, computational systems, and the questions that the AI-assisted research infrastructure puts on the table. It is the program territory in which the institute develops and reflects on the infrastructure described in the section above, and engages the wider questions about computational technology, artificial intelligence, and human capacity that the work surfaces. The February 2026 methodology essays — A Descent into Facticity and When the Body Becomes the Laboratory — represent the first wave of IACT-3 articulation, alongside the subsequent essays engaging Stein and Atkins on AI and human capacity, the argument in For Jason Haines: On Loss, Recovery, & Why I Write with AI about how institutions dismiss AI-assisted work on sight regardless of what it says, and the broader question of what computational systems can and cannot do at the level of integral human development. IACT-3 is in active research and development, and the AI-assisted infrastructure described in the section above is itself the program’s current operating expression.
IACT-4 — Integral Action & Computational Technology (Integral Robotics) is the institute’s forward-looking territory for embodied AI systems and robotics — the question of what happens when computational technology moves from cognitive scaffolding into physical-world engagement. The program currently sits as scaffolded research territory rather than active development; its eventual articulation will draw on the AI work conducted under IACT-3 and the political-praxis work conducted under IACT-2, applied to the specific questions that embodied computational systems raise.
The programs are at different stages of development — IACT-1 the operating ground program; IACT-2 with a substantial published essay arc; IACT-3 in active research and development with a substantial published methodology base; IACT-4 most clearly forward-looking territory. Each program operates auto-ethnographically from the same factical ground, applied to different fields of inquiry. The unifying methodology across all four — auto-ethnographic from the researcher’s facticity — is what makes them an IACT family rather than four unrelated programs.
Year-to-Date Publications
The institute published fourteen essays on Integral [+] Facticity between February 1 and March 30. The arc covers three connected concerns: the auto-ethnographic methodology and AI-assisted infrastructure articulated in the opening essays, the engagement with Canadian speculative philosophy and the integral political praxis work in the middle sequence, and the contemporary political and philosophical engagements that closed the arc.
Now is also a good moment to revisit any of these pieces, or older work in the archive going back to the November 2024 launch corpus and the recovery essays from 2018–2019. If you are newer to the writing, the two methodology essays from early February are the natural entry point. If you have been with it longer, the closing four essays in March pull a great deal of the arc together.
Here is the complete list:
A Descent into Facticity — An Open Research Invitation (February 1, 2026)
When the Body Becomes the Laboratory: Field Notes on Protocol v1.2 (February 3, 2026)
The Language Parasite and the Symbolic Order: Toward a Post-Metaphysical Virtue Ethics (February 5, 2026)
Beyond the Master Signifier: Toward a Developmental Account of Psychological Flexibility and Virtue Ethics (February 8, 2026)
Integral Epistemological Pluralism and the Nature-Spirit Problem: From the Parallax Gap to IACT Praxis (February 9, 2026)
On Sean McGrath’s Lost Road and the Post-Metaphysical Challenge (February 12, 2026)
On Speculative Philosophy and the Idea of Canada: Revisiting the Work of Leslie Armour (February 17, 2026)
On God, Absolute Freedom, and the Post-Metaphysical Turn: Revisiting My Dialogue with Matt Segall on Michael Brooks and CIIS (February 21, 2026)
Can the Real Wilber Please Stand Up? A Short Journey Through Wilberland (February 25, 2026)
Through and Beyond the Threshold: My Review of Matthew D. Segall’s Work and the Future of Integral Political Praxis (February 27, 2026)
For Jason Haines: On Loss, Recovery, and Why I Write with AI (March 2, 2026)
Am I Building an Exoskeleton for My Mind? Yes, I Am. (March 7, 2026)
Philosophy and Religion after Habermas: From Zen Buddhism to Post-Metaphysical Theology (March 17, 2026)
Revisiting Lukács’s Destruction of Reason: On Trumpism and the Future of Canadian Sovereignty (March 30, 2026)
Fourteen essays in twelve weeks, with the architectural work above taking up the publication energy in the weeks since.
What is Coming
The next substantive publication has its own personal story behind it. Cadell Last reached out a little while back to ask whether he could include my essay review of his book Real Speculation as an Interlude piece in his forthcoming edited volume Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity (Philosophy Portal Books, May 2026). I was honoured by the invitation, both because of the philosophical company the volume keeps and because the anthology has given Cadell and me an occasion to connect on a more personal level — alongside the long-standing intellectual conversation we have been having through his work and mine. The Interlude essay is titled “A Rosy Cross of a Book.” More on it when the volume lands in May.
Beyond the Rosy Cross contribution, several essay projects are underway. The most architecturally substantive is a consolidating piece on the institute’s philosophical stance — the post-secular, integral-pluralist new form of integral humanism that has been load-bearing internally for some time but has not yet had its own dedicated essay-form articulation. There is also work in development on Fred Dallmayr’s Democracy to Come as ground for integral political praxis at the group-and-political register, supplementing the Prosocial framework that IACT-1 inherits from Atkins, Wilson, and Hayes. A comparative study of SMART Recovery in relation to IACT-1’s program architecture is in the working notes — useful as a structured contrast on how cognitive-behavioral mutual-aid frameworks operationalize at scale, and where IACT-1’s traditioned-practitioner commitment locates it differently from secular cognitive-behavioral models. The IACT Program Model itself continues to develop alongside this writing.
The architecture-heavy, essay-light cadence of the past several weeks has not been a slowing of the work; it has been the work moving at the level of theoretical architecture before surfacing as essay output. The next round of essays will draw on what has been built in that period.
In Closing
Thank you for staying with this work, and for the care so many of you have shown my family through this stretch.
Warm regards,
Erik