At the University of California, Berkeley, I spent the major part of my Junior and Senior years in Supervised Independent Study aimed at answering the question: What is required to train a modern generalist capable of understanding the full breadth and depth of the complexity of modern environmental challenges such as wildfire management, pollution, and climate change?
While I made progress on this question and graduated with honors, I did not find the required answers. At graduation I discovered that no university anywhere taught the kind of knowledge I was looking for. After many years of research on this problem, I realized that I had become a modern generalist. I was using in my daily work modern generalist methodologies that provided access to depth and breadth of understanding across the disciplines.
By this time my interests had progressed from complex environmental problems to exploring the foundations of the universe. This transition occurred because many of the modern generalist methodologies were based on universals—intrinsic qualities of the universe itself that play their roles in essentially every situation. These factors are usually omnipresent, and in combination with the more detailed knowledge provided by the sciences, they enable access to depth and breadth of understanding.
The generalist methodology uses the universals to guide exploration and provide understanding. In practice the content of every observation and the content of every concept are rigorously compared to the universals. The content of observations and concepts must comply with the universals. Any deviation in an observation or concept from the universals reveals a problem in the observation or concept—it is unreal in some way. Modern generalist methodology is a realist methodology that uses more than twenty universals as conceptual tools for the analysis and understanding of the universe.
More about universals.
There are three different types of universals. Foundationally there are the existence-factors which together make existence possible. For there to be existence, any existence at all, there must be existential-quantity, three-dimensionality, and continuing-existence. Here also, are the foundational forms of existence, space, time, matter, and motion. From the existence and intrinsic qualities of these four all else follows.
The second type of universal is pattern-of-organization of structure and process. Structural-organization is organization in space, while process-organization is organization through time.
The third type of universals are the factors that contribute newness to the universe. The foundational newness factors are continuing-existence, motion, and the process of emergence. There are additionally developed factors that contribute newness, such as coherence, the joining of units of matter to create material structure, and biological evolution. Due to these newness factors the universe is continuously new.
There are three existence-factors, four forms of existence, and several factors that contribute newness. These foundational universals together result in a seemingly endless variety of patterns-of-organization.
