Information for Contributors

Essential Guidelines

Types of Contributors

There are many types of people who may be Contributors to EmergeWiki, as well as many types of knowledge that they may contribute.

We welcome any and all Contributors who will follow our guidelines and who can help people better understand the wide range of ancient and contemporary traditions and approaches there are to Emergent Phenomena as well as how the contemporary global clinical mainstream may add value in relation to these.

In this way, Contributors may be: clinicians and other healthcare providers, scientists, therapists, traditional and contemporary teachers and practitioners, and scholars from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines, as well as non-academic/non-clinical/non-traditional people with useful knowledge and expertise to share, and people who hold multiple perspectives across these who can help bridge these diverse perspectives.

Types of Contributions

EmergeWiki is here to facilitate the deep synthesis of primary sources into actionable recommendations that scale globally and facilitate good outcomes related to Emergent Phenomena in clinical settings, public health contexts, as well as in the field, meaning in diverse ceremonies and traditional practice contexts, on retreats, in families and communities, and globally. Primary sources may include, but are not limited to:

• ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary texts and other media from a wide range of traditions, either in full or in summary
• hybrid texts and other media that span, synthesize, and expand upon older sources
• clinical and scientific sources from those traditions, including articles, theses, dissertations, policies, protocols, guidelines, standards of care, preliminary results, ongoing projects, open source data, roadmaps for systems improvement, etc.

References and Citations

It is essential that we properly document our information sources. As this platform is built on MediaWiki, the same platform that powers Wikipedia, and given the general familiarity with these formats, we will generally follow the standard reference and citation guidelines from Wikipedia.

Epistemology and Evidence Quality

Epistemology is the study and consideration of how we know what we think or feel we know. Different groups and individuals may have diverse and sometimes contradictory understandings of what forms the basis of statements about how things truly are (see Ontology below).

In the case of EmergeWiki, the goal is to understand and work with and across the various cultural understandings of how we know things to promote therapeutic alliances and improved outcomes. In this case, the specific goal is to help the everyone relating to Emergent Phenomena to have information presented in a style and language and based on evidence that they will find informative and to understand the source of that knowledge so that they can filter that through their own Epistemology.

It is also essential that we provide clear information on the Level of Evidence of any in formation regarding the specifics of what is considered normal and abnormal in the various traditions, as well as for any clinical or policy recommendations found here. Evidence quality and how it applies to both contemporary and evolving clinical practice and public policy is a complex topic.

Similarly complex is the topic of exactly how to weigh and categorize various types of evidence we have available from various Emergent Traditions, some of which have been evolving and iterating on their systems for thousands and maybe tens of thousands of years with a wide range of epistemic standards and methods. We will need to refine and develop Approaches to Traditional Evidence.

We also face a new and rapidly evolving question in how to weight and categorize the recommendations of various LLM/AI platforms, which may aggregate and synthesize vast amounts of information of variable quality, with, on the one hand, possible "hallucinations" and errors, yet, on the other hand, profound insights based on amounts of information that ordinary humans might find beyond their capacity to learn and remember, let alone cohere. This question becomes more complex as more and more LLM/AI content is generated and publicly posted that is fed back back into the training models for next-generation models, with the EmergeWiki contributing to those models.

Ontological Certainty, Agnosticism, and Neutrality

Ontology is the study or consideration of what truly is, often concerned with the fundamental questions of the nature of reality, experience, identity, and the like, and a core consideration of philosophy, religion, spirituality, and science. Ontological considerations on EmergeWiki are primarily viewed in a pragmatic light of what helps produce therapeutic alliances, inform practitioners and experiencers in ways, and facilitate communication, interpersonal, and intrapersonal understanding in ways that promote good outcomes and scale globally into mainstream settings in a way that adds demonstrable value.

Considerations of how to skillfully handle issues of Ontology are essential to the EmergeWiki project, and this must be done with great care.

Ontological Certainty

Ontological Certainty is a common feature of most religious, spiritual, cultural, scientific, and related emergent traditions. Noetic Experiences, those which induce a compelling sense of veracity in the experiencer, both of bare phenomenology as well as interpretation, are commonly reported as an aspect of Emergent Phenomena, and this is reflected in thousands of years of traditions claiming the supremacy of their diverse ontological doctrines. For traditions who propound or adhere to Ontological Certainty, it is important that they be labeled and described as having this feature, as that knowledge may be very useful in for intrapersonal understanding and cultural competence as the basis of building therapeutic alliances and promoting good outcomes.

Guideline: Sections of EmergeWiki that are specifically about the details of traditions that maintain aspects of Ontological Certainty may and should be presented as such, with their full internal arguments, worldviews, ontologies, and certainties being made clear to help facilitate a respectful and authentic representation of these traditions.

This is in keeping with guidelines and recommendations that understanding traditions as they are and as they think of themselves is vital for informing support and care, such as this from the DSM-5TR, page 366:

“Culture-Related Diagnostic issues Many differences between cultural contexts may influence psychological factors and their effects on medical conditions, such as those in language and communication style, idioms of distress, explanatory models of illness, patterns of seeking health care, service availability and organization, doctor-patient relationships and other healing practices, family and gender roles, and attitudes toward pain and death. Psychological factors affecting other medical conditions must be differentiated from culturally specific coping behaviors such as accessing faith, spiritual, or traditional healers or other variations in illness management that are acceptable within cultural contexts and represent an attempt to help heal the medical condition. These local practices may complement rather than obstruct evidence-based interventions. Use of alternative healing practices may delay use of medical services and affect outcomes, but when the intent of the healing practice is to address the problem in a culturally sanctioned way, these practices should not be pathologized as psychological factors affecting other medical conditions.”

Ontological Agnosticism

Ontological Agnosticism is the notion that we cannot know for certain what the underlying truths actually are, as there is insufficient evidence to justify absolute certainty one way or the other, so this is closely related to considerations of Epistemology and fundamental inadequacies therein. While there is some nuanced diversity in the varieties and underlying logics of Agnosticism both in terms of the reasons for the doubt as well as what there is doubt about, the basic essence of it containing essential aspects of ontological uncertainty remains. Its roots are ancient and its contemporary variants are many, contributing strongly to movements and cultural phenomena such as Postmodernism.

Ontological agnosticism has the disadvantage lacking the reassuring sense of felt certainty and known truth, with both the internal and social benefits that may provide. It has the advantage of potentially being more open, curious, flexible, and culturally accepting, potentially contributing to the demonstration of openness, acceptance, and interest that can allow for the establishing of trust in healing contexts, for example and specifically.

Nearly everyone has their favorite ontological positions and frames, and very few people to perhaps no people are truly and entirely ontologically agnostic either philosophically or functionally in how they operationalize their internal concepts in their day-to-day lives and interactions.

Guideline: It is extremely important that contributors who contribute outside of the presentation of traditions with Ontological Certainty are aware of their own ontological biases, preferences, and certainties and how these may impact other aspects of the EmergeWiki, specifically sections designed for global clinical recommendations to be recommended for inclusion in the curriculum of board certification of the various specialties, inclusions in standards of care, national policy guidelines, medical textbooks, etc. In these, we strongly recommend Ontological Agnosticism, or at least Ontological Neutrality.

Put another way, EmergeWiki is not a place for what we call the Ontology Wars, those seemingly perennial battles for that which is not Perennial

Ontological Neutrality

Ontological Neutrality is