Boomeritis: A Novel That Will Set You Free is a 2002 novel by the philosopher Ken Wilber. The protagonist, who is named Ken Wilber, is a brilliant MIT student studying artificial intelligence. Ken believes that the future of evolution includes the departure of human consciousness from the physical realm, or "meatspace", and the merging of human intelligence with cyberspace. 2002 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A novel is an extended work of written, narrative, prose fiction, usually in story form; the writer of a novel is a novelist. ... A philosopher is a person devoted to studying and producing results in philosophy. ... Kenneth Earl Wilber Jr. ... The protagonist is the central figure of a story, and is often referred to as a storys main character. ... MIT redirects here. ... Artificial intelligence (also known as machine intelligence and often abbreviated as AI) is intelligence exhibited by any manufactured (i. ... Cyberspace is a (virtual) reality within the worlds computers and computer networks. ...

Ken attends a series of lectures at an institution called the "Integral Center", which guide him towards a more expansive understanding of evolution and existence. These lectures are interposed with explicit descriptions of Ken's sexual fantasies with another character, Chloe.

Wilber (the author) intended the novel to exhibit the traits of extreme post-modernism—irony, self-reference, noetic flatness—and thus act as a literary reductio ad absurdum, assisting people, especially pluralists, in overcoming the post-modern mentality. Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated pomo) is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism. ... Adolf Hitler: layered visual irony? Irony is a form of speech in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the words used. ... Reductio ad absurdum (Latin for reduction to the absurd, traceable back to the Greek ἡ εις το αδυνατον απαγωγη, reduction to the impossible, often used by Aristotle) is a type of logical argument where we assume a claim for the sake of argument, arrive at an absurd result, and then...

Boomeritis is also a term that Wilber uses to describe a pathological state of consciousness that particularly afflicts Baby Boomers. Boomeritis is characterized by relativism, narcissism, and an aversion to hierarchy. A baby boom is defined as a period of increased birth rates relative to surrounding generations. ... Relativism is the view that the meaning and value of human beliefs and behaviors have no absolute reference. ... Narcissus, the fictional Greek hero after whom narcissism is named, became obsessed with his own reflection Narcissism is the pattern of characteristics and behaviors which involve infatuation and obsession with ones self to the exclusion of others and the egotistic and ruthless pursuit of ones gratification, dominance and... A hierarchy (in Greek hieros = sacred, arkho = rule) is a system of ranking and organizing things. ...