Explaining Every Day Events: UTOK Versus Physicalism
Yesterday, while on a walk, I noticed a rubber glove lying in the gravel. It grabbed my attention, prompting me to take a picture and send a text to my fiancée, Marcia, that read, “Abandoned rubber glove saying f*ck you to the world.”
For this blog, I want to pose a simple but revealing question: How do we understand this event?
Physicalism is the dominant approach in the modern philosophy of mind and it struggles to provide a satisfying answer. Physicalism remains entangled in abstract debates over whether the mental is reducible to the physical, whether consciousness can be fully explained by physical mechanisms, and whether philosophical zombies are possible. Despite spending hundreds of hours exploring the philosophy of mind literature, I have not encountered a framework that helps me make sense of an everyday event like my reaction to this glove.
In stark contrast, UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge, offers a map of reality that clarifies both continuity and discontinuity in nature. It precisely defines mind and consciousness relative to behavior, provides a coherent model of human consciousness, and situates our scientific understanding within an intelligible framework.
Instead of the traditional “objective-matter” vs. “subjective-mind” dichotomy, UTOK reveals that I was behaving as a cultured person. This means I was (a) actively engaged with the world as a primate, and (b) operating on the Culture-Person plane of existence, navigating what UTOK calls “justification space.”
This leads to deeper questions: What are cultured persons, and where do they come from? What is the Culture-Person place of existence? How does the concept of justification relate to this?
UTOK answers with a clear visual map of reality and scientific knowledge called the Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System. The ToK System divides reality into four distinct “planes of existence” — Inanimate, Biological, Psychological, and Cultural. Traditional philosophy of mind overlooks these distinctions, yet they are essential for scientifically understanding the behaviors of inanimate objects, organisms, animals, and people.
UTOK’s Periodic Table of Behavior (PTB) extends the ToK framework, mapping the evolution of behavioral complexification both within and across these planes. The PTB identifies cultured persons as operating on the 11th level of behavioral complexification. Complexification refers to how smaller parts synchronize into larger wholes, which then form metastable patterns. For example, a soccer team consists of individual players who coordinate into an integrated system. The PTB traces this complexification process from fundamental particles (level 1) to human cultural groups (level 12).
The 11th floor is labeled “Mind3,” which in UTOK refers to the domain of justification in the mentation of a human person. The 11th floor is the primary layer/level that I would use to understand my behavior.
Returning to the glove: Why is it “behaving” the way it is as it lies on the dirt? Here, UTOK and physicalism initially agree — the glove lies on the ground due to gravity and other physical forces. We can assume it ended up there by blowing off a truck or being accidentally dropped. Physics and chemistry explain its passive behavior after being discarded (i.e., we can understand the glove behavior as “general object field relations” on the Matter-Object plane of existence).
But the key question for us is: Why did I take the picture?
UTOK provides a clear answer. My hierarchical predictive processing system, what John Vervaeke aptly calls “recursive relevance realization,” detected the glove as a meaningful pattern. More specifically, the glove’s macroscopic, symbolic form triggered my perceptual system. Crucially, this pattern was independent of the glove’s microscopic physical states.
The reason for this lies in how symbols and justification systems function on the Culture-Person plane. In our culture, that hand symbol conveys “f*ck you.” According to the ToK System, only humans fully participate in this “justification space,” a unique dimension of behavioral complexification that emerged due to propositional language and the problem of justification, which in turn created a feedback loop leading to complex cultural systems.
Physicalists like Sean Carroll acknowledge emergence, but as far as I can tell, they consistently fail to appreciate how novel information-processing systems and communication networks generate novel, top-down causal forces. While physics explains the glove’s material properties, it cannot explain how and why my cognitive system assigned semantic meaning to its form.
In this instance, (presumably) random environmental forces arranged the glove in a shape that my predictive processing system interpreted as significant. This triggered a reaction — a predictive processing surprise that turned into amusement, and the impulse to share that semantic construction with my fiancée. That led to this blog, where I am trying to justify why UTOK’s perspective on emergence is superior to the reductionist stance of physicalists like Carroll.
If Carroll or other physicalists can explain how quantum state fluctuations account for my recognition of a rubber glove flipping off the world, I am open to hearing it. However, so far, all I see from physicalism is an emphasis on ontological continuity without an account of the novel causal powers of emergent information-processing systems that add discontinuity to the mix. UTOK, by contrast, provides a clear and testable framework for understanding how human cognition operates in “justification space” and why emergent cultural and psychological processes cannot be dismissed as mere illusions.
In sum, UTOK provides a way to understand the dynamics of an everyday event. Physicalism, in contrast, offers little more than the assertion that everything is ultimately reducible to physics. While that claim may be true in the broadest sense of ontological continuity, it fails to capture the causal powers of human cognition and culture, which includes debates about physicalism. UTOK includes what is valuable about physicalism and then transcends that because it enables us to understand human psychology and the causal powers of things like justificatory processes.
