Five Layers, Four Planes, and Twelve Levels:
Extended Naturalism’s Ontology of the Natural World
As John Vervaeke makes clear in his excellent keynote lecture given at the 2023 UTOK Consilience Conference, Leveling Up, Extended Naturalism (EN) embraces a layered as opposed to a flat ontology. This means we reject reductive physicalism and any philosophical position that claims that the only thing that is “fundamentally real” is the bottom of the ontological layered cake. This is the claim the laws of physics and the fundamental particles and forces that make up the Standard Model are the only things that have true causal power. It is a claim that the physicist Sean Carroll recently made, and here is a blog that explains why reductive physicalism is profoundly misguided.
Although Leveling Up does a great job of providing the philosophical justification for why there is a layered ontology in nature, it did not specify the layers themselves. Of course, this is where UTOK picks things up and fills in the details. This connection was laid out in the first part of the Cognitive Science Show series that John and I did, called Transcendent Naturalism. For those who have not seen TN, it is a worldview that consists of Extended Naturalism coupled to the concept of strong transcendence, which refers to transcendence that takes place at the level of cultural collectives. Here we focus only on EN.
The purpose of this blog is to be explicit about the ontological vocabulary and conception of emergence that grounds EN, as we have laid it out. To do so, I will use UTOK’s ToK System and PTB to define what is meant by ontological layers, planes, and levels. I will then align this with the three kinds of emergence I classified with Tyler Volk.
To begin, though, let me make a comment about what is meant by the “natural world” in the title of this blog. It is basically everything in our cosmic history, except for human technology. This raises the question: What about human culture? After all, many conceive of culture as being the opposite of nature.
If you know UTOK’s Tree of Knowledge and Justification Systems Theory, you know that UTOK gives us a clear theoretical formulation of how human self-consciousness and human culture emerged via natural processes. Indeed, Justification Systems Theory is the “joint point” between the nonhuman natural world of minded animals and the Culture-Person plane of existence.
Thus, in UTOK, human culture, defined by emergent systems of justification, and can be thought of as being both continuous and discontinuous with the natural world. Moreover, the ToK System makes clear that the Culture-Person plane of existence, unlike human tools and artifacts per se, are part of the wave of behavioral complexification that needs to be mapped by natural-into-social science (see here for more). With this technical point clarified, we can now move to specifying our ontological vocabulary.
Five Ontological Layers, Four Ontological Planes of Existence, and Twelve Ontological Levels
UTOK’s ToK System gives us five ontological layers, which are: 1) Energy-Information; 2) Matter-Object; 3) Life-Organism; 4) Mind-Animal; and 5) Culture-Person.
These layers are then divided into the Energy-Information Implicate Order and the four planes of existence. The four planes of existence emerge out of the layers beneath them as dimensions of behavioral complexification. Indeed, the planes of existence can also be called ontological dimensions of behavioral complexification. That was how I originally characterized them. Here is the relationship:
You can think of the Energy Information Implicate Order as consisting of probabilistic potential, but it does not constitute a plane of existence. The reasons are complicated, but the basic answer is that at the Energy-Information layer, the virtual, possible, and actual are all entangled and undifferentiated, so that there really is not a “plane existence with specifiable entities” in the standard meanings of these terms.
The Matter-Object plane emerges from the Energy Information Implicate Order at the time of the Big Bang because of the hot inflationary processes and the way the universe expands and cools. This expansion relates to something called the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which means that fermions, also known as the “matter particles” cannot occupy the same quantum state. The relationship between the Energy-Information Implicate Order and the Matter-Object plane of existence is, in essence, the relationship between the quantum world and the classical world. Indeed, this formulation helps us frame the relationship between quantum and classical in a readily graspable way.
We can now shift to the Life-Organism, Mind-Animal, and Culture-Person planes. These planes can be considered “complex adaptive” planes. They emerge because complexity building feedback loops (AKA evolutionary processes) give rise to novel information processing systems and communication networks. We can see such emergent information-communication processes in genes, organisms, and ecologies on the Life plane; nervous systems, animals, and animal groups at the Mind plane; and language, persons, and cultures at the Culture plane.
The Periodic Table of Behavior extends the ToK System to give us ontological levels. To do so, it identifies primary behavioral units that are associated with each of the four planes. It then posits that these primary units can be broken down into parts, as a “level down” below the primary unit or grouped together to generate a “level up” above the primary layer This gives three levels per plane of existence, such that the PTB identifies 12 ontological levels.
The argument for the PTB is greatly enhanced by UTOK’s analysis of the concept of behavior and how it aligns the domains of science with these ontological levels. For a blog on this, see here. For a more extended treatment, see chapters 9 and 10 from A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology.
Three Different Categories of Emergence
In addition to clarifying our ontological vocabulary, the ToK and PTB give us a way to categorize different kinds of emergence. This was the focus of the work I did with Tyler Volk in our Big History 2.0 proposal. As our perspectives synced up, we identified three kinds of emergence, as follows: (a) aggregate across scales; (b) leveling up via combogenesis; and (c) evolutionary processes that give rise to new planes of existence (or realms, as Tyler called them).
Aggregate emergence is the most basic kind. It occurs when novel properties like fluidity emerge when groups of things come together. Another common example is that traffic is a property that emerges out of groups of cars.
Aggregates are not directly depicted on the ToK System because it is a map of complexification and leveling up across time. On the PTB, however, above the primary levels there is the general category, which represents the placeholder for aggregates across scale. Here is a graphic that depicts various aggregates across scales of complexification, divided into the four planes of existence:
Ontologically, leveling up is a different kind of emergence than mere aggregate formations. It refers to part-whole fusion. It is what I have called complexification, and what Tyler Volk called combogenesis. It is different from aggregates because of the structural-functional relations between the parts and wholes gives rise to new ontological levels of organization.
Consider that fluidity, which is a kind of aggregate property emergence, is not structurally or functionally bounded. However, when an electron and a proton come together to form a hydrogen atom, that atom is structurally and functionally bounded in a different way. This is actually a deep philosophical issue. Indeed, there is a whole branch of metaphysics called mereology that deals with these relations. The PTB maps the leveling up or steps in combogenesis that leads from the Big Bang to us.
The third kind of emergence is dimensional emergence, which refers to the way new planes of existence emerge from the ontological layers beneath them. Tyler Volk and I argued that Life, Mind, and Culture can be framed as emerging via Darwinian processes of variation, selection, and retention. Tyler Volk called these “realms,” which is synonymous with planes and dimensions in the present scheme. (Of note, Stephen Hawking’s final theory was that the Matter-Object plane also emerges via a similar kind of Darwinian process).
The last point about emergence I want to make here is one that John emphasizes in his talk; a proper conception of emergence requires us to also consider emanation. Whereas the concept of emergence tends to orient us to focus on new features and properties, emanation orients us toward constraints that frame properties and probabilities and transform them into actualities. Both are needed for the growth of complexification.
Here is a diagram that captures both emergence and emanation from a blog by Nathan Fifield, who wrote about my work with John on Transcendent Naturalism.
Concluding Comment
The great challenge of science is to map the world as it is. The first scientific Enlightenment brought us a powerful way to understand the world, called physical reductionism. It went down, from systems and wholes into parts, and found a deep ontological continuity across the levels that bottomed out into quantum field theory and, historically, collapsed everything back into the pure energy-information state that existed prior to the Big Bang.
The problem, however, was that the scientific analysis could go down, but had massive trouble “going back up.” Indeed, this is what makes emergence such a confusing, complicated, and contentious concept in science. And it is why we still have physical reductionistic positions being taken by scientists like Sean Carroll and Robert Sapolsky.
Physically reductionistic accounts are, however, deeply problematic. John’s Leveling Up lecture makes this clear with a single, powerful point. The physical reductionist worldview cannot account for what natural science presupposes. That is, natural science presupposes that measurement, observation, and accurate knowledge are real things. Yet physicists and their observations and theorists of physics do not exist at the level of the Standard Model or fundamental laws. This leaves with an obvious contradiction for physical reductionism, which is that its advocates claim that the physical laws that physics tells us are fundamentally real, while also claiming that physicists and physical theories are not fundamentally real.
Extended Naturalism avoids this rather embarrassing and contradictory state of affairs. It clarifies what is ontologically real in nature, and gives us a clear understanding of human consciousness and their epistemological interrelation. Consider, for example, the standard ToK System representation. It explicitly depicts the relationship between the natural world and our scientific knowledge of it. Our theories are justifications that map reality. And they are part of the ontological matrix. This means that how knowers know about the known a real process. Thus, Extended Naturalism is a much better overall picture of reality than physicalism.
