How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem with the Unified Theory of Knowledge
What is the relationship between the mental and the physical worlds? On the one hand, the distinction seems obvious. Consider, for example, the story of my daughter, Sydney, who, when she was 4, freaked out at the doctor’s office because she was terrified about getting a shot. The nurse came into our room, and proceeded to set up the materials for the shot, but she was then called away. Seeing the needles, Sydney became increasingly distraught. First, she whimpered, “I don’t want that. I want to go home.” She then brushed off our assurances and started crying loudly. She then decompensated into a full-blown panic, where she was writhing and screaming. The nurse hurried back, but Syd was in no position to receive the shot. It took about 15 minutes, along with a lollipop, and a walk around the office to get her calmed down. We finally got the shot in her, using some bribing, coaxing, and distraction.
“Look over there,” the nurse said, rubbing her arm. “See the pictures of the bears on the wall.”
“Yes, I see them. Ok, go ahead,” she said.
“Actually, I already did,” the nurse said. “You are all done.”
“What?” she asked, surprised. “It’s over?”
Applying the commonsense distinction between the mental and physical domains, we can say that Sydney’s terror was “all in her mind,” and that the “physical experience” of the shot was not nearly as bad as her “mental image” of it. This division suggests that there is a physical world of real things and a different world of mental things. The world of mental things is made up of feelings, imaginations, worries, and — as our dreams at night remind us — can be about just about anything. In contrast, the physical world is different. It consists of things that exist in space and follow physical laws. Such things can be mapped by precise sciences like physics and chemistry. The shot Sydney got was a physical thing. It had a certain mass, and it took the nurse a certain amount of force to push the needle into my daughter’s arm, and contained a vaccine that had molecules that would interact with her body and help prevent certain physical diseases down the line.
Although this seems pretty straightforward, with a few questions, we can see that the dividing line between the physical and mental is complicated and confusing. Consider, for example, my narrative of the story. Is it a “mental” or a “physical thing”? What about the “physical experience” of the shot? Was the imagined pain “mental,” but the sensed pain “physical”? Does the concept of “physical pain” make sense? Are you having a “physical experience” of reading this blog?
Most lay people tend to associate the physical world with “reality,” and the mental world with ideas about reality. However, as this debate between Bernado Kastrup and John Vervaeke demonstrates, some scholars and philosophers flip this around and argue that everything is best thought of in terms of ideas. With his “analytic idealism”, Kastrup argues that everything is, in fact, “mental.” Regardless of its validity, his proposal for analytic idealism shows how profoundly deep and confusing the relationship between the mental and physical can be.
From my perspective, the endless debates about the nature of consciousness demonstrate beyond any shadow of a doubt that both commonsense and standard knowledge systems are deeply confused how to sort out the relationship between the mental and the physical, and this confusion leads to loads of other problems in sense-making. Thankfully, the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK) gives us a knowledge system that can readily make sense out the relationship between the mental and physical worlds. However, before detailing the steps it takes to get us out of the confusion, we need to back up and review the history of how we got here.
A Brief History of the Emergence of the Ideas of the Mental and Physical Worlds
To fully appreciate the problem, it is helpful to locate our current understanding in its cultural history. This is because different cultural systems have divided the world in different ways. For example, the Eastern traditions like Hinduism or Buddhism have different maps for inner and outer experience than the West. To trace the modern conception of the physical and mental worlds in the West, we can start with the Christian worldview, which dominated Europe for over 1,500 years. [A good book for tracing this history of these ideas is Richard Tarnas’ The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Shaped Our Worldview.] The straightforward, commonsense, concrete, literal worldview of mainstream Christian thought is that the mental world comes alive because of a God-given soul. This soul-stuff that breathes life into humans is “other worldly,” and gives people the inner experiences and capacities to imagine and wonder and, potentially, be connected to God. This is seen in the traditional Christian belief that the spirit lives on after the body dies.
In the 13th and 14th Century, this was the way that virtually everyone in the West understood the world to work. There was the physical world of nature and the mental-into-soul/spiritual world of God, which existed in the “supernatural” realm (i.e., above and beyond the natural world). At around this time, monks and scholars started to try and find out how the natural world worked. The thinking was that God had put many things in motion and that humans were given the gift of reason and could apply that to understand the regularities of the natural world. This is the birth of what would be called “natural philosophy.” Natural philosophy was initially carried out much in the way that Aristotle (384–322 BC) had carried out his investigations more than 1,500 years prior. Indeed, natural philosophy was sparked in part because scholars rediscovered the great Greek philosophers during their raids and Crusades into the Muslim world.
Natural philosophy would ultimately give birth to what we can now call “modern empirical natural science” or modern science for short. This was a new way of knowing about the world that was ushered in during the 16th and 17th centuries. Galileo (1564–1642) is generally considered as the father of modern science. He became frustrated with Aristotle’s approach to understanding nature, and went on to develop mathematically accurate description of how and why things moved the way they did. For example, Aristotle had claimed that it was the nature of earthly things hat they had a telos or a purpose. Specifically, material objects like rocks “wanted” to move down and be connected to the Earth. This was why bigger and heavier things moved faster when they fall; there was more stuff that wanted to find its proper place.
Galileo tested this idea, and he showed it was wrong. He dropped objects with different weights but similar shapes and showed they did not fall at different speeds. Galileo also built on Copernicus’s insights and showed definitively that not everything revolved around the Earth. And he argued convincingly that a better model of the heavens was that the planets moved around the sun. As suggested by these brief descriptions, Galileo introduced systematic observation, experimental testing of assumptions, and mathematical analyses to describe motion in a way that would birth a whole new kind of knowledge. This knowledge grew and was further transformed by Isaac Newton (1642- 1726), who developed both calculus and the laws of motion. Newton’s contributions were enormous and resulted in the development of what Thomas Kuhn would call a “paradigm.” Newtonian mechanics became a consensually shared understanding of the material world that scientists used for modeling and explaining inanimate objects for over 225 years, until the modern revolutions in physics that took place about 100 years ago.
Long before Galileo, scholars in natural philosophy had established that the language of natural philosophy did not “mix well” with supernatural concepts. They were different language systems. Newton himself was a very Christian man who spent more time studying the Bible than physics. This meant that most of the early scientists, including Galileo and Newton, did not see their way of understanding the world as being “up to the task” for understanding the mental world. Most famously, Rene Descartes (1596–1650) tackled this problem and generated his “dual world” view of mind and matter. The argument from Descartes was, in some ways, like our commonsense folk psychology of today. It just seems undeniable that the “stuff of matter” is totally different than the “stuff of mind.”
Unfortunately, however, subsequent philosophical analyses have revealed that a dualistic world view is largely incoherent. The reason can be stated quite simply in the form of a question: If the stuff of matter is completely different than the stuff of mind, then how do the two substances interact? Although there is much more that can be said, we will leave it here, and simply state that the conceptual difficulties are so profound that very few philosophers argue for a “substance dualist” view of the universe and our place in it.
The modern scientific enterprise continued to advance in the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries. Chemistry, the level of analysis above physics, received a huge boost with the Periodic Table of the Elements and then the atomic theory of matter. Biology received a huge early boost with Robert Hook’s theory of cells, then Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection in the middle of the 19th Century, and a few decades Gregor Mendel’s genetics, although his key insights would only become widely known and then merged with evolution in the first half of the 20th Century. By the 19th Century, even the psyche (or in modern terms, the mind) was getting framed by the modern empirical natural science revolution. For example, in the middle of the 19th Century, early “psycho-physical laws” that connect stimulation to experience were found by scientists like Helmholtz, Fechner, and Weber. In his 1860 Elements of Psychophysics, Fechner made the claim that “…psycho-physics is an exact doctrine of the relation of function or dependence between body and soul.”
As science advanced and expanded and as technologies proliferated and fed back on scientific investigations, it produced a sea change in how humans thought about themselves and the world. In the West, the transition was made from almost a complete dominance of the Christian worldview to a massive shift toward a secular worldview, at least for the commons. That is, liberal democracies, capitol-labor relations, industrial-scale production and consumption, and global commerce and colonialization spread throughout the world. As that happened, the worldview in Europe shifted from Christianity being fused with every aspect of life to it being separated from the state and relegated to the domain of religion and faith.
A Brief Summary of the Mind-Body Problem
Although the dualistic worldviews of both the Christian religion (i.e., natural versus supernatural) and the arguments from Descartes (i.e., matter versus mind) dropped out of favor in philosophical circles, nothing coherent ever emerged to take its place. In short, the Enlightenment revolution left the mind-body problem unresolved. The UTOK frames this as the “Enlightenment Gap”. It refers to the failure of the Enlightenment to achieve a coherent philosophy that effectively framed the proper relations between matter and mind and scientific and social knowledge. This is not a controversial claim, as the so-called mind-body problem is well-known, and it is agreed to be one of the great unresolved problems in modern thought.
In his review of the mind-body problem, Kurt Ludwig gives a philosophically formal statement of the problem as follows (pages 10–11):
The problem arises from the appeal of the following four theses.
1) Realism. Some things have mental properties.
2) Conceptual autonomy. Mental properties are not conceptually reducible to non-mental properties, and, consequently, no non-mental proposition entails any mental proposition.
3) Constituent explanatory sufficiency. A complete description of a thing in terms of its basic constituents, their non-relational properties, and relations to one another and to other basic constituents of things, similarly described (the constituent description) entails a complete description of it, i.e., an account of all of a thing’s properties follows from its constituent description.
4) Constituent non-mentalism. The basic constituents of things do not have mental properties as such. The logical difficulty can now be precisely stated. Theses (2)–(4) entail the negation of (1). For if the correct fundamental physics invokes no mental properties, (4), and every natural phenomenon (i.e., every phenomenon) is deducible from a description of a thing in terms of its basic constituents and their arrangements, (3), then given that no non-mental propositions entail any mental propositions, (2), we can deduce that there are no things with mental properties, which is the negation of (1). The logical difficulty would be easy to resolve were it not for the fact that each of (1)–(4) has a powerful appeal for us.
Let me put this in plainer language. It seems that some things, like my daughter’s fears about getting a shot, are mental in nature. But science tells us that the world is made up of matter in motion. The world of matter seems completely different than the world of the mind. But, as we have seen, there can only be one world. So, how can you put together a good philosophy that comprehensively and coherently addresses the problem? Scientists and philosophers have given many different answers, but have failed to deliver a coherent picture of the whole.
Although developing a clear picture regarding the material and mental worlds has been difficult, both scientists and philosophers have long recognized that the mental plays a huge role in our knowledge about the world. The most influential philosopher of the Enlightenment was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant made a powerful argument that physics was based on observation and logic. However, when humans observed things, they do not just see the world as it is. Kant argued that humans have access to “phenomena,” rather than the “things in themselves” (i.e., noumena). When you look out at the world, it seems we just see the world as it is. However, Kant recognized that this is impossible. The world is constructed by the categories that the human mind imposes upon it. Returning the story with my daughter, Sydney did not just see a needle as it exists in the world. Her mind perceived the needle and all that it meant and she reacted to the phenomena. Kant said the same is true of Galileo looking through his telescope. It is this kind of insight that makes Kastrup’s analytical idealism potentially plausible. (Note, as this blog makes clear, I do not think idealism is the right answer, but instead I side with Vervaeke and a sophisticated naturalism, as framed here in a blog on different scientific worldviews).
Through Kant, the Enlightenment connected the mental world to our knowledge of reality through what philosophers call “epistemology,” which is the fancy term for how we know what we know and how we justify that to be true or accurate. Another key word in philosophy is ontology, which refers to one’s theory about what is real. As suggested by the mind-body problem as framed above, it is the ontology of the mental that modern science struggles with most deeply. Puzzles about the ontology of the mental relate to what is called the “hard problem of consciousness,” and why we have programs like “Closer To Truth” giving endless variations of scientists and scholars trying to grapple with the problem.
These issues are tricky, and both scientists and philosophers often get the ontological and epistemological aspects of the mental confused. This happens all the time in my field of psychology. Indeed, the very definition of the field shows how it is confused about ontology and epistemology. Mainstream academic psychology defines its subject matter in terms of “behavior and mental processes.” However, the field does not define behavior and mental processes in terms of ontology, which is what mature sciences do. Rather, in the mainstream definition, “behavior” is defined by what is epistemologically accessible to science. As I have repeatedly pointed out, this is a huge mistake, and it shows a fundamental flaw in the core logic of the field.
The UTOK Was Sparked by the Problem of Psychotherapy
This brings me to a point that readers should be aware. The UTOK emerges from a different ground than the standard frames on the mind-body problem. Mostly, the issue is tackled by philosophers, and sometimes by physicists and neuroscientists. In contrast to these areas of expertise, the UTOK ultimately emerges out of the field of psychotherapy and clinical/theoretical psychology. Since high school, I was always fascinated by human psychology and wanted to become a psychologist. I majored in psychology and learned about empiricism and thought that science (i.e., doing systematic research on patterns of behavior in the world) was the way to go. I was not concerned with solving the mind-body problem; rather, I was concerned with understanding human psychology so that I could become a wise psychological doctor and be an effective therapist that was grounded in the best scientific evidence.
I started my training in the mid-1990s and encountered the first problem intellectual problem that would ultimately spawn the UTOK “metapsychology.” We can call this the problem of psychotherapy. The problem can be stated as follows: The field of psychotherapy consists of many different schools of thought, like psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, humanistic/existential, and family systems. They all have key insights, but they speak very different languages. My big picture coherentist intuition was that they should go together in a harmonious way, and that we should be able to organize them scientifically. This led me to the idea that we should organize psychological therapies by the science of human psychology. (See here for a keynote lecture on these issues that I recently gave to a society for clinical psychologists).
Reframing the issues this way resulted in me seeing the science of psychology in a new light. As an undergrad, I had bought into the empiricist idea that psychology was a science because it applied the methods of science to the domain of behavior and mental processes. However, now that I wanted a coherent theory of human psychology so that I could organize the therapy schools of thought into a coherent picture, I saw the huge problems with this approach. That is, when I asked for what psychology said about human mental behavior as a whole, I realized that the field is completely chaotic at the conceptual level (see, e.g., here). It has no ontology that adequately frames its subject matter. This is apparent in how the field is defined. It defines “behavior” as that which is accessible to the methods of science and then defines “mental processes” as inferred “intervening variables” that are then theorized to cause the outcomes of their experiments. This framing is called “methodological behaviorism” and it is the way modern psychology applies the methods of science to mental processes.
This application of the scientific method does not address the question: What are mental processes? And I realized that no one had a good, comprehensive answer to this crucial question. Some scholars thought of mental processes as neurocognitive processes, some thought of them as conscious experiences, some thought of them in terms of self-conscious reflections and reasoning. There was no overarching frame on which folks could agree. What happened in psychology was that psychologists built research programs based on schools of thought and “operationalized definitions” of researchers. A researcher might be interested in why some kids have shot phobias and study that. Another might be interested in why some people go into the nursing profession. Another might be interested in a parent’s anxiety and how that influences their relationship with their kids. But all of these would then be different questions with different measures and different vocabularies, which, as this blog shows, creates massive complications. Why did they go this route? Because there is no general way to think about human “behavior and mental processes”.
Why was such a frame lacking for the field? Well, in retrospect, given what I wrote above about the mind-body problem, the answer turns out to be obvious. To have a psychology that specified what was scientifically meant by the concept of “mind” or “mental processes” meant that we would have had to have solved problem. That is what I mean when I say I backed into the mind-body problem via psychotherapy.
The UTOK is a unified approach to knowledge because it generates a system that effectively solves the problem of scientific psychology and an integrative/unified approach to psychotherapy. And, in so doing, it also solves the mind-body problem, and a host of other long-standing problems in philosophy. The following lists 10 key steps the UTOK makes that allow us to solve the mind-body problem and generate a coherent philosophy that coherently embraces our modern scientific knowledge and our unique subjective experience of being. These steps, admittedly, are not super easy to follow. But the problem is complicated, and with practice the specific arguments and moves can come together to form a coherent whole that undeniably advances our understanding.
Solving the Mind-Body Problem in 10 Steps
Step 1: Setting the Frame of Scientifically Observing and Interpreting Human (Mental) Behavior
Let’s go back to the scene with my daughter. What was it like for her, exactly, in the doctor’s office looking at that needle? Well, if there had been a video camera in the room, we could have seen the scene from the vantage point of a “behavioral scientist.” It would have shown her looking around with vigilance and clinging to her mother, trying to achieve a sense of security and protection. Then, it would have shown the nurse appear with the shots and proceed to get called out of the room. It would have then shown Sydney start crying, which quickly escalated into screams. If the camera angle showed my face, it would have showed me pleading with her and then turning and mumbling something about the nurse under my breath. Finally, it would have shown Sydney get tired, get a lollipop, then look away, and have nurse approach and give her a shot. Then she looked up and asked that if it was done with surprised look on her face.
Actually, we should say it might have shown this. Or, more properly, this is a reasonable interpretation of the patterns of human activity. The issue here is that what is seen depends on the knowledge of observer who was looking at the video. Put differently, this simple description is riddled with massive amounts of “interpretation.” There is no “measurement” device independent of a human observer that could have “seen” this event take place. Put another way, proving that this is what happened at the “physical level” is not possible. Indeed, the frame of this question is simply fallacious.
This point gets us into one key issue that we need in order to solve the problem. We need to differentiate the way observers operate in the human sciences relative to the physical sciences. A fascinating thing that emerged with physics is that it allowed for remarkable precision in measurement and observation. Moreover, when Newton and Lebinitz invented calculus, they gave us a way to mathematize change, so that our tools for seeing how matter in motion behaved resulted in great scientific precision.
This gave rise to an idea that science was not about interpretation, but rather was about the deductive analysis of truth based on mathematical modeling and experimentation. This gave rise to a split that science is about deducing causality or lawfully determined processes, which is different than interpreting and understanding events. Failure to know how to differentiate the relationship between deductive analyses of lawfully determined processes, and the proper framing of how to interpret complex adaptive systems is one of the points that can trip up physicists and analytic philosophers when they tackle the relationship between behavior at the physical level and behavior at the mental level.
I am going to sidestep this point in this blog. The UTOK avoids this confusion with its holistic picture of the natural-into-human world. The primary point for us to internalize here is that the stance of the human behavioral scientist is one who observes patterns of activity and makes functional interpretations. With that point specified, we can say that an observer must have the adequate epistemology (i.e., way of knowing) to interpret the pattern of behavior. Although this is complicated in the details, it also can be done by humans with relative ease in most cases. For example, you do this all the time. That is, you are constantly observing and interpreting the people around you. Although you undoubtedly make some errors, if the errors were major, things would quickly go off the rails. For example, consider that virtually no one would interpret my daughter’s screams of terror for screams of delight. My point is that there are massive functional and logical constraints on the kinds of interpretations that are reasonable and valid. This is a starting point. With its unified theory of human psychology, the UTOK comes with coherent metatheoretical frames that give much specificity and clarity to understanding human behaviors like one’s I describe in this scene.
The most relevant point here is that the first step in addressing the mind-body problem is to position ourselves as an observer of human behavior who can “see the phenomena” (i.e., events via an interpretive lens) and to recognize that this has parallels to the way physicists like Galileo observed matter in motion. Both physics and human behavioral science are anchored to observing behavior, but the latter is different in that it is not describable in mathematical laws and experimental deduction. Although much ink has been spilled over this conundrum, UTOK sidesteps this problem for reasons we do not need to get into, as it is not directly relevant to the mind-body problem. The key point is that we have moved into the concept of behavior, and this move is central.
Step 2: Recognize That There are Different Kinds of Behaviors in Nature and that “Mental Behaviors” are a Reasonable Class
Via step 1, we have shifted our primary lens from “mind versus matter” to the problem of human behavior and its observation and interpretation. This shift is a crucial one that has largely been missed by the mind-body problem people. Behavior is a necessary but largely overlooked concept that must be introduced to the grammar of the problem. I know this because I came through the science of psychology, which came through the concept of behavior and the philosophy of behaviorism (and behaviorism in philosophy, ala Ryle and Wittgenstein).
The first thing focusing on behavior does is that it helps us be located in the frame of a scientist. That is, according to the UTOK, behavior is the key concept or grammar of modern empirical natural science. We can see this in that behavior is what the scientist has access to. The scientist looks at the world framed by the area of interest and identifies objects and fields and then tries to measure them and describe and explain changes. This is the epistemology of modern science. It has some added features, like measurement and quantification, which helps achieve what we can call the “generalizable objective stance”.
This is a key point. The perspective of a scientist is lensed through some kind of measurement device that yields data such that other observers can step in and see that data. In the current example, we could have taped the scene from several angles and any observer who is competent to understand human activity could then perceive the events and describe them. We could put it on a timeline, and we could map the spatial dimensions and we could imagine analyzing all the “object-field changes” in the room.
With this step made, we can deepen it by saying that although there are parallels between the behavior of objects and the behavior of persons, there are also differences. This means we need to divide up the various kinds of behavior, and that we need a way of specifying what constitutes “human mental behavior”. According to UTOK, we can divide the world into four broad classes of behaviors as follows: material behaviors of inanimate objects, living behaviors exhibited by cells and organisms like plants, “mental behaviors” exhibited by animals, and sociocultural behaviors exhibited by persons. The behavior of inanimate objects are mapped by the physical sciences, the behavior of animate objects are mapped by the biological sciences, the behavior of animal objects are mapped by the (basic) psychological sciences, and the behavior of human objects are mapped by the human/social sciences.
I should note that I have made a couple of moves here that may not be obvious. The most important move I have made is I have generated a new class of “mental behaviors” as the kind of behaviors that basic psychological science maps. Mental behaviors refer to the function awareness and response patterns that animals exhibit that can be studied by traditional behavioral science methods. I have engaged in extensive analyses to demonstrate why the adjective “mental” is crucial (see here, here, and here). This is move to create the category of mental behaviors is a key part of the solution. I have also separated “animal-mental behaviors” from “human mental behaviors”. The difference has to do with language, self-consciousness, reason-giving and culture. This will be made clearer going forward.
The most important point in these first steps is that we have now framed ourselves from a particular “behavioral” vantage point, one that science in general adopts. This means we need to be clear about what this means in terms of what we can and cannot see.
Step 3: Isolate the Unique Subjective Perspective from the World of Objective Behavior that is Available to Science
Let’s go back to the video camera recording the event in the doctors office. As any physicist will tell you, there are many things that are happening in the room that cannot be seen via a “normal” video camera. For example, all the material objects in the room are made up of atoms, but you can’t see them. Likewise, the people are made up of cells, but you can’t see them either. Of course, scientific knowledge and technology have both advanced so that we can “see” the behaviors of atoms and cells, and they fit nicely into our basic frame of understanding. There is also no camera angle that shows what the experience was like from the first person perspective of my daughter.
This brings us to an aspect of the hard problem of subjective conscious experience. This is the epistemological aspect of the problem. It refers to the crucial difference between objective and subjective perspectives on the world. Actually, there are two different epistemological problems involved in dealing with subjective conscious experience from a scientific perspective. They are often intermingled. Thankfully, the UTOK highlights them both and has remedies for them both.
The first epistemological problem is the basic difference between the view from the inside (i.e., subjective) and the view from the outside (i.e., the camera). Subjective conscious experience is “contained” such that the camera view can never see it. This is the problem kids encounter when it dawns on them that they can’t see the red that their friend sees (i.e., “How do you know the red you see is the red I see?). This is called the “epistemological gap” in UTOK. (Please do not to be confuse it with the Enlightenment gap). The epistemological gap refers to the fact that each person has their own unique epistemological portal on the world, and that this is contained so that only they have direct access to it.
Modern empirical natural science is built on a framework or grammar of observing behavior from the exterior. That means that, as a language system, it is “blind” to the first person perspective. That is not to say that science cannot study consciousness. However, to study it, science must be anchored to behavior in someway. For example, self-report measures or correlates with brain activity.
The second epistemological issue pertains to the kind of knowledge science generates, relative to specific events and unique occurrences. That is, science is about developing generalized frames for understanding patterns. It does not provide an explanation for unique, idiographic, events. As John Vervaeke notes, there is not really a scientific explanation for why Napoleon lost at the Battle of Waterloo. That is a historical and contingent question. Nor does science explain why my wife and I were at the doctor’s office at that specific time. Consistent with this, science also does not provide a language system to explain the unique, idiographic subjective states of being.
These are two epistemological limitations (subjective versus objective and unique versus generalizable) that are inherent in the nature of the language of science and the kind of knowledge science can give us about the world. Many overlook this, and it leads to much confusion because it tangles us up about what science can and cannot explain. Theories of everything, of course, don’t explain everything in reality. A theory of quantum gravity has nothing to say about why specific parents are dealing with specific kids who have specific issues. For example, I just looked out and saw a man of about 6 feet tall walking a black dog. This is an everyday occurrence and the specific intersection of these particular properties are not part of what science says. It gives frames to deepen our understanding of generalizable regularities and underlying causal processes. So, if I said the man was walking a foot above the ground, then you would use science to say that is highly unlikely because it violates principles that science has shown to be operative. To explain specific events, we need history and contingent explanatory narratives. Such narratives should be consistent with science, but the unique details are not explained by science.
The primary point of Step 3 is to build off the behavior move and frame scientific epistemology and its relationship to subjective conscious experience. This leads us to be aware that science is blind to (a) subjective perspectives in general because they cannot be directly observed and (b) unique idiographic perspectives in particular, because they are not part of the language of science. We will come back to this, as UTOK frames this aspect of reality — your unique experience of being in the world — in terms of “the Coin”. But for now, we need to proceed with understanding behavior patterns in nature.
Step 4: Get the Right Model of Behavioral Patterns in Nature, as Mapped by Science
In their famous attempt to achieve unity across the scientific landscape, the logical positivists made (at least) two errors. First, they thought they could tie logic and mathematics and empirical findings together in a tight-knit deductive set of statements that made sense and were separate from the “nonsense” of every day talk, which included subjective interpretations, preferences, and values. As we suggested in the discussion of interpreting the events in the doctors office, this was a major error, and you cannot get away from interpretation.
The second error that they made was that they generated the wrong model of ontology in nature. As noted before, ontology is the scientific theory one has of reality. They argued that nature was layered like a cake, as virtually everyone in science agrees that science has found nature to be organized in stratified layers of complexity. However, prior to the UTOK, the exact nature of the layers has been confusing. Oppenheim and Putnam were leaders of the unity of science frame. They gave a six-layered cake model that they argued were the minimum necessary layers for a unified vision of science:
(Layer 6) Social Groups
(Layer 5) Multicellular living things
(Layer 4) Cells
(Layer 3) Molecules
(Layer 2) Atoms
(Layer 1) Elementary Particles
This is not the only way to layer nature’s ontological cake, but it is a classic conception, and it shows up in many modern analyses. From the UTOK vantage point, these authors have seen a vague outline of a unified model, but it failed to get the map of the territory correct. There are several crucial things missing in the classic six-layer map. The Tree of Knowledge System, the first key idea in UTOK, gives us a much better ontological layered cake model.
It that gets even clearer when it is extended to include Periodic Table of Behavior. We need to spell this out in some depth, because it turns out that getting the right map of behaviors in nature is crucial to solving the mind-body problem.
First, we can start by noting that there is a layer beneath particles. We can see this in how ToK System depicts the process by which Matter emerges out of Energy. This layer became known in the middle of the 20th century. It is crucial to solving the problem because it shows that it is NOT matter that we should be thinking about as the ultimate substance or ultimate common denominator in nature. Rather, there is a layer of Energy-Information out of which the particle, atom, and molecular layers emerge. This is a major point that we will come back to in Step 10.
Second, the ToK System shows that there are two kinds of layers of emergence, which is emergence within a dimension and emergence into new dimensions. This is clear in the way the ToK depicts different dimensions of complexity, depicted above in different colors (i.e., Matter/Grey; Life/Green; Mind/Red; and Culture/Blue). It becomes even more explicit with the Periodic Table of Behavior. The PTB shows that there are layers of emergence within the dimensions of existence that exist at the part, whole, group across scope and scale. So, the first three layers in the Oppenheimer and Putnam ontological cake corresponds with the Matter dimension. It then moves to cells, which is in the Life dimension, but does not include the “part” transition (i.e., molecular biology/genetics). Finally, social groups are essentially meaningless, as they could refer to trees in a forest, a baboon troop, or a nation like the United States.
Third, the ToK System helps us see why there is both Animal-Mental and Culture-Person dimensions of existence. The way the ToK divides Mind from Life “from below” and Mind from Culture “from above” is both new and represents the primary way to crisply frame and define the ontology of the mental. Its absence in the Oppenheimer and Putnam layered cake is obvious, and it is what I mean when I say science is often “mindblind”. This framing helps us see that humans are both primates and persons, and human mental behavior must be seen as such.
Fourth, the ToK identifies “joint points” as the complexity building feedback loops between the dimensions. These processes give rise to the new planes of existence. In this formulation, “quantum gravity” is the joint point between Energy and Matter and the modern evolutionary synthesis the joint point between Matter and Life. Both are well-known in science, although the ToK gives us a way to think about them as being theories that connect different dimensions of existence. Science in general, however, is blind to the other two joint points, which are crucial pieces to the puzzle.
Fifth, the UTOK gives Behavioral Investment Theory (the third key idea in UTOK) as the Life-to-Mind. It frames the dimension of Mind or animal-mental behavior patterns that emerged at about the time of the Cambrian explosion. BIT is a metatheory that unites the mind/brain/animal behavior sciences via six key principles that are necessary for effectively framing and interpreting animal behavior. Those principles are: 1) energy economics; 2) evolution; 3) behavioral genetics; 4) neuro-computational control; 5) learning, and 6) lifespan development. It has been shown to be highly commensurate with both predictive processing models in neuroscience and Vervaeke’s integrative, recursive relevance realization model of cognition.
Sixth, the UTOK gives Justification Systems Theory (the second key idea in the overall system) to explain the emergence of the Culture-Person dimension, somewhere between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago. When Rene Descartes’ talked about the mind, he meant the human mind that could self-reflect and justify and reason. The UTOK was founded on a new evolutionary frame for language, self-consciousness, and reason-giving that also accounts for the emergence and accumulation of human culture. This means the UTOK can readily frame the domain of behavior that Descartes found so mysterious, and place it on a natural-into-human picture of cosmic evolution.
Seventh, the ToK depicts modern science emerging out of the Culture-Person plane of existence about 500 years ago. This is crucial because it means that we can place science and scientific knowers inside the map. The original layered cake model of ontology does not include the evolution of scientific knowledge or the proper place of the scientific knower in the cosmos.
Eighth, as this blog shows, the levels by dimensions analysis given by the Periodic Table provides a clear way to organize both the identifiable patterns in nature, as well as the relations between the scientific disciplines that map those patterns. Thus, UTOK has a convincing model of both the ontic reality and the scientific onto-epistemological processes that map them.
Ninth, the UTOK gives a clear frame to understand what makes behaviors at the Life, Mind, and Culture dimensions fundamentally different from the behaviors at the Matter dimension. They emerge because of networks of information processing and communication systems, which allow for autopoietic and complex adaptive behavioral processes. This is a very important point, such that we will return to it in the next step.
The overall conclusion from Step 4 is that the ToK System and PTB are the new and necessary updated maps of the ontological layered cake that scientists seeking a coherent big picture have long sought. To fully appreciate how revolutionary this is, we can remind ourselves that the UTOK is ultimately grounded in the problem of psychotherapy. That is, the kind of problems parents with children who had phobic responses might bring in for therapy, and the values of what constitutes optimal human functioning that would be used to guide any intervention that might be provided to such a family.
Step 5: Recognize that New Forms of “Knowing” and “Functional Awareness” Emerge with the Life Plane of Existence
The last point in Step 4 was that Life, Mind, and Culture emerge as novel dimensions as a function of new information processing and communication systems. Crucially, we can frame these behavior patterns in nature as kinds of “epistemic processes.” This allows us to see that a cell, mushroom, or tree is a kind of “knowing” entity behaving in the dimension of Life. It has a kind of “cognition,” such that it operates in and on the world based on processing information and making predictions that are relevant to survival and reproduction. Water molecules do not process information in this way.
Let’s go back to the shot my daughter received. As soon as the needle punctured my daughter’s arm, her body started to heal itself. It “knew” what it needed to do to fill in the hole and return to structural integrity. That is one of the “miracles” of life. Unlike dead matter, living entities engage in complex adaptive dynamic self-organization.
This gives rise to the key insight that embedded in the argument above is that the ToK/PTB is an ontology that maps the ontic reality that includes epistemic processes in nature. This insight is missing in the Oppenheimer and Putnam layers. The ToK System even shows how science itself emerges as an kind of epistemic process out of Culture because it develops as a new kind of justification system. This inclusive looping is missing in virtually other big picture models. The one exception I have seen is Lawrence Cahoone’s The Orders of Nature, which gives a metaphysical picture of the ontological layered cake in a way that is very similar to the ToK.
Step 6: Recognize that Sentience and the Experiential Self Emerge in the Animal Kingdom
Neurocognition is a special and unique kind of cellular cognition. It yokes the whole animal body and coordinates sensory inputs and motor outputs to find paths of investment that lead to anticipated returns. This refers to “functional awareness and responsivity” and it is the complex adaptive context in which sentience emerges. Sentience refers to the capacity to feel pleasure and pain and have other sensory experiences. According to UTOK, sentience is the base of subjective conscious experience.
The ontological map given by the ToK System clearly frames sentience as emerging in the Animal-Mental dimension. It should be acknowledged that there is much uncertainty exactly when, why, and how this happens. But a clear outline is emerging from the mind, brain, and animal behavioral sciences. The complex adaptive dimension called Mind can be framed as a “neurobiological-energy-informational-behavioral field” that coordinates the animal’s actions in the agent-arena relationship in the way it engages in detecting what is relevant so it can realize paths of behavioral investment that are predicted to lead to valued states, which are broadly associated with survival and reproductive success.
The cognitive scientist and philosopher John Vervaeke and I tacked this in the cognitive science series, Untangling the World Knot of Consciousness: Grappling with the Hard Problems of Matter and Mind. The picture that John Vervaeke and I share is that “the base of sentience” arises out of “valence qualia” that signal whether the relationship between the exterior sensed world and the interior state is good or bad and whether the animal should approach or avoid in an active or passive manner. Subjective experiences of pleasure and pain emerge to guide the animal toward or away from changes that are evaluated as good or bad by the neurocognitive system. This provides a strong scientific frame for the context that subjective conscious experience in the animal kingdom emerges.
As animals advance and become increasingly cortical and deliberative and planning, then they develop the capacity to extend the animal-environment relationship in time. This creates more need for self-modeling and modeling that which is relevant for the self. This births the experiential self, which is the inner subjective world. We have good evidence that birds and mammals have an experiential self in that they exhibit evidence for access consciousness. As a function of motherhood and extended care, mammals become increasingly social. Primates are very social and great apes especially so. Prior to language, humans developed massive capacities for intersubjective coordination of shared attention and intention.
The UTOK gives Behavioral Investment Theory and the Influence Matrix as metatheoretical models that help explain the neurocognitive behavior patterns of animals across the animal kingdom, from lobsters to our hominid ancestors a million years ago. It joins with Vervaeke’s recursive relevance realization model of cognitive process to give us a powerful model of the experiential self in the animal kingdom. In The Elusive “I”: The Nature and Function of the Self, Vervaeke and I (along with Christopher Mastropietro), show why our models combine to give a plausible and intelligible model for the experiential self.
Step 7: Understand How and Why Explicit Self-Consciousness and the Culture-Person Plane of Existence Emerges in Humans
At 4, my daughter Sydney was just learning how to justify herself and actions on the Culture-Person plane of existence. However, she was not, of course, fully socialized or developed as such. Indeed, a four-year-old child would have serious problems observing and interpreting the behaviors in the video, as children that age have not fully developed their theory of mind, nor the depth of justification, self and other knowledge and regulation necessary to function as an adult human person.
As noted, the UTOK gives Justification Systems Theory for the emergence of human self-consciousness and the Culture Person plane of existence. It tracks the jump from a shared intersubjective space with broken symbols to a fully functioning symbolic syntactical propositional system. It also explains the evolutionary adaptive pressures that end up generating the human ego, which can be framed as the mental organ of justification. This means that that the UTOK bridges academic psychology and models of bias and cognitive dissonance as ego defense mechanisms with Freud’s key insight that much of human reasoning can be understood as rationalizations that function to regulate animal impulses in a socio-linguistic environment and all its rules and stipulations regarding what is proper.
Step 8: Place Both Yourself and Science in the Context of Cultural Consciousness and Its Evolution
In addition to giving a clear updated model of human consciousness, JUST also frames human cultural evolution. It does so in a way that directly aligns with Lene Rachel Andersen’s analysis of there being four great periods or phases in human cultural codes and sensibilities. First, there is the oral-indigenous period that is in full swing 50,000 years ago. By 5,000 there is the transition into civilized societies, with cities, writing, markets and nations and large-scale religions. We can divide this period into Bronze Age and then Axial Age as phases in formal civilized modes. By 500 years ago, the West had started to develop natural philosophy and the Renaissance and Enlightenment were giving rise to the modern, empirical natural scientific worldview. By 50 years ago, it was clear that the Enlightenment view of science was not positioned to afford justice and care to social forces that were situated outside of it, and it failed to cohere into a meaningful picture of the world and our place in it.
Step 9: Get the Right Map of the Domains of Mental Processes
As hopefully has been made clear by this review, there are many different kinds of “mental processes.” A solution to the mind-body problem must clarify the kinds of mental processes and specify how they are epistemologically accessible. The UTOK does this with its Map of Mind1,2,3. As suggested by its name, the Map of Mind1,2,3 divides mental processes into three domains. First, there is the domain of overt mental behaviors mediated by the nervous system. Second, there is the domain of subjective conscious experience. Third, there is the domain of self-conscious justification.
The Map of Mind1,2,3 further clarifies the epistemological issues associated with first person interior and third person exterior frames of accessibility. The result is 5 clearly defined domains. The first, called Mind1a, is the neurocognitive functional activity of the nervous system that is engaged in predictive processing and recursive relevance realization that guide the behavioral investments of animal.
The second, called Mind1b refers to the overt activities that can be seen with a camera. For example, the video would have shown my daughter crying and crawling on her mother’s lap, and me pacing around these are Mind1b mental behaviors.
The third domain is called Mind2, and it refers to the inner subjective conscious experiences that cannot be seen across the epistemological gap from the outside. At the same time, Mind2 functions as the epistemological portal for the individual to have conscious access to the world. My daughter’s felt sense of being scared and anticipated injury is framed by Mind2. We can model that it likely required her reticular activating system to be firing to put her brain in an active state, her insula to be organizing her felt emotional experiences, and there was surely a P3 “ignition wave” between frontal and parietal lobes that were allowing her a interior global workspace to envision the dreaded needle and accompanied pain from the prick.
The fourth domain is Mind3a, which is the private narrating portion of the human mind. I had a number of private thoughts about the competence of the nurse and feeling sorry for my daughter and embarrassed that my daughter was flipping out. After all, I am a psychologist, and thus have internalized the expectation that might kid should be behaving better than this. This is the domain of Mind3a.
My discussions with my wife about what to do, my pleas for my daughter to calm down, and my request that the nurse hurry up would have all been recorded on the video camera. This is the public domain of Mind3b. So too is this blog, as I type it.
This map shows that, just as we needed a much better descriptive map of the behavior patterns in nature, we also require a much better map of the domains of mental processes. In giving it, we can now see how to box in the hard problem of subjective conscious experience in terms of “Mind2”. Moreover, we can also interrelate the domains. How? By thinking in terms of informational interface between them. This blog explains how the domains of the mental can be effectively linked via the concept of informational interface. And this blog gives the architecture that supports it.
So, we are almost home. We have shown that we need to think about behavior patterns in nature and that, in addition to material behaviors, there are living, mental, and cultural behaviors which are fundamentally different because of novel epistemic or cognitive processes. We have further shown that mental processes can be divided into three domains based on both ontological and epistemological considerations. And we have suggested that informational interface can link them. This gives a picture of the mental as a kind of field that processes and exchanges information. This conclusion allows us to make the final step and close the loop and show why the matter versus mind dichotomy is so fallacious.
Step 10: Replace Matter in Motion Mechanics with the Modern Understanding that the Foundation of the Ontic Reality is the Energy-Information Field
As we briefly mentioned, Matter is not the base of the physical world. This was part the realization that stemmed from the revolutions in physics during the 20th Century. The bottom of the ontological layered cake is NOT atoms. It is not even particles or even forces that act on them. These are the first floor of the Matter dimension, but that is not the fundamental base of reality. The ground or the plate that the ontological cake of the material world is sitting on is, to borrow from David Bohm, an implicate order that consists of Energy-Informational fields. Particles and forces emerge from energy-information field fluctuations. So, this means that the stuff of both Matter and Mind are, at the ontic bottom, energy-information fields.
The UTOK Gives the Tree, Coin, and Garden Solution to the Mind-Body Problem
This analysis shows clearly that the mind-body problem is not really a single problem. Rather is a symptom of our confused way of thinking about the world and our place in it. The UTOK gives a new knowledge system for understanding science, subjectivity, and wisdom in a way that resolves/dissolves the mind-body problem that plagued 20th Century scientists and philosopher.
We can end this essay by clarifying what the UTOK offers. It is a theory of knowledge gives us frames for science, subjectivity, and wisdom. It organizes these frames in terms of the Tree, the Coin, and the Garden.
The Tree stands for the Tree of Knowledge System, which, when combined with Periodic Table of Behavior, gives us a coherent naturalistic scientific ontology that stretches from Energy to Matter to Life to Mind to Culture and even includes the emergence of scientific knowledge.
The Coin stands for the iQuad Coin. It serves as a necessary placeholder and symbol of the fact that that the language game of science is blind to the unique idiographic self. It gives a frame to connect human subjectivity (i.e., Mind2) with both the body and “down” into the physical world via neuro-information interface (i.e., Mind1), and up to human culture and intersubjective narrative space via language and justification (Mind3). But it does more than the Map of Mind, because while that represents the general descriptive frame, the iQuad represents you or me as unique persons.
Finally, we must remember that the journey of UTOK starts with the problem of psychotherapy. The Garden represents UTOK as a scientific humanistic philosophy that bridges science and subjectivity with values and a vision for revitalizing the human soul and spirit in the 21st Century.
PS Speaking of unique persons, I am happy to report that my daughter Sydney is now all grown up and graduates today with honors from the University of Virginia and is going onto get her doctorate in Biomedical Engineering from Vanderbilt in the fall. Congrats, Syd! You have grown much since that day in the doctors office and made me very proud.
