Now UTOKing: Behavior
In this blog and video series, we present you with a curated set of definitions to better understand our place in today’s world through the lens of the UTOK system. The first blog and video introduced the foundational map of the natural world according to UTOK, setting the stage for exploring the interwoven concepts that help shape the UTOK worldview. Today, we uncover behavior.
How would you define the term behavior in a sentence? Take a moment to ask the people around you the same question or do a quick online search, and you’ll likely notice that the answers diverge. Like a cacophony of individual instruments, each playing its own melody, the term behavior is used with varying interpretations across different contexts, lacking a unified consensus even among experts. UTOK recognizes that these diverse perspectives on behavior are not inherently incorrect, but they offer partial insights, each capturing distinct fragments of a larger puzzle. UTOK attempts to bring these pieces back together to reveal the full picture of what behavior means in its entirety.
Behavior is most commonly defined as either 1) comportment, referring to how someone conducts themselves, 2) the functional activity of animals or organisms in the environment, or 3) observable and measurable movements of objects. Confusingly, psychology is often defined as the science of behavior and mental processes. The issue with this definition is that, both within and beyond the field, there is no consensus about what behavior means. It could mean the behavior of a rock rolling down a hill, of a child chasing a pigeon in the park, or the behavior of a cell undergoing mitosis. Is psychology about all those behaviors, then? Clearly not.
UTOK contends that establishing a shared language to refer to fundamental concepts, like behavior, is crucial for constructing a holistic, cohesive view of the world. The Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System can help explain the appropriate way to define behavior with coherence.
Layers of Behavior
In UTOK, behavior is a central, unifying concept for our scientific understanding of the world. Broadly defined, it means any form of change in the relation between an entity and the field it is embedded in. Imagine behavior as a continuous thread weaving through the planes of existence in the ToK System. This reveals four nested levels of behavior: the behavior of objects in the Matter plane, the behavior of organisms in the Life plane, the behavior of animals in the Mind plane, and finally, the behavior of persons, in the Culture plane.
The depiction below offers an alternative organizational frame that is congruent with the ToK System. These concentric circles categorize the nested layers of behavior from the concept itself, into the correspondent natural behaviors across the ToK planes, and finally into the value judgments of people about behaviors.
Natural science is a system of justification that seeks to closely map the natural world, and it accomplishes that by tracking the behavioral patterns in nature, from Matter into Culture. As such, the physical sciences map material behavior within the Matter dimension, the biological sciences map living behavior within the Life dimension, the psychological sciences map mental behavior within the Mind dimension, and the social sciences map the behavior of persons within the Culture dimension.
In this classification, various phenomena such as ice melting into liquid water, a plant undergoing photosynthesis, a squirrel cracking a nut, and colleagues conducting a meeting all fall under the broad umbrella of behavior as entity-field change. However, these behaviors reside in distinct nested dimensions of existence and warrant its corresponding labels to specify their unique characteristics. UTOK goes a step further by recognizing the layered nature within each dimension of existence, as illustrated by its Periodic Table of Behavior (PTB).
In this diagram, each dimension is divided into primary parts, primary wholes, and primary groups, which in turn may assemble and form aggregates across scale. For example, in the Life plane, we encounter the behaviors of genes (primary parts), of cells (primary wholes), and of multicellular systems (primary groups). Science aligns with this categorization by tracking specific layers of behavioral patterns, as for example, cellular biology and molecular biology.
By understanding and integrating these dimensions and levels of behavior, we gain a more synthetic understanding of how the term can be defined both at a broad, general level, and within specific contexts. In contrast to fragmented pieces of definitions, we can highlight the complexity and interconnectedness of the various facets of behavior, without losing sight of the coherent whole presented by nature.
This blog series was authored by Marcia Gralha, MA
