Now UTOKing: Introduction
Introducing blog-video series that defines key terms in psychology and philosophy
Consciousness, self, culture, mind, behavior…if you are a student of human behavior, you likely have encountered the countless definitions, interpretations, and debates surrounding these terms. This cacophony creates much confusion. Rather than adding to the noise, we want to offer you something different — a concise, guided tour of what these key terms mean in the language of the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK).
Episode #1: Introduction to the Series
The Now UTOKing video series serves as an educational tool that helps define key terms and show how UTOK puts them together in a coherent worldview. The first video centers around a fundamental insight that grounds UTOK’s understanding of reality and sets the stage for exploring the upcoming terminology in the series.
Through its Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System, UTOK divides the world into four distinct planes of existence: Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture. Anchoring the material world is an Energy-Information Singularity that precedes the differentiation of the universe’s four fundamental forces. UTOK refers to this nonlocal energy-information field as the energy information implicate order, which forms the underlying foundation for the complexification of our universe.
From this energy information field, the Matter plane emerges, encompassing the dimension of material objects and their behaviors. This plane is mapped by the physical sciences, which study both the intricate quantum behaviors at the microscopic scale and the classical material behaviors of objects in space-time. Out of Matter emerges the Life plane, the dimension of the living behaviors of organisms as investigated by the biological sciences.
Further along the path of emergent information processing and communication networks, we encounter the Mind plane, which arises from Life and constitutes the behavior of minded animals. In this plane, prey-predation dynamics emerge, driving animals with brains and complex active bodies to move around and engage with their environment through a sensory-motor feedback loop. These mental behaviors are motivated by the fundamental inclination of animals to avoid threats and seek their goals, and guided by a cost-to-benefit analysis to conserve energy. Finally, out of Mind emerges the Culture plane, which marks our transition from animals to persons who justify our claims, thoughts, and feelings on the social stage, eventually forming shared systems of justification.
This first video shows how UTOK shifts our basic grammar from the matter versus mind split that handed down to us from the Enlightenment into an Energy-Information, Matter-Object, Life-Organism, Mind-Animal, and Culture-Person view that provides a much richer and more accurate picture. From this basic understanding of nature per UTOK, various concepts and categories will be explored, encompassing behavior, culture, cognition, as well as terms like metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology.
The next blog and video in this series will describe UTOK’s fresh perspective on the confused concept of behavior, clarifying a central thread in the new grammar presented by UTOK.
This blog series was authored by Marcia Gralha, MA.
