The 5th Joint Point: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?
We are living in a time between worlds that we can frame as the 5th joint point.
Note: I initially intended this to be posted on my Psychology Today Theory of Knowledge blog. Unfortunately, they rejected it, saying it was too loaded with “jargon” and not “reader friendly.” I was disappointed by that because the whole point of this blog is to introduce these novel concepts to a wider audience. Please share as you see fit.
KEY POINTS
- The world is in a massive state of flux, and the future is uncertain.
- We can map this time between worlds as being the time of the 5th joint point.
- The 5th joint point is when the Culture-Person plane of existence gives rise to the Digital-Global plane.
- By knowing where we are collectively, we can make wiser choices about what we ought to do.
Pause a moment, take a deep breath, and do a gut check. Close your eyes and ask yourself the following: Where are we, what is happening to the world, and what should we do about it?
Give yourself some time to attend to the feelings that arise in your body as you reflect on those questions. Then, move up to your head and ask yourself if you have a clear worldview for making sense of the current times, where we are going, and what we ought to be doing.
If that gut check resulted in the felt sense that the world is in a profound state of flux, confusion, and risk, and, at the same time, you were not sure how to wrap your head around what is happening and why or what we should do about it, then I invite you to consider an idea called the 5th joint point.
The 5th joint point is a central concept in the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK), so much so that it served as the title of the final chapter of my 2011 book, A New Unified Theory of Psychology. The idea of the fifth joint point is a logical extension of UTOK’s Tree of Knowledge System. Here is the standard ToK System diagram, with the 5th Joint Point and the emerging Digital Global information technology plane emerging:
The 5th joint point can also be clearly identified in the original ToK diagram, although it has a slightly different aspect of it emphasized. This diagram popped out of my consciousness one evening close to my 27th birthday, over 25 years ago. I was stoned, and it appeared in a flash of vision-logic that would forever change my life. In the months prior to the diagram, I had developed the “justification idea” that enabled me to see how we evolved from primates into cultured persons clearly. The ToK diagram builds off that logic. Following the cones downward, it moves from cultured persons into minded animals into living organisms, down into chemistry and the base of matter, and finally into energy, represented by the circle at the bottom.
Because it came to me in a flash, for several months afterward, I struggled to specify exactly what the life, mind, and culture cones represented. However, by the middle of 1998, I had come up with the answer. The Life, Mind, and Culture cones on the ToK diagram depict new planes of existence that emerged from complexity-building feedback loops that generated novel dimensions of information processing and communication systems. I called the phase transitions between the dimensions “joint points.” (The fact that I was stoned makes the name “joint points” playful and self-referential. I would later realize that this kind of move is part of an emerging cultural movement called metamodernism.)
Arriving at the answer that the phase transitions were deeply related to the emergence of novel information processing systems shook me a bit. The reason is that, via the diagram, I could see that I was standing at the brink of another emerging joint point. To follow the trail, the first joint point is the Energy-to-Matter phase transition that happened at the Big Bang. The second joint point is the Matter-to-Life transition, and it is framed by cell theory and modern evolutionary synthesis. The third is the life-to-mind transition, and the fourth joint point is the mind-to-culture transition. If life, mind, and culture arise as a function of novel information processing and communication systems, then you can probably see where I am headed. It follows naturally that the next plane would also arise because of novel information processing and communication systems.
Now look around. Almost everywhere you look, you will see transitions. Old institutional systems, born in the industrial age, are breaking down, and new technologies are popping up. Moreover, the felt sense is one of confusion, uncertainty, and massive flux. According to UTOK, what we are collectively experiencing is the emerging digital globalization (and meta-cultural) plane of existence. Back in 1998, via the vision-logic of the ToK System, I saw that something along these lines would unfold.
Let’s pause and recap. We started this blog with the question: Where are we, what is happening to the world we are living in, and what ought we be doing? Via UTOK’s ToK System, we have a way to get a grip on this complicated question. It starts with the universe in a collapsed, hot, dense state of what some physicists call “pure energy.” From there, four great planes of existence have emerged (i.e., matter-object, life-organism, mind-animal, culture-person). The latter three planes have emerged because of novel information processing and communication networks (i.e., living processes mediated by genes-cells, minded processes mediated by brains-animals, and cultural processes mediated by propositional language).
The current state of the world is in massive flux in part because we have generated digital technologies and artificial intelligence systems that are dynamically interfacing with every aspect of our lives as cultured persons. Chatbots powered by LLMs freaked us out precisely because they represented yet another layer of dynamic informational interface and feedback. And this is only going to continue to complexify. This is the digital globalization network, and it is only getting started. It is the technological aspect of the fifth joint point, which is the phase transition from the culture-person plane of existence into the digital global dimension.
The fundamental questions from a UTOK vantage point include: How will the technological aspect interface with the natural dimensions mapped by the ToK System? What kind of world will emerge from that interface? What should we be doing about this?
A powerful and helpful way to answer this question is via the concept of a “third attractor”. An attractor is a state of equilibrium. Applied to the digital global dimension, the first attractor that we can identify emerges via the force of chaos. It is the state of global civilization collapse. One way to think about this attractor state is to think of a very tall and thin building being tossed around in increasingly heavy winds. The potential crash to the ground is the attractor of gravity, chaos, destruction, and entropy. No wonder we collectively feel anxious!
With that in mind, ask yourself the following: What happens when people feel things are getting increasingly chaotic? The answer is that folks get scared and want order. To achieve that sense of order, they will often look to powerful leaders and governments who convey authority so that they can feel safe. Unfortunately, this can also result in a disaster. The second attractor is a totalitarian state (or states) that gets control over the digital and uses it to create a new world order. Think here of George Orwell’s 1984; only in 2024 and beyond, it is achieved by controlling our lives through the digital landscape.
Finally, the third attractor refers to the process of us collectively waking up to the situation we find ourselves in and moving toward wiser and more sustainable living. That state can be achieved if we effectively interrelate: a) our relations with each other both within and between cultures and b) with mother nature and c) the emerging digital technological globalization landscape and situate these relations in a field of collective value.
So we can now return to the question that started the blog and ask again: Where are we, and where are we headed? We are collectively traveling through the 5th joint point and feeling uncertain because so much is in flux, and we are starting to seriously wobble between chaos and totalitarian control.
And so what ought we to do? We need to collectively wake up to that reality, shift our identities accordingly, and start to coordinate our valued states of being toward the third attractor, both for our own good and so that we can be good ancestors for those who will live on this planet in the back half of the 21st century.
