The Core of Extended Naturalism
This blog was co-authored with Professor John Vervaeke.
Extended Naturalism (EN) is a new approach to understanding human consciousness, the natural world, and their relation. Developed by Drs. Gregg Henriques and John Vervaeke, EN explicitly bridges philosophy of mind with scientific psychology to provide the necessary grammar for effectively gripping the natural world as mapped by science and the nature and function of human consciousness within it.
As detailed in The Cognitive Science Show Series, EN is part of a larger worldview called Transcendent Naturalism. This bridges EN to the concept of strong transcendence, which refers to the transformation of consciousness at the level of cultural collectives in a manner that affords the advent of the sacred.
Here we focus on the key elements that constitute EN. We begin with three claims about the state of our knowledge and what is necessary for a comprehensive worldview that coherently relates the natural sciences and human consciousness.
1. We lack an adequate worldview for understanding both human consciousness and the knowledge generated by the natural sciences, and the four major approaches in the Western philosophy of mind (i.e., materialism, idealism, panpsychism, and dualism) are ineffectively framed and constrained by the objective-matter versus subjective-mind dichotomy that emerged in the wake of the scientific Enlightenment.
2. We need a worldview that effectively includes what scientific knowledge presupposes, which is that science is a real process in the universe that produces real knowledge.
3. We need to tackle both the nature of consciousness and its function together. Because of the difficulties framing consciousness, the field has unfortunately been split into two questions, one of which is the “nature of consciousness” (i.e., what is consciousness and how does it relate to the nonconscious world, which is addressed by the philosophy of mind), and the other which is the “function of consciousness” (i.e., how does consciousness operate in animals and humans and enable them to act in the world, which has been explored more by empirically grounded approaches in neuroscience and cognitive science/psychology).
EN explicitly addresses these claims and provides a comprehensive picture of human consciousness and the natural world mapped by science and their interrelation. EN rejects substance dualism as logically incoherent, ontological idealism as implausible, panpsychism as unworkably ambiguous, and materialism/physicalism as misleading and misframed.
EN provides us with an ontology, epistemology, and metapsychology that clarifies the structure and functional organization of both the natural world and human consciousness in a manner that is consistent with both physics and phenomenology. EN emerges from the synthesis of Vervaeke’s metatheoretical work in 4e cognitive science and Henriques’ metatheoretical work in psychology. EN works by piecing together the following elements to generate a new worldview.
- EN splits the hard problem of consciousness in two.
· EN clarifies the fact that the hard problem of consciousness conflates two distinct problems, one of which is the zoomed out, philosophical mind-body problem framed by the Enlightenment Gap and the second is the zoomed-in scientific Neurocognitive Engineering Problem. The Enlightenment Gap gives rise to the Problem of Psychology and pertains to the meta-science question of how mind exists in relationship to matter and how scientific knowledge relates to subjective and social forms of knowing. In contrast, the Neurocognitive Engineering Problem pertains to how the brain relates to neurocognitive activity and subjective conscious experiences in animals and humans. EN addresses and resolves the first question, with substantial implications for the second.
2. EN offers an extended view of the natural world and our scientific knowledge of it.
· EN clarifies the emergence of behavioral complexification via Extended Emergence, which is framed as a continuous-discontinuous emergence-emanation dialectic that is properly located in the conceptual space in between weak and strong emergence in the philosophy of mind literature.
· EN clarifies the ontology of nature as mapped by science by showing the five ontological layers given by the Tree of Knowledge System (i.e., Energy-Information, Matter-Object, Life-Organism, Mind-Animal, and Culture-Person), and 12 primary levels of analysis across scale given by the Periodic Table of Behaviors in nature.
3. EN offers an extended description of the domain of the mental.
· EN clarifies the ontology of the mental by defining mind as mindedness and specifying its relationship to consciousness, and via the Map of Mind, EN provides the needed taxonomy that defines mind as: i) overt minded behavior (i.e., Mind1b); ii) neurocognitive processes (Mind1a); iii) subjective conscious experiences (Mind2); iv) private narration (Mind3a); and v) public justification (Mind3b). The Map of Mind makes clear that the Neurocognitive Engineering Problem exists between Mind1a and Mind2. It also makes clear that we need to differentiate consciousness arising in the context of mindedness from other entities like robots or aliens.
· EN clarifies the phenomenology of the mental by specifying the architecture of Mind2 in animals and humans as an epistemic portal that functions to semantically model mindedness and consists of the field of perspectival knowing constituted by three kinds of qualia (i.e., adverbial, adjectival, and valence qualia).
· EN clarifies the epistemology of the mental by delineating the difference and relation between scientific, third person, propositional knowing and subjective, first-person, perspectival knowing.
4. EN offers an extended metapsychology that characterizes the function of human consciousness in the world.
· EN clarifies that the core cognitive process in animals is functionally organized by recursive relevance realization, and clarifies that the domain of Mind2 is a model of mindedness constituted by focal recursive relevance realization that affords the animal perspectival knowing across time.
· EN clarifies how mindedness evolved in animals to coordinate behavioral investment patterns over extended time horizons (i.e., from reflexes and procedural instincts to operant learning to imagined simulations from a subjective point of view to narrating reasons via propositional knowing in humans), which provides a framework to understand the evolution of Mind2 from elementary feelings to a subjective perspective on the world.
· EN clarifies how social creatures like primates engage in recursive relevance realization in a relational matrix to achieve social influence and relational value across the self-other process dimensions of power, love, and freedom.
· EN clarifies how humans are primates who became persons because propositions gave rise to the problem of justification, which is the problem of how to realize legitimizing claims for what is and ought to be in an intersubjective context, which was a generative mechanism for the emergence of the Culture-Person plane of existence that ultimately produces science as a particular kind of justification system based on third-person empirical claims.
Summary
EN ultimately results in a transjective onto-epistemology that effectively clarifies the proper relationship between mind and matter and scientific and subjective forms of knowing in a way that solves the Problem of Psychology, resolves the Enlightenment Gap, and effectively frames the Neurocognitive Engineering Problem, all in a manner that connects to a larger worldview oriented toward cultivating wisdom, value, and meaning in life across cultural collectives.
