The Four Planes of Existence and a Vision for the Cultivation of Wisdom Energy in the 21st Century
The Unified Theory of Knowledge affords us a new way to make sense of where we have been, where we are, and where we might be headed. The first key idea in the UTOK is the Tree of Knowledge System. The Tree of Knowledge System is a new map of the territory that arranges our scientific knowledge in relationship to the ontic reality in a way that solves the problem of psychology.
A key aspect of the ToK System is that it divides the universe into different dimensions of behavioral complexity or planes of existence. What is a dimension of existence? After all, isn’t there only one dimension in reality? Somewhat surprisingly, it can be highly useful to think about the universe from the vantage point of a human person in terms of four different planes of existence. To see them, consider a family having a conversation about what they are going to do for the weekend. Their dog is there with them. The family’s conversation and shared verbal understanding of reality exists on a plane of existence “above” the dog. The dog operates on the “animal-mental” dimension. What this means is that the dog mentally perceives the world and tracks the feelings and general group demeanor and engages socially, in terms of being attached to the family and responding to relational cues. However, the conversation about family dynamics, planning and reflective choice making exists at a meta-dimension relative to the dog. It would just be commonsense to say the meaning of the words and the nuances of the verbal exchange “go over” the dog’s head. To say this is not being species-centric from the vantage point of UTOK. Rather it simply is a fact that dogs can’t fully participate in what we call, via the ToK map of reality, the Person-Culture plane of existence.
Humans, according to UTOK, are primates that become persons via socialization; that is, we are born as human primates and it requires growing up into a socio-linguistic environment to become a self-conscious person that justifies one’s actions on the social stage. If the family had a 10-year-old, a 6-year-old, a 2-year-old and 3-mos-old infant, we could see clear differences in how growing up is very much about learning to operate on the Person-Culture dimension. The 3-mos-old does not yet operate on the Person-Culture dimension, whereas the 2-year-old is learning to do so, and the 6 and 10-year-old are able to do so, albeit at different levels or stages of human conscious/cognitive development and sophistication, with the parents operating at full adulthood. Both the 3-month-old and the dog operate only on the Animal-Mental dimension, which is the vast landscape of the nonverbal psychological behavior that on the ToK System is labeled “Mind”. Mind is a dimension of existence that exists above “Life”. Inside the dog and each human are lots of complicated processes that are taking place at the Cell-Life dimension of existence. The flower on the table that the 10-year-old son brought his mother for her birthday also exists at the Cell-Life dimension. The final dimension is the Physical-Material dimension. This is the dimension of atoms and molecules at the small scale and of space, time and the universe at the large scale. The “Matter” dimension is the fundamental stage upon which the complex adaptive behaviors take place at the Life, Mind, and Cultural landscapes of existence.
Now let’s consider a plague like the Black Death. That was a crisis at the level of Cell-Life. (It worth noting here that the COVID-19 virus is an entity that exists in the space in-between Matter and Life). Or consider an earthquake or tsunami. These are crises that have their epicenter at the Physical-Material dimension of existence. The meaning crisis that John Vervaeke speaks of is an “epidemic” at the Person-Culture plane. What does it mean to say we are experiencing a meaning crisis? To answer this question, we need to understand more fully what the Person-Culture plane is.
According to the ToK, the Person-Culture plane is functionally organized by “justification systems.” Now, as those familiar with the UTOK know, “justification” is a complicated word with lots of potential meanings that stretch from defensive rationalizations to moral contracts to analytic epistemology and scientific theories of the real. With that caveat offered, we can just start with the most basic meaning of the word, which is a legitimizing claim or proposition. A justification system, then, is a network of legitimizing claims and propositions. For an example of this, think about a game. The rules, definition and grammar of a game can be thought of as its system of justification. Indeed, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted, much of the structure of our thought can be framed as “language games”. The concept of justification systems overlaps greatly with Wittgenstein’s language games.
Now, let’s return to the family. As they talk about whether it is safe to go on a picnic in the age of COVID, the husband and wife have a shared understanding of their marriage and the rules of their house. To see this, imagine it is a highly educated, modern White liberal family and out of nowhere, the wife starts making racist comments and using racial slurs. That unexpected and unacceptable behavior would be quickly identified as “unjustifiably” breaking the rules of the family’s language game, and the husband would almost certainly react with horror, shock, and dismay, and the impact to the system would be strong and disruptive. The point here is that the family has its own justification system, which refers to the shared rules, concepts, values and understandings regarding the way the world works. The family, of course, is embedded in a larger cultural context. That cultural context creates the plane of existence in which the family’s justification system operates. If the family resided in the south in the 1820s, the rules and understandings about what is justifiable about race would be radically different. Indeed, if the husband reacted strongly to his wife use of derogatory racist language in that context, he would likely be the one that would be violating the rules of the game. The point here is to show how groups of people operate on the Person-Culture plane and that plane can be considered in terms of systems of justification that exist across a number of levels embedded in a larger historical context.
Given this backdrop, we can now start to understand why we might be facing a “meaning crisis” in the 21st Century. What has happened is that the large-scale systems of justification that provide the cultural context for individuals and groups and institutions to operate are breaking down. That is, the old systems of understanding that allowed people to have a frame of reference for acting on what is real and what is good have weakened or collapsed or become very confused. These are religious, national, moral, philosophical and even scientific frames. Put simply, we are losing our ability to know what is justifiably real and good. Descriptively, we live in a “postmodern” period of a multitude of highly fragmented and competing language games. This is particularly true of my country, the United States of America.
Of course, if our large-scale systems of understanding are breaking down, that is a big deal. The ToK System can help as a sense making tool for understanding what is going on. For example, as this discussion with Jordan Hall highlights, the language of “justification systems” can help us describe why we are going through such a confusing, polarizing, and tense age. In addition, the overall UTOK helps provide a larger explanatory context. It says that modernity can be thought of a “worldview” or system of justification that is breaking down for many reasons, but one of them it highlights is called the Enlightenment Gap. This refers to the fact that modernity failed to produce a coherent system of knowing that afforded us the proper relations between matter and mind and science and society.
But ToK System provides additional explanations for why things are so confusing. It suggests that part of what is happening is that we are on the cusp of the 5th Joint Point and are seeing the emergence of a new plane of existence. We might tentatively call this the landscape of “digital”. This is not a good final name for this new plane for reasons I will not get into here. But digital is surely crucial, as it describes the medium of this emerging landscape.
Why, according to the ToK System, might the digital medium give rise to a whole separate plane of existence? To see this, let’s think about what makes the Cell-Life plane of behavior so different from the Physical-Material plane. The RNA and DNA inside cells store and process information to build cells. In addition, cells communicate with each other and metabolize energy toward the goal of staying alive and reproducing. These are complex adaptive behavioral processes that we just don’t see in the more basic Physical-Material plane of existence. That is why we have the science of biology, because when it comes to cells, the rules of the game are very different, and a key reason — if not the key reason — is because of information processing within cells and communication between them.
Information processing and communication are what makes the Cell-Life a meta-dimension that is “above” but also “within” the Matter dimensions. If you are wondering how the Cell-Life plane can both be “above” and “within” the Physical-Material dimension, you are asking a good question. One way to think about it is to think about the relationship between letters, words, and sentences and the concept of meaning. In this article, Nelson offered the following example that can help us see how this works: “Thiss sentence has threee errors.” To understand the point of the example, a consideration must be made at the object level (the individual words) and the meta-level (the meaning of the sentence as a whole). There are two errors at the object level (the two misspellings) and one error at the meta-level (the fact that there are two spelling errors instead of three). Applying this to the domain of Cell-Life, we can think of molecules as being akin to letters, organelles inside the cell as being akin to words, and the cell as a whole being akin to the meaning of the sentence as a whole. Given this, we can then see why the sentence in some ways exists “within” the set of all letters, but the meaning of the sentence is not reducible to the letters and thus also exists “above” the set of all letters.
According to the ToK System, the same basic relation regarding information and communication is true for the Animal-Mental and the Person-Culture dimensions. That is, these dimensions exists both “within” and “above” the dimensions beneath them for the same basic reasons. The Animal-Mental dimension sees new behaviors and new ways of being-in-the-world, like perceptions and feelings because of the activity of the nervous system in general and brain in particular embedded in complex animal bodies. What is the brain/nervous system but a new system of information processing and communication that works to coordinate cells together so that animals move as whole beings? [Note, for those interested in the question of consciousness, see this series I did with John Vervaeke]. And, as the family example shows, the Person-Culture dimension is defined by human language and justification, which means it is also a complex adaptive landscape characterized by a new kind of information processing and communication. The pattern is clearly suggestive. The new dimensions of existence emerge when there is a new way to process information and communicate.
Hopefully, the direction of the argument is emerging in your mind. As is well-known, the 20th Century saw the construction of new forms of information processing and communication. Computers, artificial intelligence, and the internet laid down an entirely new complex adaptive plane of information processing and communication. The digital landscape has taken off in the 21st Century and is accelerating, such that artificial intelligence and human information interface are changing things at a breakneck pace. The strong likelihood is that a new, essentially infinite landscape is in the process of opening up, but there are no rules to this game, at least not yet. Indeed, we can see that there is surely a relationship between the rise of the digital landscape and the breakdown of the old systems of justification.
The ToK System maps this process. It says “We Are Here” in the universe. The “here” is the cosmic coordinates on the Physical-Material, Cell-Life, Animal-Mental, Person-Culture map that is starting to transition into the 5th dimension of existence. It is some kind of “Meta-Cultural” space that involves the interface between human persons and the digital landscape. [I should note that Alexander Bard has pointed out to me there are good reasons to critique this term, but I will stay with it in this context.]
Given this, what does the ToK System and larger UTOK suggest we might need to do? It suggests we need to cultivate a form of “Meta-Cultural Consciousness” that fosters a shared sense of awareness, acceptance and orientation toward adaptive change. That is, collectively we need to develop a shared narrative the locates the situation we are in and the issues we face. We need to be aware that combination of the vast, essentially infinite potential of the digital landscape is simultaneously combining with the breakdown of shared Person-Cultural understanding and justification, which, as Zak Stein notes, has the potential for mass confusion, hysteria, and generating a kind of cultural schizophrenia. At the same time, we also need to be aware that there is much that is hopeful and positive about our situation. That is, we need a perspective that allows us to understand our metaphysical and existential situation and both crises and affordances we have, and how we might be able to avoid catastrophe and move toward more valued states of being.
How might we achieve this? Currently, I am excited by the notion that the answer might be found in the cultivation of “wisdom energy”. Wisdom is a complicated word, but its core meaning can be thought of as a meta-cognitive stance, grounded in values that engages in the cultivation of knowledge practices that move toward valued states of being in the short and long term. Energy refers to the capacity to do work. If we connect this to the “DIKW Knowledge Pyramid” the notion that emerges is that we might be able to collectively channel energy via data and information into knowledge that can cultivate wisdom. Indeed, the UTOK suggests that to address our many wicked problems, we might adopt a “WKID” approach to knowledge and being.
The UTOK offers the following schematic for this process. Specifically, the ToK System and its updated map of reality and science locates our cosmic coordinates as being at the portal of the 5th Joint Point and the emerging digital landscape. To successfully channel through it, it suggests that we need to work toward the cultivation of wisdom energy. To do this, the UTOK offers a vision of a metaphorical Tree in a Garden, and posits that we might position our collective way of being and becoming by orienting toward the concept of God, the idea of ultimate concern and goodness.
