The iQuad Coin (Part II)

Framing the Human Identification Matrix via the Four Lenses of: 1) Self; 2) Pure Awareness; 3) Reality; and 4) Science

In Part I of this blog series, I introduced the iQuad Coin and explained the role it serves in UTOK as a placeholder for the unique, particular, subjective human knower. I reviewed the two primary meanings of the iQuad symbol, which is that it represents the Human Identity Function and the fact that the imaginary number raised to the 4th power equals one and generates the complex unit circle. That blog concluded by making loose associations between the real, the imaginary/imaginal, and the complex as they operate in both the Human Identity sphere and the complex unit circle.

This blog deepens the analysis of the Human Identity Function by elaborating more on its central core, which is called the Human Identification Matrix. This blog shows how we can think about the Human Identification Matrix as putting on one’s “iQuad glasses” and then proceed to see the world via four different lenses. Two of the lenses are more subjective in nature and can be defined as “Self” and (pure) “Awareness.” The other two are more objective in nature and can be defined as “Reality” and “Science.” Together the four lenses afford what might be called an “iQuad correction” in our current perspective that affords us a new way to see more clearly our place in the cosmos and how we might proceed to live wisely.

As was described in Part I, the iQuad symbol on the Coin makes an H and then rotates to an I, which stands for the Human Identity Function. The most general way to understand the Human Identity Function is to frame it as the Human Identification Matrix. This refers to how people can generate a “self-world map” that allows them to participate in the world effectively. The example given in Part I was the process of observing a person in a furniture store who was considering purchasing a table. The ease with which a typical person who has been socialized within this culture can understand this scene is a testament to the human capacity to build identification matrices.

We can be reminded how much capacity is built into this ability if we imagine how difficult it is to understand what happens in different cultures that are foreign to us. For example, I do not speak Chinese. If I were in a market in China and saw folks engaged in a conversation about making a purchase, I would only have the vaguest frame for understanding what was happening because I lack an identification matrix for that setting.

The goal in this blog is to deepen our analysis of the Identification Matrix. More specifically, I show how to shift your frame on it. To do this, let’s consider the Identification Matrix as something you normally look through. That is, in everyday contexts, such as making a purchase in a store, you simply walk into a store and go about your business, readily understanding and identifying the products, customers, and rules of purchase, etc. Now, let’s shift our perspective so that rather than looking through this frame of identification, we look at it. The analogy here is that you normally look through your glasses, but sometimes you want to shift the focus so that your glasses become the object of attention. Indeed, my friend John Vervaeke is famous for this example, such that his glasses and the difference between his looking through them and then shifting to look at them is now a meme.

Let’s apply this to the iQuad Coin, and envision it as a pair of glasses we put on. When we do, we become conscious that we are seeing the world via our unique, particular Human Identification Matrix. As this becomes salient, consider how all your experiences allow you to see and participate in the world. To start, consider something that you are very good at, and reflect on how easy it is for you to engage in that domain relative to others. Then consider a domain you have no capacity to understand, and imagine entering into that space. As with the example of me being in China, when we enter into a space that is completely foreign to us, we are overloaded and have trouble participating in that world.

With this fact highlighted, let’s get into frame shifting. The movie, The Matrix, provides a powerful example of frame shifting. It tells the story of how futuristic robots harvest human bodies and keep them alive in part by creating a simulation that feeds their brains information to make it seem as though they are living in the world. The protagonist, Neo, has a unique capacity for recognizing that the Matrix is a simulation, and the wise Morpheus gives him the chance to take the red pill and wake up to reality. It is the ultimate example of a frame break.

Given this, we can begin to wonder about different frames for the Identification Matrix. Indeed, our goal in this blog is help you begin to see the world via four iQuad Identification Matrix lenses. We have already taken the first basic step, which is creating an identity between the way you normally see the world and the Human Identification Matrix. Now, I want to “rotate” that view. Recall that the iQuad activates the Human Identity Function via the 90 degree rotation from H to the I. In enacting this rotation, let’s imagine that the lenses we are wearing shift. First, ala John Vervaeke’s famous example, we can now look at them, rather than just through them.

The second move is to make a division in the Matrix lens, such that instead of a single Identification Matrix, the frame divides, first into two, and then into four different lenses. Each of these are described below. Two of these frames are more subjective in nature (i.e., Self and Awareness), and two are more objective in nature (i.e., Reality and Science).

Let’s start with the Self lens, as it is the most obvious and the easiest to relate to. We have been discussing it already, and it can be defined as the standard operating frame for most people. It is the lens of “I am me,” and “This is what I am trying to do in the world and why.” With this in hand, let’s now add some texture to it. Specifically, we can use the Updated Tripartite Model of Human Consciousness to map what we mean by the Self and divide it into three different domains. This Updated Tripartite Model arises from Justification Systems Theory, which is the second key idea in UTOK, as shown here.

The first domain is the Experiential Self. As was discussed in the Cognitive Science Show series, The Elusive “I”: The Nature and Function of the Self that I did with John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro, the Experiential Self refers to the nonverbal model of ourselves that we hold in our mind and use to track what is relevant to us over time in different situations. (See this blog for more details). A key aspect of the Experiential Self is how it tracks our place in the relational world. Specifically, it monitors one’s felt sense of safety, security, respect and honor in relationship to important others across the dimensions of power, love, and freedom. For more details on how this works, we can use the Influence Matrix, which is the fourth key idea in UTOK. As this blog shows, it combines Bowlby’s attachment theory and Leary’s Interpersonal Circumplex to map how people form internal working models and how these guide folks in relating to others.

The second domain is the Private Self or ego. It the domain of reflective self-conscious that is explaining what is happening and why, and what should be happening (see here for a blog on the ego). For adult persons, this is the “I” that gives reasons and takes responsibility (or not) for one’s actions on the social stage. The third domain is the Public Self or persona. This is the public image we attempt to portray and regulate to manage our place in the social matrix.

There are also filters that operate between these domains. Specifically, the Attentional filter regulates what gets placed on your screen of awareness, and thus exists between your conscious and subconscious mental processes. The Freudian filter regulates the relationship between your subconscious and self-conscious processing. Here is an analysis of the “defensive system” that aligns with the Freudian Filter. Finally, the Rogerian filter regulates what you share publicly relative to what you think and feel privately. “Know thy self” refers to one’s capacity to see these domains and understand how they work to place you in the world and orient you to what you desire or fear or believe. Please note that it takes practice to be able to reflect on these domains and filters and how they relate to give us our experience of being ourselves.

The next subjective stream is the “pure” Awareness lens. Unlike the Self lens, this is just perceptual awareness in itself — full stop. This may seem confusing at first, but with a little bit of practice you will be able to observe it, and clearly differentiate it from the Self stream with all of its desires, memories, and thoughts about the meaning of everything across time. In this outstanding presentation, the philosopher Rob Scott does an excellent job helping people see this stream, and how to separate it from the Self stream. In it, he labels the Awareness stream “pure experience” and separates it from “thought,” which is the Self stream. He does this with the concept of lenses much as we are doing here. He has developed a path to wisdom called “The Fundamental Shift,” which is designed to help people see the difference between their Self stream and the pure Awareness lens, and learn the value and beauty of identifying with the Awareness lens.

It is worth noting that many wisdom traditions have also emphasized this move. For example, in Buddhism, there is the capacity to detach from the beliefs, needs, and desires of the self such that there is awareness without the self. In this video, the Jamaican sage Sri Mooji guides folks toward this pure Awareness. He does this by helping them “drop” into the fundamental thing that they know. Similar to Descartes’ foundational insight of “I think, therefore I am”, Mooji starts with “I am.” However, rather than moving into the thinking “I am,” he proceeds to drop further into “Am is,” which is the pure Awareness stream.

Over the past year, I have cultivated my ability to clearly differentiate the Self stream from the pure Awareness stream, and it has been both enlightening and helpful. When I shift into the Awareness mode of identification, I simply become aware of being-in-the-world. In this moment, it is press of the chair from below, the computer screen in front, the coffee cup to the right, the ringing from my tinnitus, and so on. I started to write “‘my’ butt sitting in the chair,” but I changed it, because this stream is evolving for me so that I don’t even feel it as “my” butt, rather a raw perception in mental space. It is pure Awareness, with no memory or desire. It is also the case that this sense of Awareness can expand such that there is a felt sense of oneness with the universe. In that mode, I experience the universe as Awareness, with my experience being a fractal of that whole. I called this state of being “wisdom energy”.

The next two Identification Matrix lenses are more “objective” in nature. By this I mean, they shift the focus from the first person, interior epistemological perspective to the third person, exterior epistemological perspective and attend to the behaviors taking place in the world. We can start by noting that there is a world that exists “out there,” independently of us. Let’s call this the ontic reality, which refers to the world as it exists independently of our beliefs or knowledge about it. We can also note that there are many living beings in the world, and of course they are also trying to make sense of it. The word epistemic refers to the processes of knowing. If we put these two concepts together, we get the “Ontic-Epistemic Reality,” which refers to reality and all the subjective knowers attempting to know in an endless multitude of different ways.

We can drop the ontic-epistemic and call this the Reality lens. It refers to the world, and all the ways knowing entities might know about it. You are putting this lens on whenever you are discovering something new in the world or are learning about what other people are thinking. This is the “everyday” or folk meaning of the Reality lens. However, as suggested by the technical sounding “ontic-epistemic” terminology, there are also more refined ways of thinking about the Reality lens. Recently, there has been a movement in philosophy called speculative realism that is trying to clarify this lens from a more refined perspective. In particular, Graham Harman has developed an “object oriented ontology” affords an interesting set of insights regarding how to look at the world through this lens.

The final Identification Matrix is seeing the world via the lens of Science. Some might initially confuse the Science lens with a refined Reality lens, but, as Harman’s work makes clear, they are not the same lens. Science is an epistemological tool (i.e., a way of knowing) for discovering key, generalizable features of reality. In addition to being an epistemological tool, modern empirical natural science has given us a natural scientific ontology.

One way to frame the Science lens is to return to our example with the table in the furniture story and consider the difference between the table as it looks to us in our everyday experience (i.e., our standard Self-into-Reality frames) relative to how the table looks via modern physics. In fact, there is a famous example of exactly this difference in a lecture given by the physicist Arthur Eddington, which is called the “Two Tables.” He opens the lecture by describing the table of everyday experience and then proceeds to describe the table from the vantage point of modern physics:

I have settled down to the task of writing these lectures and have drawn up my chairs to my two tables. Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of every object about me — two tables, two chairs, two pens.

This is not a very profound beginning to a course which ought to reach transcendent levels of scientific philosophy. But we cannot touch bedrock immediately; we must scratch a bit at the surface of things first. And whenever I begin to scratch the first thing I strike is my two tables.

One of them has been familiar to me from earliest years. It is a commonplace object of that environment which I call the world. How shall I describe it? It has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is colored; above all it is substantial. By substantial I do not merely mean that it does not collapse when I lean upon it; I mean that it is constituted of “substance” and by that word I am trying to convey to you some conception of its intrinsic nature. It is a thing; not like space, which is a mere negation; nor like time, which is — Heaven knows what! But that will not help you to my meaning because it is the distinctive characteristic of a “thing” to have this substantiality, and I do not think substantiality can be described better than by saying that it is the kind of nature exemplified by an ordinary table…

Table № 2 is my scientific table. It is a more recent acquaintance and I do not feel so familiar with it. It does not belong to the world previously mentioned that world which spontaneously appears around me when I open my eyes, though how much of it is objective and how much subjective I do not here consider. It is part of a world which in more devious ways has forced itself on my attention. My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself. Notwithstanding its strange construction it turns out to be an entirely efficient table. It supports my writing paper as satisfactorily as table №1; for when I lay the paper on it the little electric particles with their headlong speed keep on hitting the underside, so that the paper is maintained in shuttlecock fashion at a nearly steady level. If I lean upon this table I shall not go through; or, to be strictly accurate, the chance of my scientific elbow going through my scientific table is so excessively small that it can be neglected in practical life. Reviewing their properties one by one, there seems to be nothing to choose between the two tables for ordinary purposes; but when abnormal circumstances befall, then my scientific table shows to advantage. If the house catches fire my scientific table will dissolve quite naturally into scientific smoke, whereas my familiar table undergoes a metamorphosis of its substantial nature which I can only regard as miraculous. (See here for the whole lecture).

Eddington is providing us with an excellent contrast between the everyday Self-into-Reality lenses and the lens of physics. Building from this, the UTOK gives us updated natural scientific lenses to see the natural-into-human world. It is useful to note that, from a UTOK perspective, Eddington conflates “physics” with “science.” That is, he is, in fact, looking at the table via the vantage point of a physicist. However, instead of using physics, he substitutes that with the word “science”. UTOK shows why this is a problem, and that “physics” and “natural science” are not the same thing, although it is a distinction that many physicists fail to see.

Specifically, in UTOK, the Tree of Knowledge System and the Periodic Table of Behavior give rise to a new map of Big History that solves many of the historical problems associated with reconciling physical reductionism with emergence. The ToK System divides the world up into an Energy Information Singularity at the base, and then four different dimensions of complexification called Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture. The Periodic Table of Behavior extends this by emphasizing that there are primary units that behave on each plane, specifically (1) atoms; (2) cells; (3) animals; and (4) persons. These units can be analyzed via levels of analysis at the part, whole, and group across different scales. As this blog explains, this give rise to 3x4 table of behaviors in nature that starts with subatomic particles and ends with large scale groups of persons (e.g., nations or religious groups) and can be arranged as the 12 Floors of Science.

This is UTOK’s metamodern scientific lens for the perceiving the world. As it makes clear, physics is only one slice of a broader scientific picture. As with the other lenses we have discussed in this blog, learning to see the world via the ToK/PTB Science lens takes time. However, we can use the example of the man in the furniture store to show how it is done. Specifically, if we look at that event that via the ToK/PTB lens, we can divide the behaviors up according to the floors, as depicted here:

We can start with Eddington’s scientific analysis and see that he is giving an analysis of the table based on the first and second floors of the PTB (i.e., the configurations of space, time, particles, and atoms, which ultimately bottoms out into a background of “Energy-Information,” see here).

Following UTOK’s conception of different planes of existence, we can see the man via the lens of Life/biology and physiology. He is a human organism that is made up of genes, cells, and organ systems. We can imagine a physician peering into his physiology and assessing how his bodily functions are operating, and perhaps diagnosing any medical problems she might find.

Then we can move the domain of Mind, or “animal-mental behavior”. This refers to what we might call “mind-brain-behavior” relations, and involves seeing the man as a primate. This level of existence includes his perceptions and feelings, his overt functional activity, and all the neurocognitive processes that support those behaviors. On the PTB, these are the 7th and 8th floors. As he interacts (nonverbally) with the salesperson, such that they create a relational dyad, we might consider their nonverbal dance via a “Floor 9” perspective, which studies animal group behavior.

Finally, there is the Culture-Person plane of existence, the behaviors of which are analyzed by the human/social sciences. In UTOK, the primary lens here is the structure and function of verbal systems of justification, at the individual, relational and large-scale group levels of analysis. Thus, we have his statement “I see the table,” and we can consider this proposition as a justification. This resides in the pubic space. We can then wonder what he is saying to himself privately. These are behaviors that take place at the 10th and 11th floor of human cognitive science and personality/developmental psychology. Based on a general understanding of the dynamics of justification and influence, we can hypothesize that his justification for saying the statement as a way of signaling to the salesperson that he is considering the table, but has not decided to purchase it and is not keen on getting pressured.

As we consider the statement as a public statement that intersects with another person, we move from Floor 11 and start to intersect with Floor 12 (i.e., this is the domain of social psychology into anthropology/sociology). We can then imagine salesperson as she publicly says, “Take your time. I am here if you have questions.” This Culture-Person behavior would be regulated by the mission, values, and ethos of the store and how sales people are trained and expected to behave. These large scale structures, which then expand into the rules of purchase and the nations laws, are the province of the social science and are Floor 12.

The table itself does not fit into the Periodic Table of Behavior. The reason is that the PTB is a taxonomy of behaviors in nature, and the table is an example of technology. Technologies (i.e., tools) are a hybrid between the material and cultural dimensions and are a different class of things. Now, the idea of the table and the ethos of the furniture store do exist at the Culture-Person plane. The table and the actual, physical store that frames the scene are technologies. The relation between the Culture-Person plane, technologies, and the other planes of existence of Matter, Life, and Mind are key to understanding the behavior human societies. This UTOKing podcast with Professor Robert Conan Ryan on World Systems 3.0 gives a good overview of how future scientific considerations might bridge these domains.

With these four lenses summarized, it is important to note that these are not necessarily all the possible Identification Matrix lenses that one might see the world through. Consider, for example, that people in long term intimate relationships likely develop their own, unique, intersubjective space that could be framed as its own relationship lens. There are also depth/psychoanalytic perspectives that would add insights and angles about the human unconscious that are not included in the four lenses (see, e.g., here). There are also music and artistic lenses that are not necessarily accounted for here. Finally, there is an emerging digital-virtual world in that some are calling the “metaverse” that might warrant a completely separate lens.

Nonetheless, the claim of this blog is that these four iQuad lenses of Self, Awareness, Reality, and Science are a good start on obtaining a comprehensive picture of understanding ourselves and our place in the cosmos. The proposition is that if we can learn to rotate our perspective on the real, imaginal, and complex, and learn to both see these lenses and see through them with maturity and sophistication, our collective Human Identity Function will likely be in a much better place to address the current meta-crises we face. As such, we will be better positioned to be good ancestors for those who will occupy this planet on the back half of the 21st Century.

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PS. Many thanks to Anjan Katta, who generated the concept of an “iQuad Correction” that I included in the abstract.