Wilber and Watson Made the Same Mistake
Both Ken Wilber and John Watson Erroneously Yoked Behaviorism to Materialism
UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge, diagnoses our current philosophical confusions as stemming from the Enlightenment Gap, which refers to the failure to generate a coherent system of understanding that places matter and mind in right relation, relative to scientific versus subjective and social forms of knowing. Looking at the mistake that both John Watson and Ken Wilber make allows us to see more clearly how and why the Enlightenment Gap has confused so many scholars.
It would be hard to find two scholars who have less in common in their approach to the philosophy of mind than the Integral theorist, Ken Wilber, and the founder of the behavioral school of thought in psychology, John B. Watson. Wilber’s life work has been about diving into the interior domain of consciousness, and bridging science and spirituality along with Eastern and Western thought into a holistic “theory of everything.”
In contrast, Watson tried to banish the mind and consciousness from scientific psychology. He was a reductive materialist who rejected spirituality and tried to explain everything in terms of physical mechanisms, framed by stimulus-response reflexes. Thus, on the continuum of the philosophy of mind that ranges from the reductive mechanical materialist to the holistic, energetic, spiritualist, Watson and Wilber represent opposite sides of the spectrum.
Despite this, according to UTOK, they both make the same philosophical mistake. It is a surprisingly common mistake when you know how to look for it. And it is a mistake that sits at the heart of our modern philosophical confusions.
What is the mistake? It is the mistake of equating behaviorism with reductive materialism. At its broadest contours, behaviorism claims that we should base our knowledge on empirical observational data that are available from the exterior, third-person perspective. Materialism is the idea that matter is the only kind of thing that exists in the real world. A reductive, mechanistic material view of the world claims that the real causes only exist at the bottom of the causal chain.
As I show in my book, A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap, a careful reading of John Watson’s behaviorist position demonstrates that Watson was both a behaviorist and a reductive, mechanical materialist. Not only that, but I also show that he completely fails to differentiate the two. Instead, he confusingly yokes them together and considers them both as “givens” once one adopts a natural science attitude.
To see what I mean, we can start with how Watson opens his 1913 behaviorist manifesto:
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist’s total scheme of investigation.
To be precise in the argument I am making, I need to introduce two key concepts from philosophy. The first is ontology. Ontology refers to one’s theory of what is real and how reality happens. The second concept is epistemology, which is one’s theory of knowledge and what is true and how one justifies those claims. The two are intimately related; what you say is real and your theory of reality are inevitably going to be related to how your obtain justifiable knowledge about that reality. Nonetheless, the two concepts are also clearly distinguishable. Indeed, as suggested by this representation of key philosophical concepts, ontology and epistemology arguably form the foundation of philosophy.
Watson was not a gifted philosopher, and he repeatedly confused his ontology and his epistemology. Behaviorism, for Watson, meant both adopting the perspective of a systematic observer of change from a third person point of view, and it meant the idea that all real causes are material events that are reducible to the lowest rung on the latter of causation (e.g., particles or atoms). And he never systematically distinguished between the two. Instead, he lumped them together into what he considered to be the “natural science” worldview.
If we are clear on the difference between epistemology and ontology, we can see that there is obviously a difference between analyzing things from a third person point view and having the theory that reality is ultimately made up of reductive, mechanical, material causes. The first is an epistemological stance; the second is an ontological one. The fact that one can readily distinguish between the two, even if one is a behaviorist, can be seen in the work of the man who was perhaps the most famous behaviorist of them all, B. F. Skinner. Skinner embraced Watson’s behavioral epistemology. However, although many people do not realize this, Skinner did not, in fact, embrace Watson’s reductive, mechanical, stimulus-response ontology. Indeed, Skinner regularly stated he was not a “stimulus-response” psychologist. This was his way of saying that he did not commit to Watson’s reductive, mechanistic view of behavior.
One likely reason for Watson’s confusion is that modern empirical natural science, as it emerged from Galileo into Newton, tended to yoke its epistemological methods with a reductive materialistic ontology into a single system of justification called physics. A take home message of this essay is that Watson was far from alone in blending these two notions and calling them natural science.
However, all modern scholars should be clear that the emergence of modern physics (i.e., quantum mechanics and general relativity) blew up the standard, reductive, mechanical account of material objects in motion on an absolute space-time grid as being the fundamental root of causation. Because of this we can be somewhat forgiving of Watson because in his day natural science arguably committed to both. But as modern day scholars, we should be absolutely clear on the difference.
Wilber Makes the Same Basic Error
To be sure, Ken Wilber’s philosophical stance is completely different from Watson. Unlike Watson, he has always embraced the interior mode of knowing, that one can systematically study consciousness, and that the universe has a spiritual ontological dimension. Despite these differences, Wilber nonetheless ends up making a very similar error that Watson makes. Specifically, like Watson, Wilber ends up yoking together the exterior epistemological stance (i.e., behaviorism) with a reductive materialism.
To see this claim, we can start with Wilber’s classic quadrant formulation. This is the interior by exterior, individual by collective frame that he spelled out in his classic work, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Here is the basic depiction of Wilber’s quadrants:
Wilber’s overall ontology is a layered ontology that corresponds reasonably well with UTOK’s Tree of Knowledge System, which divides the natural world into the layers of: 1) Energy-Information; 2) Matter-Objects; 3) Life-Organisms; 4) Mind-Animals; and 5) Culture-Persons. Indeed, the circles shown in the diagram above relate to Wilber’s ontology, which is often depicted as going from matter to life to mind to soul to spirit. In A New Synthesis, I explain how we can roughly correlate these perspectives, and why Wilber’s soul and spirit loosely correspond to the Culture-Person plane on UTOK’s ToK System.
Nonetheless, there is an important ontological difference between Wilber’s integral formulation and UTOK. UTOK frames these ontological layers or dimensions as “complex adaptive planes of existence” that are yoked together by patterns of information processing and communication networks. Thus, two people engaging in a conversation represent an activity that is taking place at the Culture-Person plane of existence.
This is not how Wilber frames the world. Rather, he frames the interior of each person as consisting of a soul and spirit, whereas the space between the two people is just “matter.” Moreover, that soul and spirit is connected to the ultimate foundation of existence, which Wilber sometimes calls “consciousness.” Indeed, for Wilber, there are really two core ontological domains that overlap with the interior-exterior distinction. The interior domain is the domain of consciousness, whereas the exterior domain is the domain of matter.
Wilber’s ideas on this are spelled out clearly in Integral Spirituality. In that work, he elaborates on his earlier thinking to explicitly state that the exterior domain is the domain of matter. Here is a diagram from Mark Edwards that closely reproduces a diagram from Integral Spirituality.
For Wilber, the behavioral world is the world of material complexity — and nothing more. In contrast, the interior world is the world of consciousness, qualities, and ultimately the root of the human soul and spirit.
To obtain a clearer picture of Wilber’s yoking together of the behavioral exterior view and a reductive materialistic ontology, we can examine this common depiction of the quadrants that track their levels of complexification.
If we look carefully at Wilber’s upper right quadrant, we can see how Wilber yokes the behavioral perspective with a materialist ontology. Following the upper right line, we start at atoms and move into molecules and then into cells of different degrees of complexity.
However, something odd happens when we get into animals with a nervous system. Instead of tracking the behavior of animals, like sponges into worms into fish into mammal, etc., Wilber’s upper right quadrant starts listing brain regions. It goes from the neuronal chord to the brainstem to the limbic system to the neocortex to the complex cortex to the human structure-function level 1, human SF-2, and human SF-3.
When we compare and contrast the focus on the brain of animals with the atom and the cell, we realize a curious thing has happened. Surely, atoms behave in part because of particles and the fundamental forces that exist within them. Despite this being the case, Wilber is fine with identifying atoms as a level of analysis that behaves as an individual unit. The same is true for molecules. And for cells. Of course, the RNA, DNA, and organelles that make up a cell play a central role in causing cells to behave the way they do. But Wilber sees no problem with studying the behavior of a cell as a level of individual, exterior analysis.
However, when Wilber gets to the behavior of animals, that changes. Instead of listing the animal, he goes inside the animal, to a part (specifically, the brain), and then tracks the general layering of the nervous system. The reason is that Wilber, like Watson, has yoked mental behaviors with mechanical causation. And so he equates such behaviors with the brain.
But this is a major error. When we watch people behave, we do not see their brains behaving. Rather, we see them behaving as people. Consider, for example, I know both my daughters, Sydney and Lanie, very well. When I say that I know them, what do I mean? I mean that I know their patterns of behavior as human persons. I know how they walk, talk, what they like, what they believe, etc.
Do you know how I do NOT know them? I absolutely do not know them by their brains. Bracketing the morbid implications, if I were looking at both their brains side by side, I would have absolutely no idea “who” was “who”.
The point here is that animals and persons behave and we can understand their behavior as patterns of mindedness and as patterns of cultured self-conscious beings. Wilber failed to see this because he conflated the behavioral quadrant as an epistemological position with materialism as an ontological claim.
I am not the only one to see Wilber’s error here. Mark Edwards lays this out very clearly in an Integral World article aptly titled: The Depth of the Exteriors: Wilber’s Flatland: .
There is no question that the increasing complexity evident in the evolution of animal neural systems is indeed a wonderful and important aspect of human evolution. The key point I want to emphasise is, however, that even the most complex formations in the cortex are still material, and behaviour cannot be reduced to material processes, no matter how complex those processes might be might be. Neurology will always be a “gross reductionist” endeavour (to use Wilber’s very apt term) and, moreover, it aims to be exactly that. An Integral Theory view of behaviour should be able to better than that.
Because of the obvious material complexification that accompanies transformative development, it’s quite easy to associate the material complexification of the Central Nervous System with holarchic growth. But whatever one thinks of the developmental nature of the CNS it is still only matter, and seeing all behaviours and social activities as simply the complexification of matter will always be reductionist; it will always depend on the reduction of higher levels of behavioural reality to lower levels. To discuss the powerful gross reductionist (and weak reductionist for that matter) propensity within neuropsychology, and the neurosciences in general, is one issue. To import these tendencies (the gross reductionist side at least) into an Integral Theory perspective of the Upper Right Quadrant is another thing entirely and it puzzles me greatly as to why Wilber has taken this approach. Why does he so grossly reduce human behaviour to the mass-energy forms of neural networks?
One way of trying to consider Wilber’s position on this is to acknowledge that he does recognise the development of neurological structures in the Upper Right and that these structures can be seen to form a basis for higher behaviours. There are places in his descriptions of the behavioural quadrants where he talks of the “differentiation and integration” of these neurological structures. There is no question that Wilber does recognise a type of holarchic development in the exteriors, but he very clearly limits this holarchic growth to that of material complexity and the transformation of gross physical forms only. This view of material complexification still does not answer the fundamental issue of why Wilber reduces behaviour to neurology. Matter is matter, it is not behaviour.
The Enlightenment Gap is Ubiquitous
As natural science emerged on the scene as the most powerful epistemological system that humans have ever generated, it largely eliminated the idea that there was a separate, higher realm of causal power that stemmed from a supernatural god. Moreover, for the first two hundred years or so, the basic model for causation was a mechanistic, deterministic view of the world as matter in motion.
UTOK explains that this naive Newtonian view of the world was essentially mindblind. Built on a third person epistemology, the language of science basically eliminates the view of the unique, particular, qualitative subject. In addition, the matter in motion ontology could not be reconciled with consciousness and reasoning. The result ever since has been an Enlightenment Gap.
Crucial to solving the Gap is recognizing that there is an epistemological and an ontological aspect to it. Science adopts a behavioral epistemology. However, it is no longer valid to claim that science leads one to adopt a naive, Newtonian mechanistic ontology. Indeed, it is very well-known, and has been for more than a century, that this ontology is wrong.
We need to move from a reductive, materialistic, mechanistic ontology to an energy, information, emergent, evolving ontology, such as is mapped by UTOK’s ToK System. It gives us the right holistic map to map the language game of science. And, when placed in relation to the iQuad Coin, we can readily place the human subject in the map and have a language system that includes both the interior and exterior epistemological vantage points.
Although they adopted very different views on the world, both Watson and Wilber fell into the long shadow cast by the Enlightenment Gap. UTOK shines the light on the path out of the shadows and gives us the need vocabulary for mind and behavior.
