Untangling the World Knot of Consciousness

One of the most profound, unresolved problems that stem from the Enlightenment is how to obtain the proper relations between matter and mind. Often referred to as the mind-body problem or, as David Chalmers christened it, the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness, the manner in which our subjective conscious experience fits into the modern scientific worldview remains a profound challenge. It is such a profound challenge that many argue it will never be solved by the standard scientific frame, either because it is too complicated or because a new “post-materialist” view of matter and mind will overthrow the standard scientific model that adopts an embodied, emergent naturalistic approach.

In a 13-episode series, Untangling the World Knot of Consciousness: Grappling with the Hard Problems of Mind and Meaning, professor John Vervaeke and myself undertake the challenge of achieving a comprehensive naturalistic account of human consciousness. The series is grounded in a new kind of academic inquiry called “dialogos,” which refers to a form of deliberate, reflective dialogue that fosters deep interpersonal relating for existential insight and the cultivation of wisdom. Radically different than academic papers that tend to operate as static position statements, dialogos affords a much more dynamic and nuanced “back-and-forth” dialectic that affords the calibration of meaning and the clarification of shared understanding, as well as domains of disagreement.

Source: Image Elisa Riva on Pixabay

Good arguments can be made that such a format is needed in attempting to navigate the problem of consciousness. The concept is so rife with so many different potential meanings that it is essential to engage in careful problem formulation and keen attention to the language games that are operating. Indeed, Vervaeke and I spend a significant portion of the first four episodes on formulating the problem.

Their primary initial reference point to frame the problem is Rene Descartes’ famous dualistic model of matter relative to mind. This is not to belittle Descartes’ implausible dualism, but rather to deeply understand the logic of his thought and the nature of the frame he developed. Such framing is crucial because even though Descartes’ dualism is not workable from a naturalistic philosophical perspective, it nonetheless becomes woven into the very grammar of how modern people think about the nature of "the mental" relative to "the physical".

Source: Frans Hals / André Hatala [e.a.] (1997) De eeuw van Rembrandt, Bruxelles: Crédit communal de Belgique / Wikimedia Commons

With the problem effectively set, Professor Vervaeke takes the lead in the series. His background in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and Eastern philosophical traditions like Taoism afford him a rich and broad view to frame human cognition. Indeed, his acclaimed course, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, affords listeners a powerful view of the historical landscape of thought pertaining to the human mind, the human condition, and the current situation we find ourselves in.

As that course documents, Professor Vervaeke has developed a powerful, integrative model of human cognition, intelligence, and consciousness in a way that is highly sensitive to and connected with larger philosophical issues. A key aspect of his work involves a taxonomy of four kinds of knowing, called the “4 P model of cognition.” As elaborated in this Rebel Wisdom episode, the four kinds of knowing are:

1. procedural (i.e., knowing via sequenced action, often automatically)
2. perspectival (i.e., knowing via perceiving and corresponding to the interior observer position)
3. participatory (i.e., knowing via dynamic, effective engagement in the ever-changing agent-arena environment)
4. propositional (i.e., knowing via language-based, meaning-making claims)

In addition to this powerful taxonomy of knowing, Dr. Vervaeke decodes the fundamental process of cognition as being “recursive relevance realization” across scales and levels of neuro-information processing. This can be framed in terms of a question: What is an animal agent doing when it is “cognizing” about how to find the best or proper path of investment toward a goal? Professor Vervaeke answers that it is engaged in a hierarchical stack of recursive relevance realization. The first eight episodes of the series make the case that this is a broad, powerful account of the nature and function of cognitive processes that assimilates and integrates many perspectives in cognitive science, and modern work in fluid intelligence and consciousness, such as integrated information theory and global neuronal workspace theory.

As Professor Vervaeke lays out this model, I serve as a curious, knowledgeable interlocutor. This enables associations to be made and points of clarification to be drawn out. It also sets the stage for the transition in the final third of the series, where the roles shift, and the focus moves to my work on a unified theory of psychology.

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As laid out in the book, A New Unified Theory of Knowledge, I argue that four key ideas can be employed to properly frame Big History and our scientific knowledge of it such that a consilient model of scientific psychology can be achieved. I argue such a view is needed because mainstream academic psychology lacks a shared system of understanding its subject matter that generates massive confusion, equivocation, and competition between paradigms that operate from different assumptions and use different languages to map the territory.

Since the early 2000s, I have proposed a Tree of Knowledge System that divides reality into four planes of existence—Matter/Object, Life/Organism, Mind/Animal, and Culture/Person—and uses that to correspond to four broad domains of science—Physical, Biological, Psychological, and Social. Moreover, the ToK System highlights the idea that complexity building feedback loops account for the emergence of the higher planes from the planes beneath them. The modern evolutionary synthesis (i.e., natural selection operating on gene provides a basic frame for the “joint point” between Matter and Life). To achieve a unified theory of psychology, I propose that Behavioral Investment Theory frames the joint point between Life and Mind and Justification Systems Theory frames the joint point between Mind and Culture. In addition, I propose an “Influence Matrix” to map social motivation and emotion in a way the bridges the more basic animalistic social tendencies with human persons and their capacity to construct justification narratives.

Vervaeke and I developed our models completely independently, having only become aware of each other’s work in the past two years. As such, this meeting of the minds affords a remarkable opportunity for a modern theory of mind and consciousness. The reason can be framed in the form of a question explored here: To what extent do these different integrative models of cognitive science and psychology generate a coherent picture or do they compete and breakdown? We believe anyone who watches the series will see for themselves the answer.

A powerful alignment between two metatheories.

Source: All images by Gregg Henriques

As this summary slide suggests, what emerges is a remarkable synthesis between two metatheoretical approaches. They sync up to afford new insights and fill in holes to create a greater picture of human cognition and psychology. Namely, Vervaeke's recursive relevance realization functions as a kind of "cognitive glue" that connects my major ideas for unifying psychology, whereas my work broadens and expands Vervaeke's model to behavioral, social, and propositional-into-cultural domains. Ultimately, the series both showcases a new model for generating knowledge in the form of dialogos, and presents a radically new, synergistic vision for how to untangle the world knot and address the hard problems of mind and meaning. As such, it points the way for a new kind of intellectual enterprise in the 21st Century.