Hi TOK Folks,

  I am planning on putting up a Psychology Today blog on Friday that defines 10 key psychological terms via UTOK. It was inspired by an exchange between Jamie and Nik a bit ago, where Jamie listed a few words key words and offered some possible definitions. Note, unlike Jamie, I did not tackle "soul" and "spirit," although these are key works in the UTOK language system. However, I decided to keep the list closely tied to the science of psychology and how UTOK's framing relates...

I decided to share it here to see if there are reactions before proceeding to post on Friday. I will provide a brief overview/intro to the blog, with a comment about how the problem of psychology means that the field lacks the capacity to develop a clear descriptive metaphysical vocabulary for the field's subject matter and this means that we are greatly limited in our capacity to develop a coherent system of thought that produces cumulative knowledge about the ontology of the mental and human persons.
Per usual, I welcome reflections, feedback, etc.


  1.  Psychology - Mainstream academic psychology is defined as the science of behavior and mental processes. UTOK psychology critiques definition as one that is based on the epistemology of science rather based on a coherent scientifically grounded ontology of the mental. In contrast, UTOK's definition of psychology is the science of mental behavior, where mental refers to a kind of behavioral pattern in the world. Specifically, it is animal-mental behavior, which is framed by the third dimension of complexification on the Tree of Knowledge System and defined as the patterns of activity engaged in by animals with brains and complex active bodies. Thus, in contrast to mainstream psychology, which defines scientific psychology based on the methods of science (i.e., behavior is that which is available to the epistemology of science and mental processes are then inferred and modeled by the specific researcher embedded in a school of thought and program of research), UTOK provides a scientific psychology based on a clear, specific, and generalizable ontological referent in the world (i.e., psychological science is about describing and explaining animal and human mental behavioral patterns via the epistemology and ontology of the natural and human sciences).



  1.  Behavior - In UTOK, behavior is broadly defined as change in entity-field relations. It is argued to be the central concept in modern empirical natural science, such that modern science can be framed as the epistemological project of observing, describing, and explaining the unfolding wave of behaviors as various levels and dimensions of existence. The ToK System divides the behavioral patterns in the world via the four dimensions of Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture, with the basic science of psychology being the science of the third dimension of behavioral complexification. In addition, UTOK gives the Periodic Table of Behavior as a specific taxonomy for differentiating levels of behavioral analysis within the dimensions from the differences between the dimensions and for classifying the primary domains of science and how they function to map various kinds of behavioral patterns in the world at both different levels and dimensions of analysis (e.g., particle physics maps the first floor of behavioral patterns).



  1.  Mind - UTOK provides a much richer vocabulary for the mental than is currently used by most systems of language. This is necessary because the metaphysics and ontology of the mental that emerged from the science and philosophy that stemmed from the Enlightenment is deeply confused, inadequate, and convoluted. Via the ToK System, UTOK defines Mind with a capital "M" as the set of mental behaviors, which were defined above. It also defines "the mind" as the information instantiated within and processed by the nervous system. UTOK gives Behavioral Investment Theory as a metatheory for framing animal-mental behavioral processes that combines evolutionary theory, neuroscience, behavioral science, cognitive science, and developmental systems theory into a coherent picture. Finally, via the Map of Mind1,2,3 gives a descriptive metaphysical system of the domains of the mental that explicitly differentiates overt mental behavior (Mind1b), neurocognitive processes (Mind1a), subjective conscious experiences (Mind2), and private (Mind3a) and public (Mind3b) self-conscious verbal interpretive processes via their appropriate and clear ontological and epistemological referents.



  1.  Cognition - As John Vervaeke's work makes clear, cognition refers to both "to know" and the functional information processing that takes place in the brain. His 4P/3R metatheory of cognition is highly congruent with UTOK and helps fill in missing pieces. UTOK's definition of cognition in "neurocognitive processes" refers to three different meanings of information processing, including (a) the input-recursive computation-output structure of the nervous system; (b) the information theoretic meaning of reduction of uncertainty, which connects to predictive processing models of cognition; and (c) the semiotic, semantic, and schematic architectures that enable an agent to make sense the environment and its experience.



  1.  Consciousness - Consciousness refers to both awareness and the subjective experience of being, and the relation between the two must be differentiated. The broadest definition of consciousness that is used refers to functional awareness and responsivity, which basically refers to organisms exhibiting intelligent behavioral patterns. A narrower, but in UTOK appropriate referent of consciousness, refers to the subject experience of being in the world, often referred to as sentience or phenomenological consciousness. Finally, consciousness sometimes refers to explicit awareness of subjective experience. This is most obviously seen in the form of self-conscious reflection humans show when they report on their experience of being.



  1.  Self - To engage in functional intelligent behavior, an agent must model both itself and the environment, and so at the most broad and limited definition, the self references the agent and how it distinguishes itself from the environment. However, more appropriate to the normal usage of the term, the self refers to the internal working model the agent creates of itself as it extends itself over time and in relationship to others. In UTOK, the primate-experiential self refers to the core of these conceptual, motivational, and emotional structures that enable an individual human to identify and model elements of the world that are relevant. In particular, the Influence Matrix provides a model of how the human primate self tracks changes in relational value, social influence and the process dimensions of power, love, and freedom.



  1.  Ego/Persona - The central idea that ultimately gave rise to UTOK, called Justification Systems Theory, was the idea developed in 1996 that, in the course of human evolution over the past several hundred thousand years, propositional language created the adaptive problem of justification. The evolutionary solution in human psychological architecture was the emergence of the ego as the mental organ of justification. According to UTOK, the ego works to develop verbal-semantic justifications that make sense of both external events and inner experience and frame it in a manner that can be justified on the Person-Culture plane of existence. The logic of JUST clearly frames the persona as closely tied to the ego and as being the public image individuals attempt to portray to manage the impressions others form so as to navigate the dynamics of relational value and social influence. The relationship between the experiential/primate self, the ego and the persona are mapped by the Updated Tripartite Model of Human Consciousness.



  1.  Person - Consistent with the work done on the Behavior of Persons by Ossorio, UTOK defines a person as an entity that can self-consciously reflect and provide accounts and take responsibility for one's actions on the social stage. This means that the concept of a person is one that is defined by a capacity, and is not tied explicit to being human, as the work of science fiction makes clear (e.g., Jabba the Hut from Star Wars is a person in this sense). However, humans are the only known creatures in the universe that have shown this capacity. The ego-persona aspects of human psychology are the mental architectures that afford humans the capacity to be socialized into persons.



  1.  Culture - In UTOK, Culture with a capital "C" refers to the fourth dimension of complexification and is constituted by the large-scale systems of justification that consist of the propositional networks that coordinate human action and legitimize what is and ought to be. It should not be confused with the broader little "c" culture, which refers to traditions of learned behavioral repertoires and practices that are developed communities of individuals over time. Other animals like chimpanzees clearly have culture; however, only humans have Culture. On the ToK, the fourth dimension of complexification is often called the "Person-Culture" plane of existence and it refers to the social construction of reality and the ways human persons navigate those systems of justification.



  1.  Psyche - In UTOK, the psyche refers to the specific, idiographic, unique, subjective first person experience of being in the world. It is the individual's epistemological portal that functions to generate the awareness and experience of being in the world. It is the field of the individual's observing function that can only be experienced from an inside-out epistemic vector. That is, one can never directly observe another's psyche. The epistemological structure of the psyche is antithetical to the epistemology of modern empirical natural science in the sense that the latter is a conceptual-theoretical system framed by mapping behaviors based on generalizable, nomothetic, natural processes that can be observed via a systematic third person empirical data gathering and experimental methods. In contrast, the psyche consists of instances of ontic-epistemic realization that are unique, particular, idiographic, nonconceptual, and real (as opposed to theoretic-explanatory). In UTOK, the iQuad Coin is given as the conceptual placeholder for the human psyche, and it bridges with the ToK System to provide the proper conceptual relations between the unique particular subjective psyche in the real with a generalizable scientific theoretical account of behavior in nature.


___________________________________________
Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
President of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration (2022)
Professor, Department of Graduate Psychology
216 Johnston Hall; MSC 7401
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
(540) 568-7857 (phone)

Cultivate wisdom energy.

Check out the Unified Theory Of Knowledge homepage at:
https://www.unifiedtheoryofknowledge.org/


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