HMN 2024: Mindedness Is to Psychology What Life Is to Biology

Take a minute and imagine a world where biologists do not have a concept of life. We can call this the “No-Concept-of-Life” (NCL) World.

In the NCL world, biologists struggle to characterize exactly what they study. Entities like bacteria and oak trees are called “macro-chemical systems,” or MCSs. Some scientists who study MCSs claim that there is a force that is responsible for why MCSs behave the way they do. They call this the Elan Vital or EV Force.

The hunt for the EV force and how it causes MCSs to behave is a major research project. However, skeptics argue that the EV force does not exist and that the only real things in the world are chemical forces. These forces are just more complexly arranged in MCSs.

Life Is a Property and a Generative Plane of Existence

What is wrong with this picture? The problem is the folks in the NCL World have misframed the concept of life. Life is not a physical force like electromagnetic radiation. However, that does not mean that life does not exist or is not important or can be reduced to chemistry. Rather, life is properly conceived of as both a property and a generative process of complexification. Complexification refers to how things both differentiate and integrate to become “meta-stable” patterns that have causal properties.

This means that life is a specific kind of assembled organization that enables particular behavior patterns. More specifically, life describes a set of complex adaptive units that process information (i.e., cells) and communicate with each other and create webs of behavioral complexification in various environmental contexts.

To understand this better, we need to consider different levels of organization in nature. Lots of things are organized into hierarchical levels. One example is our language. It has letters, words, and sentences that can then be embedded into recursively complex systems (e.g., paragraphs, sections, chapters, books, topics).

Now consider this common brain teaser: “Thiss sentence has threee errors”. It is interesting because there are two errors at the word level, which then sparks the awareness that there is an error at the sentence level.

Now, think of atoms as being akin to letters and molecules being like words. And then think of a generative process that gives rise to sentences. And then consider how these sentences can be stitched together and function as whole units that process information and communicate with each other. This is a reasonable way to think about the kind of thing life is. Genes are like the sentences, cells are like stories, and the ecology is like the topic or genre or context.

This means that life is not a new force per se. Rather, life is a new plane of existence that emerged in the world as a function of novel information processing systems and communication networks that expanded into systems. Put in the metaphor of propositional language, life is the ecological network of chemical sentences that tell stories in the form of organisms like bacteria and oak trees. In her recent book on the physics of life’s emergence, Sara Amari Walker frames life in terms of assembly theory, which is very similar to the sentence metaphor.

Mind(Edness) Is Also a Plane of Existence

With this background, we can shift to the main focus of this blog, which is on how scientific psychology (mis)frames “the mind.” The history of psychology has strong parallels with biology in the NCL World. There are behaviorists who deny that “the mind” exists and claim that everything is just behavior. And there are mentalists who argue that “the mind” is a force inside of people that causes them to do things. This is the “mental versus behavioral” divide in psychological science, and it has never been satisfactorily resolved.

UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge¹, is a new system of understanding that helps resolve debate. The first key is to realize that there are different planes of existence in nature. The second key is to realize that the mind, like life, is a plane of existence. This means that “the mind” is not some nonphysical force that causes physical things to behave. Rather, “mind” is properly framed as a property and a generative process that has given rise to a new plane of existence.

UTOK calls the property mindedness. Mindedness can be defined as the sensorimotor loop that emerged in the animal kingdom². Specifically, it starts as neuronal networks in things like sponges and jellyfish. It advances with the emergence of brains and bilateral body plans in things like planaria. Finally, there is the Cambrian Explosion. This is when we get animals with brains and complex active bodies that can engage in new kinds of patterns, like predation on other animals.

The fundamental unit of life is the cell. The fundamental unit of “mind” is an animal with a brain and a complex active body. These two elements enable the animal to get up and move around as a whole, which, in turn, opens up a whole new way of being in the world (i.e., this is normally just labeled the world of animal behavior).

Mindedness describes this property. And mental behaviors describe the kind of behaviors that exhibit mindedness. In so doing, the bridge between the behaviorists and the mentalists is made clear.

Summary

The conclusion here is straightforward. Biology is the science of life, defined as a new plane of existence that emerged because of the evolution of a novel kind of information processing/communication network that allowed for the assemblage of much greater kinds of behavioral complexification than is the case for inanimate matter.

The same is true for (basic) psychology. Psychology³ is the science of mental or minded behavior. Minded behaviors are readily identifiable. They are characterized by the higher-order functional awareness and responsivity that we see in animals, which are constituted by the sensorimotor loop in animals with brains and complex active bodies.

This is mindedness. And, as we saw with life, it can be readily defined as a new plane of existence that emerged as a function of a novel form of information processing and communication networks.