Erik Hoel opens his recent book, The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science¹, with a review of “humanity’s two perspectives on the world.” I learned of Hoel’s capacity for depth and nuance when I came across his excellent critique of the open letter that caused a recent fight to break out in the field of consciousness research.

My two recent posts describe that fight and offer some clarifications from the vantage point of the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK). Specifically, UTOK provides clear definitions of both consciousness and mental processes. In particular, UTOK's Map of Mind divides mental processes into three domains and shows that subjective conscious experience can be labeled as the domain of Mind2. In those posts, I explain that although the domain of MInd2 overlaps with the concept of consciousness, it is not the same as the broad definition of consciousness, leading to much confusion.

Let's continue the discussion by building off Hoel’s book. The first three chapters of his work help to orient the reader to humanity’s two perspectives and how they have developed historically over the past several thousand years. The two perspectives are the intrinsic perspective, which refers to the subjective, inside-out point of view, and the extrinsic perspective, which refers to the objective, outside-in point of view. Hoel argues that the evolution of civilization has coincided with a deepening of these two “conceptual marvels.” Early in the work, he writes:

It is a civilizational achievement to be able to extrinsically see the universe “from the outside.” It is also a civilizational achievement to be able to intrinsically see the universe “from the inside.” The two perspectives are the source of our greatest triumphs, like our ability to observe galaxies light years away, and also the elegance and beauty of the stories we tell….

It takes the scientist Galileo Galilei to fully understand the importance of cleaving the extrinsic from the intrinsic, allowing the extrinsic perspective to crystallize into science. And yet, despite all the progress that has been made since then, it is increasingly clear that science cannot ignore the intrinsic perspective. Neuroscience and psychology run into invisible walls.

The back half of Hoel’s book is a strong commentary on those walls and how we might address them. It includes some of his important contributions to the mathematics of causal emergence. That work shows conclusively why causal properties cannot be reduced to the lowest common denominator (e.g., quantum fields) but that causal properties emerge at higher-order aggregates.

From this, he makes the argument that we should think of science as the process of mapping emergent entities from an extrinsic perspective. He proposes that we can conceive of the map of causal emergence generated by science as being akin to “a great tree, wherein each branch spans a different spatiotemporal level. Microphysics is at the bottom, then moving up the tree, [classical] physics, and then chemistry, followed by biochemistry and so on.” Those familiar with UTOK’s Tree of Knowledge System and Periodic Table of Behavior will immediately recognize the striking overlap. In fact, Hoel’s work, especially when seen through the lens of UTOK, allows us to achieve substantial clarity in the science of consciousness, its problems, and needed solutions.

To see this, we can begin by aligning Hoel’s analysis of the science of consciousness and its problems with what UTOK calls the Enlightenment Gap (EG). As I defined it in A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap⁵, the EG “refers to the joint problem that emerged in the wake of the scientific Enlightenment of placing mind in proper relation to matter (i.e., the mind-body problem) and scientific knowledge in relationship to social and subjective knowledge systems. The downstream consequence of this gap in our knowledge gives rise to the problem of psychology and a chaotic, fragmented pluralistic state of knowledge more generally.”

To fully grasp what the EG is saying, I need to introduce two important terms from philosophy: epistemology and ontology. Epistemology refers to how you know and how you justify what you know, whereas ontology refers to the thing in the world you are trying to explain or, more broadly, your theory of reality.

The first problem the EG highlights, which is the problem of placing the mind in relationship to matter, is an ontological problem. This is because it refers to the difficulty of saying exactly what mind is relative to matter. The second problem that the EG highlights refers to epistemology, which relates to how we know things about the world. Science is an exterior, objective epistemology that contrasts with the subjective processes for knowing. This difference between the extrinsic versus intrinsic perspective is what frames Hoel's book.

With this distinction in hand, we are now getting to the core issue that is driving the fight in the science of consciousness from a UTOK point of view. What we are seeing emerge is that, like the science of psychology before it, the science of consciousness is confused about both ontology and epistemology. It is surprisingly easy to confuse ontology and epistemology at high levels of abstraction.

Indeed, although Hoel’s book is excellent overall, it also confuses the ontological and epistemological aspects of the EG and the related problems faced by the science of consciousness. This confusion appears from the beginning on Hoel’s book cover.

It reads, “Throughout history, two perspectives on the world have dueled in our minds: the “extrinsic”—that of physics and mechanism—and the “intrinsic”—that of feelings, thoughts, and ideas….These perspectives have never been reconciled; they almost seem to exist on different planes of reality.”

Hopefully, you can see what I am getting at here. The "extrinsic versus intrinsic" divide is epistemological in nature. In contrast, “mechanism” and “feelings, thoughts, and ideas” are ontological in nature. They refer to things in the world and how they work. Notice that they are yoked together in this first sentence. That is a dead giveaway that confusion will likely follow.

In A New Synthesis, I demonstrate conclusively that there has been a massive conflation in science between the exterior epistemological position and the reductive mechanistic ontological position. This is a major problem because the two can be easily separated if you know how. For example, UTOK embraces the scientific exterior position, defined as the behavioral position, but UTOK eschews a reductive, mechanical, materialistic ontology.

What does all this mean for the science of consciousness, and how we should fix the problem, at least according to UTOK? The previous two posts I did on this fight showed that we needed to differentiate the broad definition of consciousness (i.e., functional awareness and responsivity) from the concept of Mind2 (subjective conscious experience in animals with brains). This is an ontological distinction.

In addition to mapping important ontological differences, UTOK also gives us clear frames to make very clear epistemological differences between the objective-natural science vector of knowing relative to the subjective-psyche vector of knowing. This is UTOK's distinction between the Tree of Knowledge System and the iQuad Coin.

The ToK System frames our outside-in, exterior epistemological view of scientific knowledge. However, it is not a reductive, mechanistic view. Rather, just as Hoel suggests, we can frame scientific knowledge as a branching tree that maps the causal emergent properties across levels and dimensions of complexification.

In contrast, the iQuad Coin frames the interior perspective of the human subject in the world. The iQuad Coin starts with the unique, specific human who is qualitatively experiencing a moment in time. Notice this epistemology is completely antithetical to the epistemology of science.

To see this, go tell a scientist that you have an idea about the world that is subjective, qualitative, and particular to your point of view and that you are not sure it would relate to anything in the world in a reliable or valid way. They probably would not recommend you submit the idea to the best science journals.

The cool thing about the iQuad Coin is that it starts with the subjective psyche and then proceeds to provide a network of associative adjacent identities that ultimately allow it to be seamlessly knitted together with the exterior, scientific perspective. Combining the Tree and the Coin means that UTOK is structured ontologically to bridge the intrinsic and extrinsic epistemological vantage points effectively. In other words, it achieves what Hoel's book cover says has never been done.

In a recent post, I showed how UTOK's knowledge system shares some powerful parallels with how Descartes laid things out in his Principles of Philosophy (1644). Here is the depiction of the Tree-Coin relation.

 

Source: Gregg Henriques

The bottom line is that, from a UTOK perspective, what is happening in the science of consciousness is the same thing that gave rise to the crisis in psychology over 100 years ago. Natural science confused and conflated an exterior behavioral epistemology with a reductive mechanical materialist ontology, and we have failed to separate the two effectively.

This failure has helped to create the “invisible walls” that Hoel mentions. These are the walls that UTOK diagnoses as the walls of the EG that first boxed in the science of psychology and now are boxing in the science of consciousness. These walls of confusion will continue to trap us and generate unproductive disputes until we can diagnose them and climb out of the long shadows cast by the EG and into the light of a new day in our understanding.