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The Four Dimensions of Existence Mapped by Science
The Tree of Knowledge System maps reality and science on four dimensions.
Posted September 20, 2019 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
As John Vervaeke notes, we are facing a meaning crisis, whereby we have lost a shared sense of what is true and good. This suggests that new maps of meaning are necessary.
The Tree of Knowledge System offers a frame that says: “Here is a new map of the territory that perhaps can help foster one’s understanding of both reality and science that can set the stage for a greater shared understanding of the big picture.” What is new about this map is that it divides the universe into different dimensions of existence.
What is a dimension of existence? After all, isn’t there only one dimension in reality? Somewhat surprisingly, it can be highly useful to think about the human universe in terms of four different planes or landscapes of behavioral patterns. Consider, for example, a family having a conversation about what they are going to do for the weekend. Their dog is there with them. The family’s conversation and shared verbal understanding of reality exist on a plane of existence “above” the dog. The dog operates on the “animal-mental” dimension. What this means is that the dog mentally perceives the world and tracks the feelings and general group demeanor and engages socially, in terms of being attached to the family and responding to dominance and submissive cues. However, the conversation about family dynamics, planning, and reflective choice exists at a meta-dimension relative to the dog. It would just be commonsense to say the meaning of the words and the nuances of the verbal exchange “go over” the dog’s head. To say this is not being species-centric. It simply is a fact that dogs can’t fully participate in what we call, via the ToK map of reality, the Person-Culture plane.
The Person-Culture plane requires socialization; that is, it requires growing up into a socio-linguistic environment and becoming a person that justifies one’s actions on the social stage. If the family had a 10-year-old, a 6-year-old, a 2-year-old, and a 3-month-old infant, we could see clear differences in how growing up is very much about learning to operate on the Person-Culture dimension. The 3 mos-old does not yet operate on the Person-Culture dimension, whereas the 2-year-old is learning to do so, and the 6 and 10-year-old are able to do so, albeit at different levels or stages of human conscious/cognitive development and sophistication, with the parents operating at full adulthood.
Both the 3-month-old and the dog operate only on the Animal-Mental dimension, which is the vast landscape of the nonverbal psychological behavior that on the ToK is labeled “Mind”. The mind is a dimension of existence that exists above “Life”. Inside the dog and each human are lots of complicated processes that are taking place at the Cell-Life dimension of existence. The flower on the table that the 10-year-old son brought his mother for her birthday also exists at the Cell-Life dimension.
The fourth dimension is the most basic and the first to emerge, the Physical-Material dimension. This is the dimension of atoms and molecules at the small scale and of space, time and the universe at the large scale of galaxies. The “Matter” dimension is the fundamental stage upon which the complex adaptive behaviors at the Life, Mind, and Cultural planes of existence take place.
Now let’s consider a plague, like the horrific Black Death. That was a crisis at the level of Cell-Life. Or consider an earthquake or tsunami. These are examples of crises at the Physical-Material dimension of existence. The meaning crisis is an “epidemic” on the plane of Person-Culture. What is the crisis and why are we having it? To answer this question, we need to understand more fully what the Person-Culture plane is. According to the ToK, the Person-Culture plane is functionally organized by “justification systems.” Please note that “justification” is a complicated word with lots of meanings. As aficionados of the ToK language system know, the use of the word justification can get tricky. With that caveat offered, we can just start with the most basic meaning of the word, which is a legitimizing claim or proposition. A justification system, then, is a network of legitimizing claims. Think about a game. The rules, definitions, and grammar of a game can be thought of as its system of justification. And, as this example suggests, justification systems line up with Wittgenstein's conception of "language games".
Now, let’s return to the family. As they talk about whether they want to go on a picnic, the husband and wife have a shared understanding of their marriage and the rules of their house. To see this, imagine it is a highly educated, modern White liberal family and out of nowhere, the wife starts making racist comments and using racial slurs. That unexpected and unacceptable behavior would be quickly identified as “unjustifiably” breaking the rules of the family’s language game, and the husband would almost certainly react with shock and dismay and the impact would be strong and disruptive.
The family has its own justification system, which refers to the shared rules, concepts, values and understandings regarding the way the world works. The family, of course, is embedded in a larger cultural context. That cultural context creates the larger plane of existence in which the family’s justification system operates. If the family resided in the south in the 1820s, the rules and understandings about what is justifiable about race would be radically different. If the husband reacted strongly to his wife's use of derogatory language in that context, he would likely be the one that would be violating the rules of the game. The point here is to show how groups of people operate on the Person-Culture plane and that plane can be considered across a number of scales and exists in a socio-historical context.
What we have reviewed up until this point is how the ToK provides a way to describe reality into four different dimensions of existence, or, alternatively, dimensions of behavioral complexity. This is a picture of reality that is generally consistent with Big History or E. O. Wilson’s Consilience or Larry Cahoone’s Orders of Nature. However, the ToK also includes an explicit (and novel) “theory of science” as well. According to the ToK depiction, science is a kind of justification system that emerges out of the Culture-Person plane. Moreover, the ToK characterizes science as an “onto-epistemology” that maps the unfolding wave of reality (the left side) into behavioral frequencies that operate on different levels and dimensions of complexity. The meaning of this is most clear when you consider the Periodic Table of Behavior that classifies parts, wholes, and groups, across the dimensions of Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture (for a more complete depiction of the PTB, see here).
In sum, the ToK offers a picture of reality as an unfolding wave of behavior, and of science as an attempt to develop justifiable epistemologies and ontologies that map that reality. With such "meta-maps" of knowledge, we might be able to start the process of addressing the meaning crisis.
