A Simple Map of Reality

Do you have a simple way to understand reality? This essay invites you to consider a helpful way to classify the things in the world, called the “1 + 4 + 1” map. Let’s begin by separating what exists from what does not. Although this can be a tricky philosophical issue, for this blog, we can say that the real world consists of everything that exists.

From there, we can ask: What kinds of things exist? The “+ 4” refers to four broad categories in nature. To see them, imagine you are taking a walk in the woods with a friend. The first category consists of inanimate, material objects. These include the rocks you walk on, the streams, and the wind blowing in your hair. Science has shown that these materials can be broken down into molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles like electrons and protons.

Now consider the flowers, trees, and mushrooms that you see. These are part of the second category: living organisms. We know that the flowers and trees are part of the plant kingdom and the mushrooms are part of the fungi kingdom. There are other organisms like bacteria that only consist of single cells and cannot be seen with the naked eye but are also living organisms. Although they’re made from the same basic building blocks as inanimate objects, they’ve evolved over millions of years into complex, living forms assembled at a higher dimension of organization.

During your walk, you’ll spot animals like bees, birds, and squirrels. These are, of course, living creatures. However, because they have brains and complex active bodies, they behave very differently from plants and mushrooms. The map classifies the bees, birds, and squirrels as minded animals. We call them minded because they display a special functional awareness and responsivity, above and beyond other living organisms.

Now, think about your conversation with your friend during the walk. Your discussion represents a whole new category above and beyond-minded animals: cultured persons. This is the fourth category.

These four categories—inanimate objects, living organisms, minded animals, and cultured persons—are basic ways humans have divided the world. Indeed, we can find these categories in all known cultures. And, there is good evidence that the human mind comes prepared by evolution to divide the world into these categories. In the West, these four domains were historically known as Aristotle’s scales of nature. If these categories are so familiar and historically prominent, why would we “re-invent” them here?

The Tree of Knowledge identifies four planes of existence

Source: Gregg Henriques

The short answer: As natural science gained traction, it helped us see that there were no sharp divisions between these categories like many systems have assumed. Rather, there is a continuous process of complexification from things like particles into atoms into molecules into organic compounds into things like viruses, which are sort of alive, but not fully. The categories blurred and faded. Unfortunately, in helping us see that nature is continuous, we have tended to lose sight of where the discontinuities are in nature and why. The map of reality that helps us see this is called the Tree of Knowledge System, and it is a crucial part of UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge (explore the new UTOK here).

The Tree of Knowledge System (ToK) helps clarify these categories by showing how different layers and levels emerge. The qualitative jumps from matter to life, life to mind, and mind to culture do not happen because some new substance is added to the equation. Rather, what happens is that a complexity-building feedback loop gives rise to new patterns of information processing systems and networks of communication. Through this understanding, we can divide the natural world into the “+ 4” categories of inanimate, animate, animal, and human persons and align those classes of entities with major divisions in science (that is, the physical, biological, psychological, and social sciences).

The First “1”

What about the first “1” in the map? In the 20^th Century, modern physics came to realize that there was a layer of reality that existed beneath the matter-object plane of existence. This is what UTOK calls the energy-information implicate order. To get a grip on this, we can use a quote from the CERN website, which notes that “All matter in the universe was formed in one explosive event 13.7 billion years ago.” This is the Big Bang. To see it, we can use the ToK to follow the trail back in time and imagine all the space, time, and matter collapsing to a singular point of almost infinitely dense energy.

If we go back to the example of walking in the woods, can we see energy? Actually, yes. Indeed, it is the medium by which you see. That is, electromagnetic radiation carries the light from the rocks, plants, and squirrels to your eyes in packets called photons. Starting there, we can then think of the material objects as a kind of “frozen energy.” In that sense, energy is everywhere and everything is made up of it. This fact shows up in Einstein’s most famous equation, E = mc².

The Second “+1”

Now, take a moment to look around you. Chances are, you’re surrounded by human-made objects—chairs, phones, coffee mugs. The “+ 4” maps behavior patterns in the natural world, which in this map includes human behaviors like talking, but it does not include technology made by humans. That is what the second “+1” does. Technology includes everything made by humans for a purpose. If we are inclined, we can further divide human technology into separate categories, like practical tools like hammers, symbolic tools like money, and creative expressions, like art. Technology is different from nature because it has its own evolutionary history.

The 1 + 4 + 1 Map of Reality

Source: Gregg Henriques

Human technology is evolving rapidly. On the map, the second “+1” carries a double meaning, referring to technology in general, as well as to artificial intelligence (AI) specifically. Artificial intelligence is a special technology because it can dynamically interact with human intelligence to produce radically new behaviors. And this will only continue to progress. This means that we can think of the emergence of artificial intelligence as potentially representing a whole new dimension of complexification. This is why UTOK calls our current moment in time the 5th joint point, as we are transitioning from the culture-person plane into a new digital globalized system.

UTOK posits that this 1 + 4 + 1 map can be a pragmatic guide for understanding reality. To get practice using it: First, categorize things according to the simple examples we have listed.

Then, try to find things or patterns that do not seem to fit neatly into it. Where do dreams, consciousness, Santa Claus, jellyfish, fossils, macaroni and cheese, or even the future fit into it? If you learn the basics of the map, you can see how these things get placed in it.

To explore this further, check out the book, UTOK: The Unified Theory of Knowledge. It dives deeper into this map and much, much more.

UTOK: The Unified Theory of Knowledge provides us with a new, coherent worldview.

Source: Gregg Henriques

_{Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.}