Intro Series IV: Bigger-than-Self Reality and the Intellect-Embodiment Gap (Section B: The ToK System)
Bigger-than-Self Reality from Perspective of the ToK System: Emergent Stack of Cosmos, Biosphere, Animal Nervous Systems, and Human Complex Cognition
This is the fourth instalment in an Intro Series where I introduce the key concepts and lay out the intellectual grounding of the Bigger-than perspective I’m developing in this Substack. There are a number of interlocking pieces to the Bigger-than approach and I am fleshing out each piece individually in order to be able to then put the pieces together later on, and spell out how the overall picture adds up to a capacity to address bigger-than-self distress and the meta-crisis from this perspective. Here are the links to parts I, II, and III in this series… This is also the second section of a three-part post on Bigger-than-Self Reality and the Intellect-Embodiment Gap.
Having established (in the previous post) a narrative that links cognition with life, and life with a larger narrative of cosmological evolution of organisational complexity (broadly: from physics to biology to complex cognition), we can begin to explore how psychology, both as a field as well as the psychology of individuals, fits into these broader narratives and understandings of life and cosmos. The threshold at which complex human cognition emerges is also the level at which human culture arrives: they co-emerge together (Christian, 2018). This is true in Christian’s Big History framework and is also true in Henriques (2003) ToK system, which posits a similar emergentist cosmology that also begins with the Big Bang.
The level of cultural cognition, as it is understood within the Theory of Knowledge (or ToK; Henriques, 2003) system described below, is the level at which psychological interventions affect change. This cultural cognitive level is highly relevant to processing bigger-than-self distress and finding ways forward to respond to the meta-crisis in today’s global culture and our own specific local cultures within our socio-ecological niches. Henriques’ (Henriques, 2003, 2011; Henriques et al., 2019) ToK system and the justification hypothesis within it helps to link cognition and culture together, within a larger cosmological framework that shares many similarities with the Big History framework (Henriques et al., 2019).
Originally the ToK system was devised with the intent to link psychology within a larger cosmological and scientific framework that could create consilience both within psychology (between seemingly disparate sub-disciplines) and between psychology and the other natural sciences (Henriques, 2003). With the ToK system Henriques sought to place psychology as a discipline within a context that can clarify its conceptual boundaries and lead to it becoming a post-paradigmatic science similar to physics and biology, rather than a disparate collection of competing and sometimes contradictory, sometimes unnecessarily repetitive theories and empirical studies Henriques argues is the case in psychology today.
Though the two systems evolved independently, the ToK system has quite strong similarities to Big History, in that it situates itself within a cosmological narrative beginning with the Big Bang and involves emergent levels of complexity that are different to but arguably consilient with Christian’s (2018) nine thresholds or Chaisson’s (2005) eight levels of complexity. Indeed, Henriques has explicitly written on the link between the ToK system and Big History and posited that there is the potential for a fruitful synergy between the two, with the Big History narrative’s historical focus and the increased emphasis on psychology within the ToK system (Henriques et al., 2019).
In the ToK system, there are four levels of complexity or ontic levels: matter, life, mind, and culture (Henriques, 2003). Between each stage is what Henriques calls a theoretical joint-point, a framework that provides a causal explanation for the difference in complexity between levels as well as how the leap in complexity came about. The Big Bang is the first joint point, describing how energy transformed into matter. The joint point explaining the jump in complexity from matter to life, in the ToK system, was natural selection operating on early genetic material.
The causal theoretical explanations in these first two joint points are obviously not new or unique to the ToK system, but as in Big History does provide a cosmological context within which to situate the next two joint points. The sciences associated with the first two levels of complexity are physics, corresponding with the study of matter, and biology, corresponding with the study of life. Between the third and fifth joint points lies the realm of psychology, according to the ToK system (Henriques, 2003).
The third and fourth joint points are at the heart of the ToK system and help to provide the boundaries within which psychology as a science sits. These two joint points are associated with a revised, updated, and naturalised understanding of the insights of two giants of the field of psychology, Skinner and Freud. The third joint point, between life and mind, is associated with the animal nervous system and with neurobehavioural principles of conditioning and selection of behaviour that can be seen as a combination of Skinner’s work and modern neuroscience (Henriques, 2003). The fourth joint point, between mind and culture, is associated with the evolution of symbolic complexity that emerged in humans and rests on the capacity for justificatory reasoning, which Henriques (2003) links with a critiqued and updated version of Freud’s original insights. Psychology spans both the mind and cultural optic categories, with culture also being the realm of other social sciences. This link between psychology and culture is reflected in the joining of the two in psycho-cultural metabolisation, which will be discussed later in this Intro Series.
Skinner and the Third Joint Point: Operant and Cognitive Neuroscientific Determinants of Animal Behaviour
Henriques (2003) identifies the central insight of Skinner as being that of behavioural selection via operant conditioning, which applies equally to animals and humans. He argues that there is nothing about this idea that stops it from being integrated with a cognitive neuroscience perspective, yet this has not been achieved, due largely to Skinner’s equating of the behavioural selection insight with an epistemological programme that became, in his view, the proper and only position of psychological science itself. Henriques points out that Skinner’s rejection of a neuro-information processing view of the nervous system was never properly justified and goes on to reconcile the two.
Henriques (2003, pp. 159-160) defines behavioural science as taking an outside-in or third-person view of animal behaviour, which treats such behaviour as information and attempts to understand and describe functional relationships in changes between animal and environment. Cognitive neuroscience, far from being a competing and incompatible scientific programme, is simply the other side of the same coin. Cognitive neuroscience, in the ToK system, is seen as taking an inside out or first-person view of the brain as an information processor and attempts to understand and describe nervous system changes that correspond to changes between the animal and environment. In this way, both behavioural science and cognitive neuroscience can be seen to study the same behaviour, from different points of reference.
The Skinnerian joint point between life and mind is formalised as a causal explanatory model with Behavioural Investment Theory (BIT; Henriques, 2003). BIT posits the nervous system as an information processing system that “computes and coordinates the behavioural expenditure of energy of the animal-as-a-whole” (Henriques, 2003, p. 160). The matrix that calculates investment of energy, in Behavioural Investment Theory, combines phylogenetic determination (distal causation) through biological natural selection as well as developmental determination in the individual life of the organism (proximal causation) through behavioural selection operating on neural combinations. (Henrique’s BIT would seem to map quite well on to Friston’s (e.g., 2010) Free Energy Principle, which I will discuss in another post).
That is, mechanisms working with evolutionary principles (i.e., variation and selective pressures continually and dynamically coming together to shape ongoing fittedness and observed behaviour) operate at both a species and individual organismic level to select behaviour that tended to be associated with ancestral and current adaptive fitness. This level of evolutionary complexity is just as present in humans as it is in animals: we are subject to species- and individual-level selection pressures on our behaviour as all animals are. What is different about humans, according to Henriques’ ToK system, is that we are also cultural-symbolic creatures and our behaviour can only be partially explained by behavioural and cognitive neuroscientific principles. Much of the rest of the explanatory power, according to the ToK system, can be found within the essential insights of Freud, if properly critiqued and updated to fit within a modern evolutionary framework.
Freud and the Fourth Joint Point: Cultural Justification Systems and Their Explanatory Power in Understanding Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Social Behaviour
If the central insight of Skinner was of behavioural selection via operant conditioning, what did Henriques view as the central insight of Freud? Henriques (2003) identified this central insight, as others had before him (Jones, 1955; Westen, 1999), as being that there are intelligible patterns behind the reasons people give for their behaviour.
For Freud, this pattern was the dynamic unconscious. For Henriques, this pattern is an updated, evolutionary psychology consilient version of the relationship between Freud’s terms of the id, ego, and superego, which compromised a system for justifying one’s behaviour within socio-linguistic contexts. Henriques argues that Freud, while often wrong in the details of his theory and unscientific and dogmatic in the constructions of such theories, can be understood in a more consilient light if properly updated to a naturalistic and evolutionary framework.
Freud’s id, which he posited as being about unconscious drives that were seeking discharge, a process akin to hydraulic forces seeking release from being pent up, can be recast as being about the biological component of the psyche. This biological rendering of the id fits within Henriques’ (2003) BIT as the phylogenic or distal selection pressures on behaviour. As Henriques (2003, p. 165) puts it: “Freud’s id provides the energy that drives behaviour. BIT is a proposal for a nonverbal behavioural system that guides and coordinates the expenditure of behavioural energy.” We can see this biological neurobehavioural system as being consilient with theories that bridge between biology and psychology: for example Maturana & Varela’s (1980) theory of autopoiesis (where biological organisms are motivated to modify their behaviour in response to the environment through an innate concern for their own self-preservation), or Bateson’s (1972) patterns of mind present within biological systems in the body coming together to form behavioural impulses (e.g., eat, sleep, sex, and basic emotions).
In organisms of the cognitive complexity of humans, however, it is not enough to simply rely on the biological systems and Skinnerian behavioural selection. To do so would result in potentially dangerous or socially inappropriate and maladaptive behaviours being expressed. As human cognitive capacity increased, a threshold emerged whereby humans gained the capacity to begin to become aware of themselves, probably in quite a rudimentary way at first.
This capacity, Henriques (2003) argues, would have been closely followed by a need to justify one’s actions to other humans. That is, given that there was a self to carry out actions, others would have wanted to know the reasons behind those actions, and this would have required a justificatory system to develop within the individual’s cognition. This justificatory system would serve to justify one’s actions to others (the ego function), justify one’s actions to oneself, and to regulate one’s actions in relation to the culture’s array of acceptable forms of behaviour (the superego function acting on ego and id). This justification hypothesis (e.g., Henriques, 2003; 2011) stems from this set of distinctions alongside the updated naturalistic evolutionary understanding of Freud’s central insight.
The justification hypothesis, for Henriques (2003; 2011) not only explains the joint point between animal neurobehavioral Skinnerian principles and human psychology, but also is used to explain the emergence of human culture as a new level of organisational complexity in the (known) universe. The capacity to justify behaviour would have created a new kind of evolutionary rachet or set of selection pressures that were of a different level of emergent complexity than the previous, Skinnerian behavioural selection pressures. That is, the capacity to justify one’s behaviour would have led to selective advantages for individuals in groups, and also between groups of people (Henriques, 2003). Those individuals and groups who could more effectively justify their actions, and whose justifications mapped onto the capacity for adaptive success, would tend to reproduce more.
This capacity for justification, and the closely related but distinct capacity for symbolic language, then set the scene and indeed made inevitable the creation, transmission, and development of new kinds of information: cultural knowledge. This cultural knowledge could be passed on and adapted from generation to generation, eventually spawning complex justification systems, which were defined by Henriques (2011, p. 113) as “the interlocking networks of language-based beliefs and values that function to legitimize a particular version of reality or worldview”.
These justification systems fed into culture, the essence of which Henriques (2003, p. 176) defined as “the presence of large-scale belief systems that function to coordinate and legitimise human behaviour.” He uses the examples of laws, religions, sciences, myths, and institutional structures as being justification systems that make up culture. The leap to justification and subsequent emergence of the cultural layer enabled a much faster evolutionary trajectory than either biological evolution or behavioural selection, which we saw in Christian’s (2018) account of human history, how human cultural evolution occurred so much more quickly than the evolution of the cosmos and biosphere.
Implications of the ToK System
With the justification hypothesis and behavioural investment theory, we have an established psychological theory that links human cognition with culture, all within a broader cosmological framework that is continuous with that described by Christian (2018) and the wider Big History field.
When we pair the ToK system with an understanding of the point in cosmological, biological, and cultural history that Christian’s Big History describes, it is clear that culture is a key leverage point that has both got us to the precipice we stand at today and which looms as the piece of history we can actually participate and effect change within. Yes, the whole cosmos can be seen to have been evolving in complexity since the time of the Big Bang, through to biological evolution, punctuated by chaotic and often highly destructive phase shifts that have then engendered new explosions of creativity and often increased complexity.
However, in the most recent 2 million / 10,000 years (depending on where you start the cultural evolution ratchet point) cultural evolution has outpaced, and (in a certain way) out-powered the pace of physical and biological evolution. This places cultural evolution as a central prong in the response to the historic bigger-than-self predicament we find ourselves in: and with it, human psychology emerges as a crucial leverage point, for we can participate in cultural evolution creatively by learning to leverage our own psychology - our capacity for insight, self-transcendence, creativity, to shape our socio-ecological and cultural niches in ways that align with healthy outcomes for people and planet.
Link with Mindfulness and Cognition
This centring on psychology and its capacity to allow us to participate in cultural evolution links back with our earlier (Posts I and II) discussion of mindfulness practice, which as we’ve seen is a good candidate for alignment with human wellbeing, prosocial and pro-environmental intentions and behaviours, and cognitive, affective, embodied, and behavioural change. Crucially, both the behavioural investment theory and justification hypothesis point to contents of cognition that are available to mindfulness practice.
Mindfulness can bring awareness to behaviour and its reinforcers, for example viewing interoceptive sensations as deep operant reinforcers of certain reappraisals as in the co-emergence model of reinforcement (Cayoun, 2011). In looking at behaviour and its reinforcers in this way we see again these two sides of the coin of behaviourism and cognitive neuroscience that Henriques (2003) refers to. Similarly, mindfulness can bring awareness to the cultural justifications that we use to explain reality to ourselves, other people, and to become aware that the justifications we learn from our culture are contingent rather than objectively true or historically necessary.
Mindfulness practice can make these contingent cultural justifications salient where they once were in the background (e.g., implicit bias; Stell & Farsides, 2016). As a practice, mindfulness affords another way of viewing cultural justifications: through the lens of wholesomeness/unwholesomeness, and the associated body sensations that co-emerge with certain appraisals. That is, individuals now have an extra source of information by which to discern the wholesomeness of an idea or pattern of conditioned behaviour. This allows individuals to gain awareness of blind spots where they might be perpetuating behaviour that is harmful to themselves, other beings, or more diffuse aspects of bigger-than-self reality (such as pollution of the environment). We don’t have only our heads and analytical reasoning to rely on: we now have our bodies and feelings: unwholesomeness doesn’t feel good. The trick is to bring skilful awareness of our bodies to the forefront to be able to access this information.
Mindfulness meditation and paying close attention to one’s experience can make the automatic, habitual, and background facets of our awareness more conscious and give us the ability to participate in these embodied embedded cognitive processes in new, formerly unavailable, ways. If I can start to become mindful of how aspects of my own culture that are not in alignment with the collective wellbeing of people and planet, and that these are living in me, in my own embodied embedded cognitive and behavioural patterns, then I have agency to begin to work with them and change them.
In this way, mindfulness can begin to allow me to transmute certain culturally embedded ways of being that are not aligned with planetary wellbeing nor the sense of embodied, eudaimonic wellbeing that enables me to flourish in my own life. Over time, this can also lead me to build personal and social resources (e.g., Fredrickson et al., 2008; Garland et al., 2015; Berkovich-Ohana et al., 2017) in service of that eudaimonic meaning, and to feel better in my body, without bypassing certain difficult realities of living, especially concerning the bigger-than-self context we are living in.
In this way, becoming aware of a culturally learned pattern and mindfully adopting a different and more aligned pattern reduces the experience of distress and increases both present moment subjective wellbeing (via a change in sensations) and potentially future wellbeing for you and the wider circles of concern (e.g., Garland & Fredrickson, 2019) that are included in bigger-than-self reality. Crucially, from a systems lens, mindfulness practiced in this way would allow for individuals to become more self-correcting in their behaviour, without needing to force or coerce themselves or others. Mindfulness offers the potential to make the cognitive systems that make up our personalities and agent-arena relationships more self-correcting, and for this self-correcting mechanism to seed itself into the culture at large.
Given the link between cognition and culture, the mindful person who self-corrects their own out-of-alignment behaviours and the associated thoughts, feelings, and body sensations that are reinforcing such behaviours will then act differently into the culture. This offers an important ratchet point for enacting cultural change, a way of participating in culture, via one’s socio-ecological niche, which from our understanding of Big History we can understand as participating in the cultural evolution of humanity at what appears from all angles to be an important tipping point on the direction that humanity (and, because we are in the anthropocene, the biosphere) moves from here. To do this well, I put forward, requires wisdom, which is a big construct in itself, especially in the context of bigger-than-self reality, and is something I’ll explore extensively in this Substack.
Conclusion
This marks the end of the second section of a three-part post that had the ambitious task of broadening our view of human culture and cognition to a cosmological and biospheric view that began with the Big Bang. Throughout this post and the previous one, I have reviewed narratives and frameworks that have synthesised historical scientific information and theory to create such broadened, naturalistic frameworks for understanding reality and our place in it. It should be obvious that a process of engaging in mindfulness meditation alone, without such accompanying narratives, will not lead individuals to broadened perspectives with anything like this level of precision or historical or scientific accuracy.
What mindfulness and other related embodied psychological practices can do is broaden an individual’s perspectives and highlight the contingent nature of the narratives and understandings we have of not only ourselves but of bigger-than-self reality, the agent-arena relationship as Vervaeke (2019) puts it. Supplementing this naturally arising broadening of one’s worldview with such narratives as presented in the current chapter can help to provide a fruitful context for processing bigger-than-self distress within.
It also points to a more central role for human cognition in understanding ourselves and in shaping collective human culture that is ultimately responsible for the kinds of bigger-than-self outcomes humanity has on the world. In the next post, I’ll introduce the idea of the “intellect-embodiment gap”, and how this is of central significance in both the experience and transmutation of bigger-than-self distress and in contributing towards the kind of cultural change that can meaningfully address the meta-crisis.
This is part IV of an Intro Series that introduces the approach taken within the Bigger-than perspective. Parts I, II, and III can be found here.
This is also Section B of a three-part post on Bigger-than-Self Reality and the Experience Gap. Section A covered Christian’s Big History perspective, while Section C will give an account of what I am calling the Intellect-Embodiment Gap, in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty (e.g., 1962) and Varela et al. (1991).