Three Axes of Mind: Layers, Location, and Epistemic Access
What Mary knew before she saw red
The Map of Human Mindedness distinguishes three independent axes — evolutionary layer, inside-versus-outside spatial orientation, and the epistemological vector by which something is knowable — and argues that conflating them is the root of most confusion in the science of mind.
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The Observer
UTOK framework, integrative metatheory — epistemology, philosophy of mind, and systems thinking in clinical psychology
The Translation
AI-assisted summaryFamiliar terms
The Map of Human Mindedness, developed within Gregg Henriques' unified metatheoretical framework, organizes mental phenomena along three independent axes that are routinely collapsed in both philosophy of mind and behavioral science. The first axis is vertical: the Tree of Knowledge's layers of Complexification, yielding Mind 1 (bio-physiological), Mind 2 (mind-animal, subjective consciousness), and Mind 3 (culture-person, linguistically mediated selfhood). These are treated as ontologically distinct layers, not merely heuristic categories — each emerges through a genuine phase shift in informational organization.
The second axis is spatial, distinguishing overt minded behavior (the 'b' subdivision — what occurs between organism and environment) from implicit neurocognitive processing (the 'a' subdivision — what occurs within the organism). This inside-outside distinction operates within each layer and is orthogonal to the vertical axis.
The third axis is epistemological and carries the deepest philosophical weight. Mind 2 — subjective experience — is constituted by an interior epistemic vector. It arises from the inside out and is not directly available to the exterior behavioral vantage point that grounds scientific methodology. This is not a gap that better instruments will close; it is a structural feature of what first-person experience is. Frank Jackson's knowledge argument and John Vervaeke's distinction between perspectival and propositional knowledge both illuminate why: knowing-by-being is categorically different from knowing-by-description. The map does not dissolve the hard problem, but it names the three axes precisely enough to prevent researchers from inadvertently treating an epistemological boundary as a mere methodological inconvenience.