Emergence of Meaning Across Planes of Information

The perennial tension between reductionism and Emergence finds a sophisticated resolution in Gregg Henriques's Unified Theory of Knowledge. UTOK begins from an Ontological monism — reality is a single energy-information field — but resists collapsing explanation into physics alone. Instead, it identifies four irreducible Planes of existence: Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture, each visualized in the Tree of Knowledge diagram. The critical move is recognizing that each plane involves a qualitatively distinct mode of information processing. Genetic information processing constitutes the Life plane; neuronal information processing constitutes the Mind plane; Symbolic information processing constitutes the Culture plane. These are not merely quantitative increases in complexity. They represent new causal registers that cannot be fully captured by efficient causation alone — formal, final, and perhaps novel causal logics become necessary at each transition. The Periodic Table of Behavior extends this architecture by mapping the characteristic entity-field couplings at each plane: object-field, organism-ecology, animal-environment, and person-society. Each coupling generates Mutual Information between system and surround, and each defines a unique Viability space — a domain in which specific qualities of meaning become operationally relevant. Meaning here is not a subjective overlay on an indifferent physical substrate. It is structurally entailed by thermodynamic reality: what bears on a system's Viability is meaningful to that system in a precise, non-metaphorical sense. This grounds a naturalistic theory of meaning that spans from molecular biology to cultural semiotics without dissolving the distinctions between them.