Triunity, like monism and dualism, is a philosophical approach to make sense of lived experience. Triune process philosophy extends the New Science of adaptive systems into a theory of knowing that overcomes the mind/matter dichotomy. In this new approach to epistemology, an identical fabric of informational processing accounts for movement within both the material cosmos, and the reality of consciousness understood as participation in movement.
As a process philosophy, the cosmos is ontologically a network of relational transactions, which actualise simultaneously into [a] a substantial potential for movements (energised matter) and [b] patterning into relating subsystems of movement, creating a further potential for mutual responsiveness (conscious mind).
Triune process philosophy has its evidence rooted in systemic family therapy, enhanced by a medical health promotion insight into the hormone physiology of emotions activated by relational stresses or harmonies. Relationality of social movements thereby affects people’s immune systems and physical biochemistry functioning. The potential for chaos and overwhelm in this extended informational system influences the initiation and maintenance of physical and mental illness in social contexts.
Behind this relational health-orientated basis for triune process philosophy is the New Science of complex adaptive systems, rather clumsily called psycho-neuro-immuno-endocrinology (PNIE). Informational processing patterns shape the changes of these subsystems of a mental-physical-social human being. The patterns integrate many remote inputs in the core brain neural systems and the whole body via the limbic and endocrine systems. This is the basis of intelligent knowledge and feeling. The cerebral hemispheres feed their analytic and synthetic processing into this personal integration, but they are not the locus of personal integration. This unifying personal development process among informational phenomena generates the focus of attention on values (what’s important) that is a living person, moved by and moving by participatory choice within wider social and ecological networks of movement.
That same intelligent patterning of informational processes can be transferred to material physics. It would be the pre-quantum substratum of movement that is known currently as the so-called quantum vacuum. This informational ‘holomovement’ would emerge transactionally into the patterned movements that researchers describe as energy-particle physics. The lived conscious experience of human beings would therefore engage directly in this relationally shared informational process that patterns the emergence of physical world and cosmos. This overcomes the mind/matter dichotomy, and affirms the influence of mental and emotive choice on the way the world shapes up.
What is triunity?
Triune process philosophy is neither materialist (dualism), nor panpsychist (monism). Both of those ancient philosophical approaches to making sense of lived experience reduce informational movement to a secondary effect of… some other conceptual ontology. Triune process philosophy starts instead with an epistemology of movement; knowing movement by participation in movement. However, it does not scale up to a variety of Idealism, because the transactional view of quantum physics that is consistent with triunity explains how the energy fields of changing patterned forms actualise into real relational particle events. Patterns of these transactions would accumulate into helicoid progressive networks like an informational spinfoam 4D fabric, which stabilises the patterning process into classical material physics with engineering level predictability (such as for bridge-building). These stable patterns outlive individual human lives; but they are not themselves Ideals in the philosophical sense. They are themselves transformable under contextual conditions, such as extreme cooling into quantum computers, or extreme acceleration in the Hadron Collider.
Triune process philosophy thus affirms the reality of processing matter, and of the embodiment of consciously processing social life.
There are three minimum necessary informational features of life (phenomena) required for the participating person to detect relevant movement, whether externally or within: change, relatedness, and form.
Changing relatedness repatterning forms is the triune process that shapes consciousness of movement for survival, thriving and replication of a living organism in its changing physical environments.
Science, spirituality and cultures meet in triune process philosophy
To understand and promote triune process philosophy does not require religious belief in Christianity, even though the triune principles of relational living process were initially developed over many centuries in that context. Eastern monism and Greco-Roman dualist philosophies had been inadequate to provide an account for the events surrounding a spiritual teacher and miracle worker who had lived in the Middle East two millennia ago. The New Science of adaptive relational systems has now, however, opened another and non-religious channel to make sense of everyone’s lived experience. It is also robust enough to account for the diverse qualities of mutual responsiveness found in the entire biosphere as it emerges from energy physics.
Modern technology such as real time brain scanning has provided insights into informational processes not available in previous centuries. This new evidence can now integrate matter, mind, heart and spirit into a unifying picture of experiential and transformative relational life. The unifying picture of life that results can integrate biophysics with particle physics in a way that can resolve many philosophical and scientific dilemmas. Life science is no longer materialistically opposed to the religious or spiritual experience of relatedness in movement.
These new insights could reconcile the diversity of deeply held beliefs that emotively have induced much conflict and fragmentation between religions and cultures. This can be achieved as people recognise how they prefer differing perspectives on the uniting utter relatedness of life’s movement. The triune process philosophy developed in the forthcoming book might even fill out some new thinking to revitalise Christianity without excluding the physiology of light from everyone else.
These ideas are developed further by Dr Trevor Griffiths in Clearing a Way: Unveiling the Mental Tricks That Hide Reality, available now for pre-orders here.