Sungchul Ji, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Cell Biology, Rutgers University
with conceptual assistance from ChatGPT
There is a simple formula that may summarize a surprisingly large intellectual landscape
TLRH ≈ Einstein ⊕ Tagore ⊕ KDW
where
TLRH = Three-Layered Reality hypothesis [7], and KDW = King ⊕ Davis ⊕ Warter
These symbols are conceptual rather than mathematical. The symbol ≈ means “is conceptually related to” or “may be illuminated through.” The symbol ⊕ means that the perspectives being joined are not identical and need not be reducible to one another; they may instead be complementary.
This interpretation brings Niels Bohr [1] immediately into the discussion. Once Bohr enters, Charles Sanders Peirce [2] and Federico Faggin [3] reveal further dimensions of the original formula. The result is not simply a list of thinkers interested in consciousness. It becomes a progression through six basic questions.
The arrows implied by this sequence are conceptual, not historical. The Three-Layered Reality Hypothesis (TLRH) [7] may provide an architecture within which these different questions can be considered together.
1. Einstein: What Is Reality?
Modern science has achieved extraordinary success by constructing mathematical descriptions of observable reality. Few people symbolize that achievement better than Albert Einstein [8].
Yet Einstein also represents a deep dissatisfaction at the foundations of modern physics. Quantum mechanics could predict experimental outcomes with extraordinary precision, but Einstein continued to ask what those predictions told us about reality itself [9]
What we can calculate ≠ what we can explain.
More specifically:
Successful prediction of phenomena does not necessarily imply complete understanding of the underlying reality.
Einstein therefore brings us to the first question:
What is actually there?
This is fundamentally an ontological question. Quantum mechanics confronted Einstein with the possibility that a theory could be spectacularly successful while still leaving the deeper nature of reality unresolved. The Einstein Gap [9] therefore marks a boundary between predictive adequacy and ontological explanation.
2. Bohr: What Can We Say About Reality?
Einstein asked what reality is independently of observation. Bohr shifted the emphasis toward what can meaningfully be said about physical reality.
Einstein: What is reality independently of observation?
Bohr: What can we meaningfully say about physical reality?
For Bohr, a quantum phenomenon cannot always be separated conceptually from the experimental conditions under which it becomes observable.
Quantum system + experimental arrangement → observable phenomenon
This led Bohr to the principle of complementarity. Different experimental arrangements can reveal aspects of quantum reality that cannot be merged into one classical picture, yet each may be necessary for an adequate account.
A ⊕ B = complementary perspectives that need not be reduced to one another
Thus Einstein and Bohr themselves can be represented as:
Einstein ⊕ Bohr
Einstein asks what exists. Bohr asks what can be said. Einstein emphasizes ontology; Bohr emphasizes the conditions under which knowledge becomes possible and communicable. Neither question eliminates the other.
A more encompassing account of reality may require complementary descriptions rather than reducing every description to one privileged language.
3. Peirce: How Does Reality Become Meaningful?
Bohr brings us from reality to observation. But observation alone does not provide meaning. Something must connect an event in reality with its interpretation.
Charles Sanders Peirce [2] developed one of the most comprehensive theories of signs. His fundamental relation is triadic:
Object ↔ Sign ↔ Interpretant
Something becomes a sign when it stands for something in such a way as to produce an interpretive effect. Meaning therefore does not reside exclusively in the object, nor exclusively in the observer. It emerges through mediation. Peirce organized his philosophy around three broad categories:
Firstness — possibility and quality
Secondness — actuality and encounter
Thirdness — mediation, relation, habit, meaning, and law
For the present discussion, Thirdness is especially important. It means that mediation is not merely an artificial bridge between two independently complete realities. Mediation can itself be a fundamental feature of how reality becomes intelligible.
Reality → Sign → Interpretation → Meaning
This gives Peirce a potentially important role in TLRH (Three-Layered Reality Hypothesis) [7]. If Layer II represents a communicational, relational, or transformational interface, Peircean Thirdness offers a philosophical precedent for taking mediation seriously.
TLRH Layer II ≈ Peircean mediation
This is a structural analogy, not an identity. It suggests that Layer II may be the domain in which information becomes signification, interpretation, and meaning.
Information → Signification → Interpretation → Meaning
4. From Einstein Through Bohr and Peirce to Tagore
We can now see an unexpected progression:
Einstein: What is reality?
Bohr: Under what conditions does reality appear as a phenomenon?
Peirce: How does the phenomenon acquire meaning?
But meaning raises another question:
Meaning for whom?
At this point we encounter Rabindranath Tagore. In his famous conversations with Einstein [10], Tagore emphasized that the reality known by human beings cannot simply be separated from the structures of human consciousness through which it becomes meaningful.
Einstein → reality independent of the knower
Tagore → reality as encountered by the conscious knower
Their positions need not be reduced to a simple either-or. Bohr and Peirce allow the problem to be formulated more subtly:
Reality → Phenomenon → Sign → Meaning → Conscious knower
This is where what I have called the Tagore Transition [11] begins.
5. The Tagore Transition
The Tagore Transition [11] should not be interpreted as abandoning objective science in favor of subjective intuition. Rather, it asks whether some boundaries of knowledge require an enlargement from exclusively third-person description toward an integration of third-person and first-person modes of knowing.
Third-person knowledge → mediation → third-person + first-person knowledge
The central question becomes:
What kind of knower is capable of knowing more encompassing dimensions of reality?
This sharpens the relationship between the Einstein Gap and the Tagore Transition:
Einstein Gap → limit of present explanation
Tagore Transition → transformation of knowing
But another question immediately follows: if consciousness participates in knowing reality, what is consciousness itself?
6. Faggin: Is Consciousness Fundamental?
Federico Faggin [3] occupies an unusual place in this discussion. As one of the pioneers of the microprocessor, he helped create the technological foundations of modern computation. Yet he has subsequently argued that computation cannot explain consciousness.
A computer manipulates symbols. A conscious being experiences meaning.
Information ≠ Meaning
Computation ≠ Consciousness
A computer can manipulate the symbols L-O-V-E, but symbol manipulation is not the experience of love. Likewise:
Description of pain ≠ experience of pain
Faggin therefore rejects the standard physicalist sequence in which matter gives rise to the brain and the brain gives rise to consciousness and instead proposes that consciousness belongs to the fundamental level of reality.
Conventional view: Matter → Brain → Consciousness
Faggin’s proposal: Consciousness is fundamental and cannot be reduced to computation
His theory is controversial and should be treated as a candidate ontology, not as an established result of physics. Conceptually, however, it performs an important role.
Reality → Description → Meaning → Consciousness
This leads to a further question:
If consciousness is not merely passive, what can consciousness become?
7. KDW: Three Pathways of Transformation
KDW (King, Davis, Warter) represents three contemporary thinkers whose projects differ substantially but converge upon the possibility of transformation:
KDW = King ⊕ Davis ⊕ Warter
They should not be regarded as proponents of one common theory. Rather, they can be interpreted as exploring transformation at three different scales.
Chris King [6]: Cosmos and Biosphere
Chris King’s Symbiotic Existential Cosmology [12] begins with the relationship among the universe, biological life, consciousness, evolution, and subjective existence.
Cosmos → Life → Consciousness → Volition → Responsibility
Conscious life is not treated as a meaningless accident in an otherwise indifferent cosmos. Once conscious organisms emerge, the universe contains beings capable of experiencing it from within. King’s emphasis on symbiosis extends the argument toward preservation of the biosphere and the continuing evolutionary flowering of life.
King’s question: How does conscious life belong within the cosmos?
Joshua Davis [5]: Consciousness, Values, and Peace
Joshua Davis approaches transformation through brain dynamics, spirituality, values, and peace.
Ordinary consciousness → spiritual transformation → embodied values → inner peace → social and planetary peace
Truth, Love, Unity, and Peace are treated not merely as abstract ideals but as possible organizing principles of transformed human consciousness.
Davis’s question: What happens when higher values become embodied modes of being?
Carlos Warter [6]: The Human PromiseCarlos Warter approaches the same general boundary through human experience, healing, spirituality, self-knowledge, and psychedelics.
His crucial distinction is between development and transformation.
Development within a mode of being ≠ transformation into a new mode of being
His caterpillar-to-butterfly metaphor expresses this distinction particularly clearly. The process becomes:
Experience → Insight → Integration → Transformation
Warter calls the horizon of this possibility the Human Promise.
Warter’s question: What can a human being become?
8. KDW as a Three-Scale Model
Seen together, King, Davis, and Warter reveal an intriguing scale relationship.
Warter → Davis → King
Person → Society → Biosphere/Cosmos
Human Promise → Planetary Peace → Symbiotic Existence
In simple terms:
MICRO → MESO → MACRO
KDW can therefore function as a conceptual triad representing three scales of transformation:
Transformation of the person ⊕ transformation of society ⊕ transformation of humanity’s relationship with life and cosmos
9. Two Dimensions of the Tagore Transition [11]
The expanded framework reveals two related but distinct transformations.
I. Transformation of Knowing
This is primarily the territory illuminated by Bohr, Peirce, and Tagore.
Observation → Mediation → Interpretation → Meaning → Expanded knowing
It is an epistemological transition.
II. Transformation of the Knower
This is the territory opened by Faggin and explored more directly by KDW.
Ordinary consciousness → Transformed consciousness → Different mode of being
It is an experiential and potentially ontological transformation.
The full Tagore Transition can therefore be expressed, provisionally, as:
Tagore Transition ≈ Transformation of Knowing ⊕ Transformation of the Knower
10. Where TLRH Enters
We can now ask whether these apparently different problems possess a common architecture. The Three-Layered Reality Hypothesis [7] proposes, in simplified form:
Layer I ↔ Layer II ↔ Layer III
Observable/Manifest ↔ Mediation/Transition ↔ Deeper/Unmanifest
The correspondence with individual thinkers should not be made too literal. Einstein is not simply Layer I; Peirce is not simply Layer II, and Faggin has not demonstrated the contents of Layer III. The more defensible claim is that these thinkers illuminate different relationships within the architecture.
The question mark after Faggin is deliberate. TLRH should remain a hypothesis rather than turning philosophical correspondences into claims of established fact.
11. The Middle Layer Becomes Crucial
The most important change produced by this expanded synthesis may concern Layer II (see Table 300 below). Originally, Layer II could be understood simply as an interface between Layers I and III. Bohr and Peirce suggest something richer. Bohr shows that what becomes observable depends upon the conditions through which a phenomenon becomes experimentally accessible. Peirce shows that what becomes meaningful depends upon mediation through signs and interpretants. Tagore then raises the possibility that the knower itself participates in humanly meaningful reality.
Mediation → Communication → Signification → Interpretation → Meaning → Transformation
Layer II can therefore be reconceived as a transformational interface rather than merely a boundary.
12. From Information to Meaning
This also reveals a theme connecting Peirce and Faggin. Modern science and computation deal extraordinarily well with information, but information alone does not necessarily give us meaning.
Peirce: Sign → Interpretant → Meaning
Faggin: Information ≠ Meaning
Together they raise a profound question:
Where does information become meaning?
Within TLRH [7], that question may belong at the mediating boundary:
Information → Mediation/Interpretation → Meaning
If this interpretation proves fruitful, Layer II may eventually become one of the most scientifically interesting components of TLRH.
13. The Complete Conceptual Progression
Reduced to its conceptual essence:
Reality → Description → Meaning → Consciousness → Transformation
TLRH proposes that these may not be separate philosophical problems. They may be different views of the same underlying architecture.
14. Returning to the Original Formula
We can therefore return to the deceptively simple expression with which we began:
TLRH ≈ Einstein ⊕ Tagore ⊕ KDW
The formula has not been discarded. Its meaning has deepened.
Einstein → Gap
Bohr → Complementarity
Peirce → Mediation and Meaning
Tagore → Transition
Faggin → Irreducible Consciousness
KDW → Transformation
Bohr tells us why ⊕ may be necessary. Peirce tells us what mediation can mean. Faggin asks whether consciousness belongs to the fundamental architecture rather than merely emerging at its surface. King, Davis, and Warter ask what humanity might become if consciousness itself is capable of profound transformation.
15. From Knowing More to Becoming Different
For several centuries, the central aspiration of science has been:
How can humanity know more?
That question remains indispensable. But the Einstein Gap raises another:
Are there limits to what our present modes of knowing can explain?
Bohr asks whether complementary descriptions are required at those limits. Peirce asks how reality becomes mediated into meaning. Tagore asks about the consciousness within which meaning exists. Faggin asks whether consciousness is itself fundamental. KDW asks what such consciousness might become.
We therefore arrive at a second question:
What might humanity have to become in order to know differently?
That is the deepest meaning I would now give to the Tagore Transition. It is not simply a transition from science to spirituality, objectivity to subjectivity, or rationality to intuition. It is potentially a transition from a fragmented relationship with reality toward a more integrated one.
Object ⊕ Subject ⊕ Meaning ⊕ Consciousness
Perhaps the ultimate question posed by the Three-Layered Reality Hypothesis is therefore not merely, “What are the three layers of reality?” It is:
How can a conscious being participate in, move between, and ultimately understand different layers of reality?
The Einstein Gap brings us to the boundary. Bohr teaches humility about description at that boundary. Peirce gives us mediation. Tagore points toward a transition in the relationship between reality and the knower. Faggin asks whether consciousness reaches deeper than the classical physical world. King, Davis, and Warter explore what transformation might mean for the individual, society, and the larger living cosmos.
Reality → Mediation → Meaning → Consciousness → Transformation
Perhaps, then, the frontier beyond the Einstein Gap will require more than new equations. It may require a transformation not only of what humanity knows, but of how humanity knows—and ultimately of what humanity becomes.
References:
[1] Niels Bohr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr#Physics
[2] Charles Sandedrs Peirce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce
[3] Federico Faggin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin
[4] King, Chris, Symbiotic Existential Cosmology,
[5] Davis, Joshua. https://multimedia.insightconferences.com/speaker/2017/j-j-joshua-davis-the-embassy-of-peace-new-zealand
[6] Water, C. (2026). Human Promise Program. The Human Promise Program - Dr. Warter
[7] Ji, S. (2026). From Gnergons to Gnergitons: A Metaphorical S4 to S5 Transition.
[8] Einstein, A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
[9] Ji, S. (2026). The Einstein Gap. https://622622.substack.com/p/the-einstein-gap
[10] Einstein, Albert, and Rabindranath Tagore. “On the Nature of Reality.” Conversation at Einstein’s home, Caputh, Germany, July 14, 1930. In The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 17, Document 372. Princeton University Press / Einstein Papers Project, California Institute of Technology
[11] Ji, S. (2026). The Tagore transition. https://622622.substack.com/p/the-tagore-transition
[12] Symbiotic Existential Cosmology. symbiotic exisgterntial cosmolgy, wikipedia
Thank you for a most interesting presentation. Also enjoyed the interview of Chris King, "the core of our future is to protect life as a whole."