Dimensional thinking summary
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the Dimensional thinking summary page
This page summarises a series of previous pages starting with the 'Actions' page. Be aware that the totality of the 'worldview' chapter is of equal importance to this summary.
To explain everything clearly, we focus here on the personal aspect. But the world is more all-encompassing than that. The core of this essay leads to agency at all levels of existence, from the individual to the greatest unity capable of acting.
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What is dimensional thinking about?
Essay | Guido Van Nuffelen | 2026
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You are a complex adaptive system. Your functioning cannot be summarised under a single heading
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Dimensional thinking
The power of dimensional thinking lies in its capacity to hold complexity without collapsing into oversimplification. Human beings are simultaneously driven by ancient evolutionary pressures (survival, reproduction, status, belonging), shaped by cultural learning and social meaning-making, and oriented toward future goals that integrate personal vision with collective purpose. The framework provides you with a language and logic for navigating this complexity while respecting its irreducible richness.
The framework is substantially supported by contemporary neuroscience:
Interests as action-driven
Dopamine systems encode motivational salience and approach activation. Motor systems are primary, not secondary. Seeking behaviour and action initiation are fundamental to interest.
Values as evaluation-driven
Interoceptive and basal ganglia systems encode how your body evaluates situations. Values exist to guide which actions have the highest expected utility. Evaluation is embodied, not abstract.
Embodiment of both
Both interests and values are grounded in bodily states, motor systems, and interoceptive feedback. There is no "disembodied" interest or value computation.
Intertwining of interests and values
Shared neural substrate (dopamine, basal ganglia, insula), shared computational logic (prediction error minimisation), bidirectional causality (interests drive actions generating valued outcomes; valued outcomes reshape interests), and shared development (action scaffolding develops both simultaneously).
The brain does not compute them separately and then combine them. Rather, interests and values emerge as complementary aspects of a unified system for predicting desired futures, generating an approach toward those futures, and updating based on outcomes.
Paradox and emergence
The opposite poles on a dimension define a unified reality, reflecting contemporary understanding of dynamic systems. Rather than seeking a ‘best’ position on a dimension (e.g., maximum autonomy or participation), the framework recognises that optimal functioning requires dynamic navigation between poles, depending on context and life stage.
Dimensional logic
Rather than the typological approach, we avoid the reductionism of personality type systems (MBTI, DISC) by treating human nature as continuous variation across multiple poles rather than discrete categories.
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Let me introduce you to your interest, values and goals
Active dimension – aka your Interests
- Interests represent our active dimension, spanning from autonomy (what is important to me) to participation (what is important for us). This dimension captures why we act and what drives us toward particular behaviours and life pursuits. Interests are not merely preferences – they are deep motivational currents shaped by our biology and learning history.
Evaluation dimension – aka your Values
- Values constitute our evaluation dimension, stretching from coherence (what has meaning for me) to connectedness (what has meaning for us). Values function as the interpretive lenses through which we assess situations, make judgments, and decide what matters. They are the principles by which we evaluate experience and coordinate with others.
Potention dimension – aka your Goals
- Goals define our potential dimension, extending from competencies (what can I do) to relevance (what we should do). Goals emerge from the interplay of interests and values over time, representing the concrete future orientations that guide action planning and give direction to life.
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The concept 'dimension' here is not about a physical property of your brain, but is a metaphor to describe the processes that take place in the networks within your brain. The first two dimensions are fundamentally and inextricably linked. They form the fabric that gives the third-dimensional shape
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Agency
To define 'dimensions', I rely on the work of Peter Godfrey-Smith and Daniel Dennett on Darwinian space. The term refers to a three-dimensional conceptual framework for understanding the conditions under which Darwinian evolutionary processes occur and how they vary across contexts. Natural selection is not a single fixed process but a family of related processes operating across domains (e.g. biological, cultural, technological) with varying degrees of heritability, selection pressure focus, and adaptive landscape continuity. Darwinian spaces allow you to ask: "Where in this three-dimensional space does this process lie?"
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This (3-dimensional) 'agency concept' permits the recognition of phenomena such as action, moral systems, and technological innovation as products of hybrid evolutionary mechanisms with infinitely versatile outcomes
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2 core dimensions & their directions
Interests (your position on the action dimension)
Personal interests, initiated by personal action, is always somewhere on the action dimension between, autonomy (what is important to me) and participation (what is important for us)
Models like ‘the Big 5 – OCEAN’ or ‘HEXACO’ describe the vast scope of the action dimension. Below, I describe a similar model to clearly illustrate that interests are not "point situations," but moving concepts on the action dimension.
In the 1980's, Shalom Schwartz developed his Theory of Basic Human Values together with Wofgang Bilsky, drawing upon some of the insights of Milton Rokeach and Louis Guttman. Although he called it ‘The theory of basic human values’, it describes clearly the ‘action motivators’ / ‘fundamental human desires’ for individuals, tested worldwide.
The theory distinguishes ten motivators, but the border between them is artificial and one flows into the next, which can be seen by the following shared motivational emphases:
- Power and Achievement: (social superiority and esteem)
- Achievement and Hedonism: (self-centred satisfaction)
- Hedonism and Stimulation: (a desire for affectively pleasant arousal)
- Stimulation and Self-direction: (intrinsic interest in novelty and mastery)
- Self-direction and Universalism: (reliance upon one's own judgement and comfort with the diversity of existence)
- Universalism and Benevolence: (enhancement of others and transcendence of selfish interests)
- Benevolence and Tradition: (devotion to one's in-group)
- Benevolence and Conformity: (normative behaviour that promotes close relationships)
- Conformity and Tradition: (subordination of self in favour of socially imposed expectations)
- Tradition and Security: (preserving existing social arrangements that give certainty to life)
- Conformity and Security: (protection of order and harmony in relations)
- Security and Power: (avoiding or overcoming threats by controlling relationships and resources)
Dopamine
The strongest evidence for the view that interests are fundamentally action-driven comes from dopamine neuroscience, which shows that motivation is primarily about seeking and approach behaviour. Dopamine does not signal pleasure; it signals wanting.
Contrary to popular belief, dopamine is not responsible for feelings of enjoyment or satisfaction. Instead, it encodes motivational salience – the drive to pursue potential rewards. The interest-based nervous system depends on activities that reliably stimulate dopamine release, such as fascination, novelty, play, competition, challenge, and time pressure. In the absence of these dopaminergic triggers, motivation often fails to initiate, even when a person intellectually recognises the importance of a task. Dopamine functions like lubrication for neural circuits: without it, initiating action becomes extraordinarily difficult, despite intact motor abilities. This highlights dopamine’s central role in translating intention into movement. Recent research further clarifies dopamine’s dual function in motivation. First, dopamine establishes latent attractors – stable neural representations of previously rewarding situations. These attractors bias future behaviour toward similar contexts. Second, dopamine generates oriented action: not just wanting in general, but wanting directed toward specific goals. Together, these functions provide the first clear mechanistic account of how dopamine supports both the activational aspects of motivation (energy, arousal, readiness to act) and its directional aspects (goal selection and pursuit). In both roles, dopamine is inherently action-oriented.
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Values (your position on the evaluation dimension)
Personal values, initiated by personal evaluation, is always somewhere on the evaluation dimension between, coherence (what has meaning for me) to connectedness (what has meaning for us)
The clearest evidence that values are fundamentally evaluation-driven comes from converging research on interoception. Interoception is commonly described as the perception of internal bodily states, although many interoceptive processes operate outside conscious awareness. At its core, interoception involves integrating signals from within the body into the central nervous system. This integration underpins the modern allostatic view of brain function, which holds that the brain’s primary role is to regulate the body’s internal milieu predictively. Allostasis refers to the brain’s capacity to anticipate physiological needs and prepare to meet them before they arise. Rather than merely reacting to bodily changes, the brain continuously generates predictions about internal states and adjusts bodily systems to maintain efficiency. In this framework, regulation of the internal environment is not secondary to cognition – it is cognition’s foundation.
Within this predictive architecture, values emerge through embodied evaluation. Your brain generates visceromotor predictions: expectations about how your body should feel and respond. When prediction errors are small – when incoming bodily signals match these expectations – interoceptive experience is dominated by your brain’s predictions, its “best guess” about bodily state. When prediction errors are large, your brain can resolve the discrepancy in three ways: by updating its predictions, by shifting attention to bodily sensations, or by initiating actions that bring the body into the predicted state.
Crucially, reward prediction errors – the differences between your expected and the actual outcomes – continuously update your value estimates on a trial-by-trial basis. Your basal ganglia play a central role in this process by translating value representations into action selection, effectively choosing which behaviour to pursue based on expected benefit. This reveals values as inherently evaluative and action-guiding: they exist to answer the question, “Which action should I take next?”
Values are not abstract principles floating independently of behaviour; they are computational tools that rank your options according to their anticipated outcomes. At the neural level, this evaluative system is distributed. The striatum primarily encodes immediate, concrete rewards tied to your bodily states, while the prefrontal cortex represents more abstract and symbolic values and computes probabilities over longer time horizons. Their interaction integrates visceral, present-focused evaluations with deliberative, future-oriented reasoning. In this way, evolution has extended your basic bodily valuation system into the sophisticated human capacity to reason about distant, abstract, and socially mediated values.
Allostasis, coherence and meaning
Allostasis refers to your brain’s capacity to maintain internal stability through proactive prediction and adaptation. Unlike homeostasis, which aims to keep physiological variables at fixed set points, allostasis is a dynamic and anticipatory process. Your brain continuously forecasts upcoming demands – physiological, psychological, and social – and prepares bodily responses in advance.
This predictive regulation engages multiple systems, including the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, and immune and metabolic regulators.
Crucially, allostasis depends on behavioural interpretation. The same external stimulus – such as a confrontation – can elicit very different physiological responses depending on whether it is appraised as a threat or a challenge. This interpretive layer shapes how your brain predicts future demands and organises its bodily preparations. At this level, coherent sensations are repeatedly assembled into values.
Coherence and values are therefore not secondary psychological embellishments; they are core regulators of allostatic control. Through predictive processing, perceived self-efficacy, and the satisfaction of basic needs, alignment between values and lived experience enables efficient and flexible physiological adaptation. Though supporting values, coherence is not merely about enhancing meaning or life satisfaction; it constitutes a neurobiologically grounded intervention with measurable effects on physiological regulation, resilience, and long-term health.
Together, coherence and values function as higher-order organising principles that govern the brain’s allostatic mechanisms – the processes that maintain stability through change. They determine whether stress-response systems operate efficiently or become chronically dysregulated. When core values align with action and life experiences are integrated into a coherent narrative, the predictive brain operates with reduced uncertainty. This allows effective downregulation of the stress response and supports sustainable well-being. By contrast, misalignment between values and behaviour, fragmented meaning-making, and unintegrated experiences generate persistent uncertainty. The result is prolonged activation of the HPA axis and the accumulation of allostatic load – the cumulative physiological wear and tear that increases vulnerability to mental health disorders and physical disease.
Empirical evidence reflects this alignment effect. Individuals whose actions consistently express their deeply held values report higher well-being, greater self-esteem, and stronger psychological flexibility. Conversely, persistent value–behaviour mismatch is associated with chronic stress, burnout, and diminished life satisfaction.
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(Hidden) Layers
Both dimensions – the ‘Active dimension, aka your Interests’ and the ‘Evaluation dimension, aka your Values’ – are interconnected and intertwined
As we explained in the brain-section, your brain is one single entity. ‘Positive action’ creates ‘approach’ to the world (aka participation), ‘negative action’ creates ‘retreat’ from the world (aka autonomy).
Simultaneously, there is an evaluation; if it's not as expected, ‘uncertainty’ grows (aka connectedness); if it's expected, ‘confidence’ grows (aka coherence).
There can only be an optimal condition, never a perfect condition:
- On the active dimension, there will always be a trade-off between autonomy and participation. By participating in a joint action, you will lose autonomy (and vice versa)
- By engaging in the evaluation dimension in connectedness with others, you will lose some coherence within yourself (and vice versa)
Time creates experiences en competences
Throughout every moment of your life, you create layers of experience by continually combining action and evaluation, creating and enriching your personality.
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The 3th dimension
Relevance
Personal goals, initiated by personal foresight, are always somewhere on the potential dimension between, competencies (what can I do) to relevance (what should we do, given the context)
Contemporary neuroscience offers strong evidence that rational, purposeful, and conscious thought emerges from increasingly sophisticated elaborations of the action–evaluation systems described earlier. This is not a reductionist claim. Emergence means that higher-level properties arise from lower-level processes in ways that cannot be fully predicted from those processes alone. Nevertheless, it shows that rationality originates in – and remains grounded in – sensorimotor and evaluative biology.
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In your preconscious systems, sensory input automatically triggers innate or learned motor responses. The key evolutionary innovation occurs when a system acquires the capacity to inhibit these automatic responses before they are executed. This creates a crucial shift: instead of sensory representations directly evoking action, they become available for inspection and deliberation. Once inhibition is possible, the system can do something unprecedented – it can monitor the perceptual consequences of its own actions in real time and use that feedback to guide your behaviour toward desired outcomes. From the system’s internal perspective, actions are now initiated, controlled, and selected by the system itself (represented by a – hidden – layer). The subjective experience of voluntary control – the feeling that you are choosing your actions – emerges from this capacity to inhibit, monitor, and regulate your own responses.
With accumulated experience, both across evolution and within individual development, your system gains a further capability. Your brain can disengage from immediate action and generate learned action sequences internally. Neural populations that were once active only during actual navigation, manipulation, or social interaction can now reproduce similar activity patterns in the absence of external sensory input and without executing motor output. Your brain effectively runs action sequences ‘offline,’ simulating what would happen if a particular action were taken. This enables what-if reasoning: “What would happen if I chose this option rather than that one?”
Through these internal simulations, your brain evaluates the predicted consequences of alternative actions by monitoring your interoceptive and emotional responses to imagined scenarios – before committing to behaviour. Rational, purposeful thinking is therefore not a system that competes with action; it is internalised action. When you deliberate, your brain runs simulations of possible actions, evaluates their anticipated bodily and emotional consequences, and selects the option with the highest predicted value.
- At lower levels, your neural layers generate basic drives, instincts, and learned associations: your core competencies
- Consciousness adds something different: relevance. It allows deliberation among alternatives in novel situations for which no automatic response yet exists
When confronted with a new problem, consciousness enables you to inhibit habitual responses, generate multiple behavioural scenarios, evaluate their likely outcomes, select the most adaptive option, and update your internal models for future use. In essence, conscious reasoning answers a single practical question: “Given my past experience and current circumstances, which of the available actions should I choose?”
Your behaviour is driven by the tight sensorimotor coupling between your actions and the evaluation of their outcomes. This coupling operates through specialised neural processes that run in parallel, continuously linking perception, action, and feedback. Your brain develops the capacity to inhibit automatic responses and examine them before acting when it begins to construct higher-order representations of its own first-order states. In this sense, consciousness begins with the ability to treat your own mental states as objects of thought.
At this point, your brain can disengage action sequences from immediate execution and instead run them internally. Using interoceptive feedback, it evaluates the predicted consequences of possible actions without having to perform them. Rational deliberation thus emerges as internalised action simulation. Multiple internal models of action and outcome compete for access to a global mental workspace, and the selected information is broadcast across the brain, enabling unified, goal-directed cognition.
As this brain architecture develops further, your prefrontal networks acquire the capacity to represent relations between relations. This enables abstract reasoning, counterfactual thinking, mathematics, and logical inference, all organised around the practical demands of planning and guiding action. Recursive cycles of reflection generate awareness of one’s own cognitive processes, emotional influences, and contextual constraints. This metacognitive capacity supports self-directed learning and aligns behaviour with values.
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At every level of organisation, even the most abstract and reflective forms of conscious thought remain grounded in and oriented toward improving action selection
This is not reductionism but an account of emergence. Rationality is not ‘merely’ action evaluation any more than liquidity is ‘merely’ hydrogen and oxygen. Rather, it is an emergent property of an increasingly sophisticated action–evaluation system, a property that remains constrained by, and organised around, the fundamental requirements of effective behaviour in the light of the context.
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