The Third Form of Matter: From Inanimate and Living to Civilization

This article substantiates the hypothesis of civilization as the third form of matter — alongside inanimate and living matter. First step: science and education already distinguish between living and inanimate nature. Alexander von Humboldt is considered the founder of the holistic concept of their interrelationship. As F.B. Shkundina demonstrated, living systems possess phenomena (control, transcription, information) that are not reducible to physico-chemical laws. This is a methodological precedent: the living is irreducible to the inanimate. Second step: humans are studied separately — as a biological species (Homo sapiens) and as social beings (culture, consciousness, society). This biosocial nature of humans has been substantiated by Engels, Fromm, Darwin, Locke, and others. The social human is an individual. But civilization is not an individual; it is a supra-organismal, supra-populational system. Third step: civilization possesses characteristics absent in living matter (even in the social human): symbolic (extragenetic) memory; memetic evolution (non-hereditary, goal-directed); suprabiological institutions (money, laws, states); projective transformation of the environment (adapting the environment to goals); technological memory outside the body (books, blueprints, machines). In the global information space, there is no analogous concept. Related approaches (the noosphere, the technosphere, stages of evolution, social levels) either describe something else or do not grant civilization an independent ontological status. The hypothesis provides an ontological foundation for civilizationology — a meta-science of civilizations necessary for analyzing global risks, intercivilizational comparisons, and the search for extraterrestrial civilizations. The article invites discussion and verification. --- Keywords: forms of matter, inanimate nature, living nature, civilization, civilizationology, biosocial essence, Humboldt, Shkundina, noosphere, technosphere.