Psychology is the study of the mind with or without respect to the physical brain. Modern psychology tends towards a balanced approach between cognitive processes and their underlying neural foundation.
But psychology does not necessitate any understanding of the physical brain but only can include it based on certain assumptions about mind-brain identity. More than anything, it is often easier to think of mind-brain identity in the same way we do not use relativistic descriptions of space and time in our everyday lives. Including metaphysical possibilities in our theories of mind, however, are not important if we are functionalists.
Functionalism is a theory of mind that overlooks the particular substance a mind may be associated with and concentrates on the information-processing features of any dynamic system no matter the type of stuff that it may be realized of instantiated in.
In the west, psychology is basically this: "The world is fine and it always has been but you are not and you never will be. There are pills for this and there are more pills for this".
In Buddhist psychology, it is basically this: "The world is not fine and it never will be but you are and you always have been. Meditate and maintain awareness".
Perhaps, as in all things, we can find balance between east and west, between the problems of the world and the problems of the individual.
This is not to say medication can and does not help but that for some, it may be a sedative for and a thick tarp over the root causes of the problem(s). I do not think severely mentally ill people, however, can utilize cognitive therapies until they have found stability and calm before it. Psychotropic medication is perhaps one of the greatest double-edged swords in modern medicine and it has saved my life on many an occasion.
Psychological study is extremely difficult because it is an attempt to study and categorize the complex system that is an individual human mind. A psychologist may form a theory, for example, about why our minds attempt to "fill in" areas that are not complete as in the six-sided star shape embedded amongst the circles to the left.
Our minds take information from the world and make assumptions about it. These assumptions, such as the assumption that allows optical illusions of dimension to occur, tell us that what we see in the world and what is actually there are not always the same.
A psychologist may try to determine why, for instance, an individual is depressed or why they see people where no one else does. It may be that the answer to these questions lies in relationship to the individual's experiences. Perhaps the answer lies in some trauma, be it psychological or physical, that occurred.
What most people believe determines sanity and many particular views would not fit with what most people believe. If only one person one Earth believed in god and the other billions did not, then this view could be determined to be insane. Homosexuality and left-handedness were once both seen as psychological problems or illnesses where now we see that they are most obviously not.
Being insane is typically synonymous with being psychotic, and refers to an individual's inability to control themselves or their actions. However, I greatly prefer the term "psychotic" because it seems to point more towards the underlying problem of control whereas the term "insane" is often used as a derogatory term as in "Dick Cheney is insane". If he is aware of his actions, then he is not psychotic.
So, insane has this twinge of malice in its occassional use. More correct would be, "Dick Cheney is a sociopath". This is because he is both aware and unaffected by the human suffering he has caused in the world.
Some of the disorders that psychology deals with are schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, drug or food abuse, and attention deficit disorder. All of these categories blurr into others and have various degrees and classifications. Many misdiagnoses occurr and I would suspect that in another century, these distinctions will be considered primitive. Bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder and multiple personality disorder all seem to have very common characterisitics. If someone's mood changes drastically, so to will their personality.
Modern psychology generally holds that materialism or physicalism, a form of monism, is true. In other words, modern psychology holds that the cognitive basis for the mind lies in the brain. The brain, then, is the seat of the mind and things that happen to the brain can affect the mind and vice versa because they are not actually separate but are various aspects of the same thing.
From 2001: Experiencing Representations:
Two main assumptions underly a representational theory of mind. The first assumption is that the mind operates on representations of certain physical states. The second assumption is that such representations are capable of being transformed in ways that allow for various cognitive systems to use and manipulate such representations.
These two assumptions that are fundamental to a representational theory of mind, however, leave out the way in which certain representations are subjectively experienced.
All experiences are representational experiences. All experiences are experiences of something represented through one of the sense modalities. A visual representation of some distal object x, for example, will bear some representational relation to the object such that the representation of x will contain some description, perhaps a color description, of x.
The representation of a certain color is not itself colored. When we recall a mental image of a yellow bannana, there is no yellow surface being 'seen' by the areas of the brain that are responsible for visual cognition.
However, a representation of what ocurrs in the areas of the brain that are responsible for visual cognition may be stored in memory such that, when the representation is accessed, it causes an identical sensation of yellowness in the mind. |
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Representations are the mind's way of storing information about the world. Certain physical patters exist outside the body that provide useful teleological information about how to reach goals such as finding food, staying alive, and searching for a mate. All of these external objects must have some way of being represented by any system that must exploit such objects in its pursuits. However, objects that can be represented need not be external to the body. Objects that are represented can be parts of the body or other representations in the brain.
Pain, for example, is the experience of a representation of tissue damage or stress that is representative of a spatial location in or on the body and the relative form or type of pain being represented. Representations that are experienced as pain can convey information such as 'in the leg, head, arm, or chest' and 'sharp, blunt, burning, or pricking'. But, by definition, representations can also misrepresent. Because one feels pain in one's leg does not guarantee that there is tissue damage or stress in the leg, nor does it ensure that one even has a leg at all.
So, if the mind can store, access, manipulate, and form a multitude of representations with which to gain information about itself, the body, and the external world, what makes some representations conscious and others not? It must be true that the mind holds a large amount of representations in various stages of memory.
But, not all of these representations can be conscious representations at any one time. What, then, makes one representation conscious above another? It seems as though consciousness during the formation of representations about the external world may be evidential of why some representations are conscious and others are not.
Imagine looking out a window at some beautiful landscape. While doing this, imagine also, that you are conscious of your visual attention directed towards the scene. Properties of this part of the world that you are observing are being, while you are looking at it, represented in parts of the mind. Perhaps the shape of the mountains, the color of the grass and trees, and the reflectance of the glass through which you are looking.
While concentrating on the scene, it is possible that you could let your mind 'wander' and begin to imagine some other visual scene. However, while becoming conscious of the new visual representation, perhaps a Caribbean beach, you are no longer phenomenally conscious of the landscape through the window.
So, it seems, you can only be phenomenally conscious of one representation at a time. This does not mean that the scene outside the window, even when you are not phenomenally conscious of it, is not being represented by the mind. Rather it means that the representations being formed by your sight of the scene are not being consciously represented.
This can also be seen in the case of the 'absent-minded driver', in which an individual, though steering and controlling a vehicle as if she were conscious of the road environment, is actually conscious, for example, of a visual representation of her not yet reached destination. Yet this lack of phenomenal consciousness does not prevent the mind from utilizing the unconscious representations in useful ways.
What do these cases show about why certain representations are phenomenal, and hence, conscious representations? This is a difficult question and requires some analysis. If someone unexpectedly feels a sharp pain in her hand, this representation of tissue damage will become the conscious representation. She may have been thinking very hard about a piece of classical music just before the pain, and this would have been the content of the conscious representation until the pain was felt.
Then, the representation of tissue damage in some sense, takes over as a conscious representation, and the subject of the representation becomes phenomenally aware of the representation. There is a type of representational priority in the representation of tissue damage over the representation of Beethoven's fifth.
We can clearly see, from an evolutionarily utilitarian sense, why the representation of tissue damage would be the most pressing one. But, in what sense can priority target a certain representation for phenomenal awareness? There are a number of possibilities.
(a) There is a logical priority given to certain representations in various sensory systems once such representations reach a determined threshold of intensity. For example, pain is a representation of tissue damage or stress, but much lesser degrees of pain could be used for information about surfaces in contact with the body, location of limbs and body, temperature and other information about the environment that requires tactile sensation but is not painful.
The structure of such a prioritizing system, in the case of tactile sensation would be IF tactile representation is greater than X amount of bodily stress, THEN cause priority of such a representation ELSE make tactile representation conscious only when system is attentive to such representations. Therefore, we would expect that the more severe or intense a representation of tissue damage or stress is, the harder it will be to remove such representations from conscious awareness. The purpose of pain reducing chemicals is to block the representation from being formed in a number of ways and reduce the conscious awareness of pain.
(b) Certain categorizations of representations in various sensory systems can be given logical priority based on the closeness of the representation to an already acquired, through genetic programming or experience, representation of importance. For example, one may be walking in the forest and stumble across some sensory representation of a rattlesnake. Either through a visual or auditory sensation, one can form a representation that refers to the concept of poisonous snake. Such categorizations can cause an overriding representational priority to be given to the current situation.
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From 2000: (a) The representational theory of mind as presented by Fred Dretske and Michael Tye is a theory concerning the nature of mental facts and how these facts function in information processing. Dretske, in his Naturalizing the Mind, writes, “The thesis [Representational thesis], in two parts, is that, plus or minus a bit, (1) All mental facts are representational facts, and (2) all representational facts are facts about informational functions” (Dretske, 1995, p. 7).
This theory utilizes a representational acount to explain and include various features of the mind and the ways in which certain states come to be about or representative of other states. The representational thesis, which can be thought of as a more developed version of the intentional stance of Daniel Dennett, is ambitious in its attempt at an explanatory inclusion of the phenomenal properties of subjective experience.
Representationalists, such as Dretske, take an externalist stance towards representational states. In other words, representations are representations of external objects, events, and properties. Using this externalist framework, the distinction between appearance (how something is represented in the mind) and reality (what is the source of the representation) can be made explicit.
Both Dretske and Tye attempt to include the most elusive aspects of mental life within their representational accounts. Dretske attempts to show how the recurrent problem of what-it-is-like poses no serious problem for a representational account because, if all mental facts are representational facts, then what-it-is-like for some organism is just what the organism is representing in some sense modality. |
Although Dretske sees some aspects of the mind as still problematic for the representational thesis, such as proprioception (awareness of one’s bodily states, pain, hunger, etc), Tye, in his article A Representational Theory of Pains and Their Phenomenal Character, makes a bold attempt at bringing such proprioceptions under the conceptual umbrella of the representational thesis (Tye, 1995, in Nature of Consciousness, p.329-340).
Summarizing Tye’s argument, pains can be seen as “…topographic or maplike representaions” (Tye, 1995, p. 335). Pain, then, can be represented in a limb or internal body structure because the representation of such tissue damage occurs in the brain. In the brain, Tye proposes, we can give an empirical account of cell arrays that are designated for various parts of the body.
This, he states, is why various types of pains (aches, pricks, stings) can have a spatial dimension in both location and range. Neuroscientific evidence is supportive of this view in that various areas of the body are represented to various degrees of complexity in the brain. For example, the face is a complex system of muscles and nerves that requires more control than the back. Also, pains can be felt much more distinctly and much more closely in the face than in the back. This is because the representational maps that corresspond to the face are more detailed than those that represent the back.
However ambitious the representational thesis may be, many have dissented that the thesis, while good at capturing mental aspects that include intentionality, does not give an acceptable account of phenomenal properties. Some think that a representational theory of pain, such as Tye’s, is a good attempt at understanding the way in which such information can be sensed and represented. However, the knowledge that pain is a representation of tissue damage in maplike arrays of cells in the brain does not, in at least some sense, convey understanding of what-it-is-like to be the subject of such a representation. Tye directly confronts this objection by stating that “…phenomenal content is abstract, nonceptual, intentional content that is poised for use by the cognitive centers” (1995, p.338).
(b) I think that Tye and Dretske do a good job of showing how phenomenal content plays a functional role in cognition as found in biological life. But, the pressing question about why certain representational states have the subjective feel that they do is left up to an empirical conclusion for the representational thesis. The representational thesis, I concede, does give an account of why phenomenal pain would feel the way it does; namely, because it must play a certain cognitive functional role.
However, this explains why it feels the way it does, not the way it feels. This seems like the hard problem of consciousness coming up once again. Even if we were to have a complete representational account of all information processing in the mind, it would still not convey the experience of such information processing.
The one area in which I see some hope for the representational thesis is that it singles out certain aspects of what-it-is-like (as presented by Dretske) so that it may actually be plausible to consider very fine-grained perceptual abilities and the representations they form. For example, in speaking of the ability of Frank Jackson’s Mary (What Mary Didn’t Know, 1986, in Nature of Consciousness, p. 567-570) to know what-it-is-like to sense an electromagnetic field, Dretske says that all Mary needs to do is have a visual representation of the electromagnetic field. This, I think, is at least incorrect on the surface.
This is parallel to saying that all Mary need know to know what-it-is-like to see red is a representation of what red is. This rests on some difficult metaphysical questions about what, exactly, is red and what would be a representation of it? Dretske would say that a representation of red is a representation of a certain wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum. Despite these worries, if given a more detailed account, it may be that separating what is represented from every other aspect of system could convey what-it-is-like to represent the thing in question.
But, I was not completely satisfied with the given account, and, I think that the representational thesis fails to account for the subjective experience and does not even necessarily need to account for this feature. Rather, the representational thesis need only recognize subjective experience of representations as an aspect of all (as Nagel would say) ‘conscious’ creatures.
(c) The representational theory of mind has a lot in common with most viable accounts of consciousness. This is mainly due to the cognitive psychological assumption that, for a system to process information about something, the information must be represented in some way. If the information in question is information that would need to be aquired given an evolutionary account, it is hard to formulate theories of mind that do not include some degree of representational content.
While some theories of the mind rest in specific cognitive domains, the representational thesis attempts to be an over-arching theory that is all inclusive using the representational conceptual frame. Intentional states such as beliefs, desires, etc, must be about something. No one can believe that X if there is no X to be the content of the belief. Therefore, most theories that include some kind of semantic sentential analysis of the mind are at least in part based on a representational account.
The question of consciousness raises new ways of looking at how mental states can be about other mental states, and how the system in question can have access to embedded representations. Along these lines, most cognitive theories of consciousness also utilize a representational account to some degree. It is, in my opinion, difficult (if not impossible) to maintain a non-representational account of consciousness and the content of conscious awareness. Like other intentional states, if there is nothing to be conscious of, then there can be no consciousness (in at least one sense).
The Multiple Drafts model of Dennett, while it does not advocate an area where higher-order representations are kept, is, to some degree, a representational view of the mind. The disagreement ensues when the theorists consider how representations can account for the mental lives we lead. The Lockean Inner Sense theorists, though trying to dispel notions of a Cartesian Theatre, rely on the mind being able to (in some way) perceive output representations (in opposition to the non-outputting Multiple Drafts model).
Higher Order theories, such as those of David Rosenthal, rely on having embedded representations. The highest of these representations are those that can be consciously accessed. And, they are representative of lower-order representations which are, themselves, about some state.
About psychology sub topics (listed on the left hand of the page):
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I have a page on bipolar disorder, a mental illness I have dealt with since my late teens. There is a page on concepts, which are discussed in detail. An analysis of consciousness is available. Functionalism is a modern theory of mind that looks at the functional relationship between mental states as opposed to the biological material they are instantiated in.
An essay examining the linguistic theory of Donald Davidson and the relationship between language and thought is available. My page on mental illness discusses my own experience with it and general features of it. I have a page that is an essay concerning intentionality or mental states that are about something. An essay on symbolic vision examines the nature of visual perception from a symbolic point of view. And, my page on thought examines what thought is and how it works.
