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CHAPTER 1
The Irreducible Mentality of Mind
"If the creator had a purpose in endowing us with a neck, he surely meant us to stick it out."
— Arthur Koestler
1.1 Introduction
The astounding success of modern science depends on reductionism, the concept that the properties or behavior of a higher-order entity can be fully explained in terms of the properties or behavior of the lower-order entities of which it is composed. As an intellectual program, it lies at the core of our efforts to see the universe as a rational or rule-abiding place whose laws we can discover by pursuing a rational or rule-governed program. We can call this approach 'naturalism,' to contrast it with the ancient idea of a supernatural element above and beyond the natural or material world which we mortals can approach only by intuition or supplication, if at all. To a very large extent, the history of western science has been the history of reducing what was once seen as mysterious or beyond comprehension to matters of mechanics and chemistry.
In attempting to explain human behavior, the ancient model was the intuitive: each of us has a resident supernatural soul or spirit that does the hard work of separating us from the beasts of the field. The notion of an inner self was formalized by the French polymath, Rene Descartes, who concluded that, while the body is a machine of essentially the same order of nature as that of all other animals, the soul is both real and utterly different. That is, he saw the universe as having a dual nature, consisting of the natural or material world, which obeys the laws of physics (although he didn't use that term), and a supernatural world, which does not. This, of course, leads to an insuperable problem: if the soul is of a non-material nature, how can it interact with the material body to produce observable behavior? How can some untouchable thing touch us? For several centuries after Descartes, nobody worried greatly about this as most people accepted that it just did: after all, that is what supernatural means. There was enough work for scientists to do without offending religious sensibilities by tackling a mind-body problem which seemed to have no beginning.
However, from about the middle of the nineteenth century, it was becoming increasingly obvious that something was very wrong. Either the universe was a natural, rule-governed sort of place, or it wasn't. Political programs, such as Marxism and anarchism, began to challenge the idea of a benevolent deity, while the onward rush of materialist science seemed to overcome every challenge in its path. More to the point, the concept of a causally effective soul or spirit started to appear incongruous, if not downright silly: science was based on hard evidence, but if there was no conceivable evidence for a soul, then how could science deal with it? By the turn of the century, there was open rebellion. The American psychologist, John B. Watson, proclaimed that all talk of a mind tethered psychology to a nonsensical standard. What was needed, he said, was a science of behavior in which students of psychology knew as much about the mind as students of physics — essentially, nothing [1, Chap. 2].
In fairly short order, the notion that there could and should be a formal science of human mentality took control. There were three possible forms, a mechanistic model of mentation, as in Freud's psychoanalytic notion of mind; the behaviorist approach, which regarded all talk of minds as gibberish; or the concept that reductionist science would explain the mind just as it was explaining everything else. By the 1950s and 60s, the intellectual world had more or less stabilized in these three approaches. Neuroscientists and physicians accepted that the phenomena of mind would eventually be explained in toto by the principles and methods of reductionist laboratory science. Psychologists had their behaviorism, and psychiatrists had both of those plus psychoanalysis, as the fancy took them. Philosophers, the smallest but most durable group of theorists of mind, were moving to a hard-nosed materialism, doing everything they could to distance themselves from the insurmountable difficulties of dualism.
By the 1980s, however, the world was changing fast. First psychoanalysis, then behaviorism, fell by the wayside as 'non-science.' Psychiatrists rushed to embrace reductionist biologism, psychologists fell hungrily upon a semantically-modified mentalism (relabeled 'cognitivism'), while philosophers discovered a middle road called functionalism. That, roughly, is the position today, so we need to look a little more closely at what these terms mean.
1.2 Failed Theories
The term 'cognitive psychology' can be misleading as, in practice, it has two distinct meanings. The first, and more restricted, meaning applies to the investigative or laboratory discipline which is part of the broader field of cognitive sciences. Cognitive sciences means roughly the intersection of the neurosciences, psychology, philosophy, linguistics and computer sciences. Ulrich Neisser defined cognition as referring to all the processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used. This includes not only the obvious mental events of which we are aware, butalso the many brain processes underlying knowing and awareness that are not open to introspection. Cognitive research examines mental processes such as sensory perception, memory, motor processing, judgment and many other complex events, often using laboratory animals rather than humans. There is no conceptual boundary between this and ordinary neurophysiology as researchers in each field approach the same general topic from different but complementary directions. Cognitive psychologists and other neuroscientists freely borrow techniques and concepts from each other.
When cognitive psychology is used in the context of treating mental disorders, it is normally in the loose sense of what is now known as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Overlooking the fact that cognitivism and behaviorism are mutually contradictory, and that a therapy without a model is just a technology (or even an art), not a scientific theory, CBT uses techniques of moral suasion in a more focused sense than in the days of 'moral therapy.' It sees the human as a mind in a body, where the mind is causally effective, but it has no formal theory of mind and definitely no theory of mind-body interaction. The techniques have limited efficacy and are relatively harmless but the lack of a model of mind leads to a major problem: the absence of a demarcation criterion between the therapy and quackery. As Skinner noted in 1974, the problem is that simple cognitivism is not a theory at all. It simply attributes to an 'inner person' that which requires explanation. Thus, we have the bizarre spectacle of psychologists trained in the scientific method indulging in all sorts of non-scientific practices, such as aura therapy, rebirthing, massage, prayer, macrovitamin therapy, QEEG and anything else that takes their fancy. The reason they can do this is because there is nothing in their theory that says they can't. At the same time, many psychologists are now claiming that, by virtue of their training in areas of mind, they should be granted the right to prescribe psychoactive drugs. In general, this is not a good combination. Governments should resist steadfastly the drive to mate Kirlian photography with depot antipsychotics.
Unlike psychology, psychiatry has not had to change horses in mid-stream, merely to let two of them go while everybody crowded on the last. Worldwide, since early in the nineteenth century, there has been a very strong tradition of what is now known as biological psychiatry. In about 1867, this was summarized by the British psychiatrist, Henry Maudsley, in his famous dictum "mental disease is brain disease" (also attributed to Benjamin Rush, of the US). This means that all cases of mental disorder are simply cases of neurological disorder in which the symptoms are manifest as psychological dysfunction rather than, say, as paralysis or speech defects. It must never be forgotten that, despite all the publicity it generated, the foray into psychoanalysis was a very small show indeed. In every country, at all times in the past several hundred years, the vast majority of people with any sort of mental disorder received "treatment," where treatment meant something like what ordinary medical practitioners do to people with ordinary physical illnesses, or what vets do to horses. Until about fifty years ago, this meant incarceration and isolation (like people with infectious diseases) and a wide range of more or less brutal physical "treatments." A brief but shocking history of some of the physical methods used to control the mentally disturbed is available in Whitaker's Mad in America.
The concept that mental disorder is, at base, a form of brain disturbance, has a powerful appeal to people trained in the tradition of reductionist science, meaning all medical practitioners. Western physical medicine is a compelling argument for the notion that, if you want to know why something isn't working properly, you need only look at its component parts and the answer will thrust itself at you. All physicians are trained in anatomy, physiology and biochemistry, while therapeutics consists of understanding how particular chemicals change the biochemical status of the body. It is thus a small step to the view that, since the mind is a function of the brain, a full understanding of the brain is both necessary and sufficient for a full understanding of all disorders of the mind. In one sentence, that is the credo of biological psychiatry which, since the collapse of psychoanalysis and behaviorism, has more or less had the field of psychiatry to itself. The social pressures that have contributed to biological psychiatry's spectacular success in taking control of the profession are another issue; what counts here is that psychiatrists needed a scientific stance, and biology is the strongest, or even the only, candidate they know.
It has been said of psychiatrists that they studied medicine but don't practice it, and practice psychology, which they never studied. Intellectually, turning from psychologism to biologism represents a conceptual retreat, from either the arcane mysteries of psychoanalysis or a borrowed science of behaviorism, to the certainty of reductionist biology. Psychiatrists no longer study or practice psychotherapy; they say they are conventional physicians of the mind, diagnosing chemical imbalances of the brain, either by ordinary interview alone or supported by laboratory tests, and treating them with a range of drugs which are finely targeted on the specific disorders they find. Since the human genome project, it has become commonplace for psychiatrists to talk in terms of genes for mental disorder. The profession as a whole has no doubt that, in the near future, there will be massive "breakthroughs" allowing the development of drugs to treat mental disorders diagnosed wholly by chemical analysis. Psychoanalysis will give way to genome analysis so that, after generations in the wilderness, psychiatry will take its rightful place among the rest of the medical specialties.
For ordinary psychiatrists, the new biologism in psychiatry represents a return to intellectual certainty and safety. It is not so much a retreat as a reorientation of limited resources: psychiatry must be based in science; the only science we have is reductionism; therefore, psychiatry must be biological, as Samuel Guze proved to his satisfaction [4]. In addition, this strategic shift will make the training of tomorrow's psychiatrists easier as they will no longer be required to learn a completely new language (ego, libido, Thanatos and all that) nor will they need to distract themselves with patients' problems of living. If depression is a chemical imbalance of the brain, then losing his job and his wife must be coincidental, so the depressed patient can therefore see psychologists and social workers about his bit of "collateral damage."
1.3 Theories of Mind
The world of philosophy is never quite so clear as fields that claim to be scientific. Philosophers are the 'forward scouts,' you could say, ranging far and wide in their enquiries, finding the paths for the technicians plodding in the rear. Early in the last century, there was general agreement that the soul was a non-starter. By the 1950s, philosophers had rushed ahead of the psychologists. The behaviorist idea of a science of mind without a mind was not yielding the benefits claimed for it [5], so the drive was to provide an account of mind that did not set up a mind-body problem. To this end, some philosophers adopted the leitmotiv of science, reductionism. Mind, they averred, was material at base. There are many different options by which this claim can be realized, and all of them have been explored at some stage or other. All of them have failed, too. The notion that the mind is identical with the brain, or can be reduced to brain, or will be explained away by the march of science, etc., in all its permutations and combinations, has gone nowhere (this means, of course, that of all the people professing an interest in matters of mind, only psychiatrists still stick to biological reductionism, but that's another question).
As the dust of philosophical battle has cleared, one group of theories remains in more or less robust shape. This is the group known as functionalist theories of mind, of which the best known is the work of Daniel Dennett, so this will suffice as the exemplar of a modern theory of mind. Dennett's approach to the question of mind has three bases: dualism is false; the mind is biological; and the mind is a virtual machine generated by the brain. The following quotes, largely taken from Chap. 9 of [1], will demonstrate how he approaches these points:
(i). "... YES," he says, "My theory is a theory of consciousness" [6, p281; all emphasis in quotes is in the original]. Note that he uses the terms mind and consciousness more or less interchangeably, which is possibly tendentious as the set of conscious events is a subset of the universal set of mental events. That is, some mental events are not conscious, but this is not central to his case.
(ii). It is a materialist theory: "The prevailing wisdom ... is materialism: there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter — the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology — and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon ... We can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis ..." [6, p33]. "Somehow, the brain must be the mind ..." (p41). See also his Intentional Stance: "I declare my starting point to be the objective, materialistic, third-person world of the physical sciences" [7, p5].
(iii). Consciousness is all sorts of things, but mostly it is about computation and information [6, pp43-65].
(iv). When consciousness is not about computation, the extra bits can be explained away: "... we will try to remove the motivation for believing in these (special, subjective) properties (of our internal discriminative states) ... by finding alternative explanations for the phenomena that seem to demand them" [6, p373].
(v). Dualism always means substance dualism, which violates the laws of physics [6, pp33-35]; therefore dualism is bad: "There is the lurking suspicion that the most attractive feature of mind stuff is its promise of being so mysterious that it keeps science at bay forever. This fundamentally antiscientific stance of dualism is, to my mind, its most disqualifying feature, and is the reason why in this book I adopt the apparently dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs ... given the way dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up (as in 'then a miracle occurs')" [6, pp37-38]. "... 'adopting' dualism is really just accepting defeat without admitting it" [6, p41]. By this, he means that accepting dualism automatically means giving up on the quest for a rational explanation of mind. He does not compromise on this point.
(vi). Descartes' model, the 'Cartesian Theatre,' is bad, because wherever there is a Cartesian Theatre, there is a hidden observer, and wherever there is a hidden observer, there is dualism, but dualism means ectoplasm where ectoplasm is antiscientific.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Mind-Body Problem Explained: The Biocognitive Model for Psychiatry"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Niall McLaren.
Excerpted by permission of Loving Healing Press, Inc..
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