A Critique of Psychology by an Outsider

First I need to get some dirty business out of the way.  There is such a thing as the mind.

 

What a ridiculous place to have to start!  One hundred years ago, an essayist could write about the mind and be pretty sure that his or her readers would have agreed on the following set of assumptions:  (1) that there was a thing called the mind, (2) that they had one, and (3) that practically everyone else had one, too. 

 

It is a sign of our times that men and women of apparent reason could question that the mind even exists.  There is a growing chorus of individuals who insist that the mind is a piece of tribal folklore, that we only think we think, that consciousness or awareness or experience are false concepts, the embodiment of a false psychological theory that was developed by our benighted ancestors before the dawn of history.  Like the primitive theory that the Sun revolves around the Earth[1], the concept of the mind will eventually wither and die in the searing light of psychological truth.

 

According to this chorus, terms such as “think”, “feel”, “want”, “intend” are false.  If we were completely authentic and observed and described things as they really are, we would dispense with such mythological terms and use a more objective, preferably neurophysiological vocabulary.   For example, instead of saying “I believe”, one would say, “I have a disposition to utter”[2] or “My brain possesses the strong idea”.  Instead of saying, “I feel hungry”, one would say, “My body has a need for food.” 

 

Before I get into the meat of what I want to say, I will detour to raise a few quick objections to this absurd proposal:

• Why would we dispense with highly useful phrases like “I believe” or ‘I feel hungry’?  They communicate clearly and embrace far more meaning than the simplistic – and awkward – “disposition to utter” or “need for food”.
• This proposal is based on the so-called identity theory of mind, the belief that every mental state has an exactly equivalent neurophysiological state.  However, despite intensive, well-funded research into the brain for over a hundred years, psychology is no closer to proving the identity theory of mind than it was in the time of William James.  For now – and pretty far into the forseeable future – it remains just a belief, a form of wishful thinking.  
• Even if the identity theory of mind happened to be true, it would be useless in everyday existence.  Short of walking around with electrodes wired to my brain, I don’t have a clue what’s happening in my brain and have no sensory apparatus to ascertain it. 

 

            Leaving aside these and many other objections that easily spring to mind, I believe that all arguments fail to address the heart of the matter.  The heart of the matter is the stubborn reality that I do seem to have a mind[3].  No matter how much clever logic you throw at me, no matter how many aspersions you cast upon my subjective, unscientific, naïve notion of the mind, I still sense that there is something there not explained – nor even adequately accounted for – by modern psychology. 

 

            I would like to share with you my intuition in this matter and see if it has a ring of truth for you.  In the previous chapter, the course of discussion led us to a reconsideration of Freud’s unconscious.  In this chapter, the discussion will lead us in the direction of something apparently much more commonplace:  experience. 

 

 

Experience

 

Please close your eyes now and think of an elephant.  Any old elephant will do.  It can be the memory of an elephant or one that you simply imagine. 

 

Please don’t read on until you’ve at least tried to think of an elephant.

 

Did you get some sort of a picture?  Maybe you only got the idea of an elephant.  Or, in contrast, maybe you’re one of the gifted ones who is able not only to see the elephant, but also smell him, hear his trumpeting call, feel the ground shake when he walks. 

 

For our current purposes, it doesn’t matter how good your elephant was.  That elephant – just an impression or a full picture, hazy or vivid, moving or stationary, color or black & white – was part of your mind.

 

Or let’s consider memory.  Again I’m going to ask you to perform a few simple tests.  Take as long as you want.  Can you remember a time when:

 

• you rode on a roller-coaster?  
• picked a flower, raised it to your nose, and smelled it? 
• saw a fantasy or science fiction blockbuster in a theatre? 
• ate freshly-baked bread with butter on it?    

 

            If you got one or more of those memories – or just an impression of it – those memories or impressions are your mind, also. 

 

Or let’s see how good you are at decision-making.  I’m taking orders for dessert.  Do you want:

 

1.      a piece of pie?

2.      a piece of cake?

3.      a bowl of ice cream?

4.      something else entirely?

5.      nothing right now, thank you?

 

            Whatever you did to make that decision, that’s part of your mind, too.

 

            It’s really as simple as that.

 

            Imagination, memory, decision-making – these are all elements of the mind.  

 

Perceiving the world is yet another manifestation of the mind.  I’m not talking here about the mechanics of seeing, smelling, or hearing, which have been given great attention by modern psychology.  I’m talking about the perception, the experience of seeing, smelling, or hearing.  I’m talking about:

 

• seeing a breathtaking sunset,
• hearing a bird sing,
• running your hand over the warm roughness of a wool blanket,
• smelling hot coffee brewing,
• lifting a basketball in your hand and feeling its weight

 

            Such perceptions (if you are able to have them) are elements of your mind, too. 

 

            So let’s take a partial inventory of the things that you can have in your mind:

 

• sights, sounds, smells, textures, the feeling of motion, pressures, pains, whether in present time, in memory, or in imagination
• objects, simple and complex[4]
• happenings/events, simple and complex
• attitudes, likes and dislikes, values, aesthetics
• decisions and intentions
• goals and purposes
• abstractions such as truth, war, life and death, psychology.

 

            These are all elements of your mind.      In fact, this leads to a tidy initial definition of the mind: 

 

The mind is the sum of all experience.

           

Experience is the operative word here.  Whatever neurological processes may or may not underlie such mental operations as perception, memory, imagination, decision-making, etc., there is also a thing that overlies those mental operations.  It’s the thing we call experience.  We experience things in the world and also things that are not in the world (memories and imaginings and so on) and also things that are sort of in the world and sort of not in the world (plans, intentions, desires, etc.).  

 

 

The Anatomy of Experience

 

            Building on our intial defintion, we find that experience also has an anatomy.  The following model is over-simplified, but it will serve as a starting place:

 

                        OBSERVER[5]            OBJECT

 

            OBJECT is assumed to be part of the physical universe – a house, a tree, a mountain, an airplane, a rhinoceros, a ball game.  This is a very commonsense concept.  When we are experiencing something, it is generally in the context of – and is focused upon – things in the physical universe. 

 

It turns out that the same model can easily apply to memory and imagination.  When a person remembers, he is generally remembering something that happened in the physical universe.  When a person imagines, chances are he is imagining something that resembles the physical universe, something that could be in the physical universe. 

 

                        OBSERVER            MEMORY

                        OBSERVER            IMAGINARY IMAGE

 

This similarity of anatomy suggests that the mechanism may be fundamentally the same.  Whatever OBSERVER is, it sees the physical universe, memories, and imagination in much the same way.  The only difference is that, in the case of memory and imagination, the object remembered or imagined is not, strictly speaking, part of the physical universe as it exists now. 

 

            This seems pretty real to me.  How about you?.  Whether I’m looking at an automobile or at the memory of an automobile or at the imaginary mock-up of an automobile, it definitely seems to me that the act of looking, of experiencing, of observing, operates pretty much the same way in all three cases.  In fact, our original diagram takes on a broader meaning:

 

OBSERVER            OBJECT

 

            OBJECT doesn’t have to be something in the physical universe right here and now.  It can also be a memory or a creature of my imagination. 

 

And while we’re at it, it doesn’t take too much stretch of the imagination to apply this same model to all the kinds of experiences a mind can have:

 

            OBSERVER            EMOTION

            OBSERVER            PLEASURE/PAIN

            OBSERVER            SENSATION

            OBSERVER            ATTITUDE

            OBSERVER            ABSTRACTION (e.g. Beauty/Ugliness,

Success/Failure, Intelligence/Stupidity)

                                   

            They all follow the same model.  I’ll leave it to you to verify from your own experience if this is true or not.

 

This model can even apply to such false objects as hallucinations:

                       

            OBSERVER            HALLUCINATION

 

            You could say that the machinery can go out of whack and produce hallucinations, misconceptions, etc., etc.  But the model is still the same:

 

OBSERVER            OBJECT

 

            So we could expand our earlier statement about OBSERVER:

An observer can observe objects in the physical universe and objects of other kinds as well. 

 

            Or simply:

 

            An observer observes objects.

 

            Indeed, I think we have arrived at one of the key properties of experience.  

 

            An observer observes objects.

 

 

The Content of Experience

 

            Certain modern branches of philosophy[6] have a concept called intentionality.  One of the best statements of this concept was originally put forward by the philosopher, Edmund Husserl:

 

Consciousness is always a consciousness of something.

 

            We see this readily in our discussion above:

 

OBSERVER            OBJECT

 

            Consciousness (OBSERVER, whatever that is) is always filled with and focused on something (some sort of OBJECT).  As we inventoried above, there can be a broad array of objects:

 

Sensations

Physical Objects

Memories

Imaginings

Hallucinations

Emotions

Pleasures/Pains

Attitudes

Abstractions

 

            No doubt you could think of some other types of objects that I’ve left out.

 

I’d like to employ a modern rendition of a time-worn simile regarding consciousness:  Consciousness is like a motion picture viewed in a completely quiet, dark theater.  The only thing we see and hear are the sights and sounds portrayed on the screen in front of us.  In a mimicry of real life, f it’s a really good movie, it can at times fully occupy our attention and we lose awareness of our own bodies, of the other people in the room, of even the popcorn we’re so busily munching on. 

 

In the context of this simile, consciousness is like the eye of the camera that focuses first on one object or scene and then on another object or scene.  At any given moment my theater consciousness may be filled with a sunset or a pretty woman or a shotgun, depending upon where the cinematographer chose to direct his lens. 

 

Of course, real-life experience is quite a bit broader than a motion picture, but I believe that this simile amply demonstrates Mr. Husserl’s dictim:

 

            Consciousness is always a consciousness of something.

 

Like our motion picture in a quiet, dark theater, there just ain’t nothing in consciousness but the objects on the screen.

 

 

The Apparatus

 

There are really three components to our motion picture simile.  Did you notice? 

 

1.      The motion picture itself;

2.      The theater – camera/projector and screen;

3.      The person sitting in the audience – you or me.

 

            All are necessary to make a theater experience.  The first two are pretty obvious, but what about the third one?

 

            Did you notice that I said “theater experience”?  I won’t argue the point that you can have a motion picture without any person in the audience.  Star Wars or Sleepless in Seattle could play all day in the theater with no one in the room.  But would there be a motion picture experience?  I trust that you will agree that the answer to that is a flat No. 

 

            Or, let’s say we put a brick in the middle of the theater.  Would that create a motion picture experience?  No, again.  At least as far as we know, bricks do not have experiences.

 

            Supposing we put another camera in the room and point it at the screen.  Would that create an experience?  This one is a little more subtle, but the answer again is No.  Cameras cannot see, any more than a photograph or a painting can see.  They simply reflect what they are directed toward in the physical universe. 

 

            Supposing we hooked up the camera to a computer, so that the images filmed by the camera would display on the computer screen.  Could we then say that the computer was experiencing the motion picture?  No again.

 

            And so on, ad infinitum.  No matter how many mirrors or cameras or complex electronic devices we trained on that motion picture, none of them would actually see the motion picture.  None of them would have an experience.

 

            You need a person to have an experience. 

 

            Now, as to what a person is:  That’s a topic for a later discussion.

 

            Drawing on our motion picture simile, we can now elaborate on our original model of the mind:

 

OBSERVER      MENTAL APPARATUS        OBJECT

 

This corresponds to:

 

You or me       Theater, Projector & Screen       Movie

 

            In terms of the mind, APPARATUS would differ according to which sense or mental operation you were talking about:

 

Sight

Hearing

Smell

Touch

Pain

Emotion

Decision

Abstraction

Aesthetics

Memory

Imagination

 

            We can posit a different apparatus for each of these mental operations.  In fact, it could be said that psychology has largely replaced mind-study with apparatus-study.  In other words, psychology has singlemindedly focused on the organs and physiological mechanisms involved in sight, hearing, smell, touch, pain, emotion, memory, etc. – the study fills volumes and courserooms – but in the process, it has lost sight of experience.  In particular, it has lost sight of OBSERVER.

 

 

The Unobservable Observer

 

In a way, it’s not surprising that psychology has lost sight of the observer.  The intrinsic problem with identifying the observer is that it does not itself appear in experience.  As Mr. Husserl said, “Consciousness is always a consciousness of something.”  OBSERVER has all its attention on objects.  Like a camera, its attention is always turned outward.  Even when it turns its attention inward, as is apparently the case with self-awareness or self-consciousness, it doesn’t really find anyting.  There’s no self[7] there to observe directly.  Many a neurotic has been caught in that trap.

 

Look at what you’re doing right now.  You are reading a magazine.  This magazine is an object of the physical universe.  You, whatever you are, are observing that object.  But how much does this tell you about you?   So long as your focus of attention is on the magazine, it doesn’t tell you anything about you, because you’re not even thinking about you. 

 

            Now that I’ve brought it up, you’ve probably started to put some attention on you, the observer. 

 

OBSERVER      MENTAL APPARATUS        {YOU}

 

But what do you see when you look at you?  I contend that, even when you try to look at you, you won’t find an object.  Oh, yes, you’ll probably find things in the physical universe – your hand, your shirt, the muscular tension of your eyes when you’re reading, perhaps the subtle muscular effort of sub-vocalizing the words on the page.   But those are all objects, things that you, the observer, can observe.   They are not OBSERVER itself.

 

Or let’s say that you look in the mirror.  Try it right now if you want.  What do you see?  A face, two eyes, a nose, hair (or not), makeup, a beard, whatever you have on your face.  Those features are all yours, to be sure.  But where are you, the one who’s looking at your face, the one we have called OBSERVER?  Where are you?

 

            I’m pretty sure that you won’t find you in the mirror.  The best you’ll find is some hint of you, perhaps something alive looking out of your eyes.  Poets and playwrights and song writers have made a great deal of the light in someone’s eyes – or of the light going out.  Great painters have tried to capture that light in their paintings.  Of course, hard-headed scientists like ourselves can safely ignore what soft-headed artists have to say about the light in someone’s eyes.  Right?

 

This absence of any observable you-ness in experience has given psychology its license to abandon the mind.  Researchers, striving to emulate the physical sciences, could find no objective, measurable way to observe the subject of experience, the observer, so they dismissed it as “subjective” and “unreportable”.  They turned their attention to things that they could observe and photograph and statisize, like brains and behavior and rats and optic nerves. 

 

The logical extremus of this position, the growing chorus that I alluded to before, was to decree that OBSERVER doesn’t exist at all.  According to this view, OBSERVER is just a particularly persistent and annoying piece of folklore.  It should be removed from the model completely:

 

MENTAL APPARATUS        OBJECT

 

            Very neat and simple, don’t you think?  No vestige of the pesky observer.

 

     

A Question of Tools

 

            The growing chorus asserts that OBSERVER is non-existent, or at best, irrelevant.  They denigrate the concept of a hidden observer as unscientific, as mystical, as tribal folklore.  However, if you boil down this name-calling, their case rests almost solely on one argument:  Because the hidden observer can’t be observed using orthodox scientific tools, it does not exist – or at best is an unworthy subject of study for a science.

 

But what do they mean by orthodox?  Quite simply, they are referring to the methods and tools they are using. 

 

And which methods and tools are they using?  Methods and tools borrowed from other sciences, methods and tools borrowed from the physical sciences and the life sciences and the medical sciences, tools that have proven their effectiveness in those other fields.  In other words, because the APPARATUS people cannot image and measure and statistize OBSERVER using tools borrowed from other sciences, they assert that it doesn’t exist.  

 

            This, I think you will agree, is a rather unscientific, illogical, even dogmatic assertion.  In their zeal to be scientific, to emulate real sciences with real track records, psychologists have borrowed the trappings of other sciences.  They have sought to appear scientific – just as, in the field of traditional religion, some less-than-holy individuals have sought to appear holy.  It is no coincidence that the word orthodox has been borrowed from religion.  Naturally, Everhart Sraem has something to say about this:

  

orthodox, n. 1. a religious term meaning adhering to traditional doctrine, which, appropriately though quite inadvertently, has come to be applied to the new religions of science and medicine.

 

            However, anyone who knows anything about the history of science knows that tools are the name of the game.  The advance of the physical and life and medical sciences has to a great extent been marked by the development of new tools – the telescope, the photometer, the microscope, the EKG, the MRI, and so on. 

 

Of course, the relationship between scientists and tools has been reciprocal.  Astronomers wanted to observe the objects of the night sky more closely, so Hans Lippershey invented the telescope and Galileo and others improved upon it.  The need for the tool spurred the development of the tool.

 

By the way, you didn’t hear Lippershey or Galileo say, “No tool exists to study the night sky; therefore the night sky is unworthy of study.”

 

The question is not:  ‘Can we study OBSERVER using orthodox tools?’ but rather, ‘Should we study OBSERVER?’.  If we decide that OBSERVER exists – or even might exist – and that, because of its apparent central role in human experience, it should be studied, then, as good scientists, we will have no other choice but to get busy developing some new tools.

 

* * *

 

            So it comes down to us to answer two questions that psychology should have answered long ago:  (1) Does OBSERVER exist and, if so, (2) should he/she/it be studied?   As you no doubt have noticed, I’m leaning toward a Yes answer to both questions.  However, I plan on spending the next chapter exploring these questions in greater depth.