Reality is a vast spectrum of perspectives that fan out through the various disciplines of science, philosophy and the Cognitive sciences; with perhaps the most easily understood schematic representations of awareness, adaptation and survival coming from psychology’s ‘Behaviorism’, a narrow yet remarkable perspective of Human existence that emerged with psychology’s scientific inception.
For a variety of reasons during the 19th century, Psychology migrated from the folds of Philosophy; with the most pertinent reason in this present context being the correlations of human Awareness to our biological senses. Sight, sound, touch and smell are all qualities which lend themselves to scientific experiment.
In juxtaposition to Philosophy and analytical theories such as the ‘Philosophy of Mind’, Psychology was to become the empirical ‘Science’ of human awareness; human awareness as stages of incrementally emergent biological phenomena, a theme still constructively expounded today:
“No principle is more central to today’s psychology … than this: Everything psychological is simultaneously biological” (Myers, D. 2010, p.47 )
But in Psychology’s beginnings, its 19th century scientific premises soon became the dominant perspective, creating a biologically oriented ‘Behaviorism’ that excised its Philosophical heritage. Psychology was no longer juxtaposition to Philosophy but a single minded ‘deterministic’ science that denied any significant influences of human thought ‘upon’ human thought. And vanquished the human characteristic of free will, an irrelevant illusion in the eyes of Behaviorism’s foremost proponent, B.F. Skinner:
“… my behavior at any given moment has been nothing more than the product of my genetic endowment, my personal history, and the current setting.” (Meyers, D. 2010, p.314)
And while this approach to human experience as ‘unidirectional’ and solely determined by physical factors reined for decades as the dominant theory of Psychology, it was incrementally challenged and re-placed by re-emerging concepts such as those of ‘Humanism’ in the 1950’s, and the blossoming Cognitive Sciences of the 1960’s.
These rising perspectives were not a paradigm at all but the mere shedding of Behaviorism’s temporary dominance; today’s Psychology is a return to the more divergent thinking displayed by some of its own founding thinkers such as William James, who envisioned human consciousness as exceeding the mere biological mechanisms of learning, adaptations and survival (the hallmarks of Behaviorism).
“’We carve out everything,’ James states, ‘just as we carve out constellations, to serve our human purposes’” (Goodman, R. 2009)
And ‘… human purposes.’ are better understood in the context of today’s ‘holistic’ psychology, which does not adhere to biological limitations but instead expounds a curious and productive skepticism regarding the bias of any ‘one and only theory’,such as behaviorism; as demonstrated by the words of a contemporary PhD:
“The fundamental question regarding the nature of reality is partly philosophical, partly spiritual, part psychological and partly scientific in nature” (Diamond, S. 2010)
The point is obvious: the World is a much bigger place than can be described by the biological constituents of Behaviorism, which in its most radical refinements has been met with considerable resistance from many quarters; an understandable prospect when you reflect upon B.F. Skinner’s ‘nothing more than physical processes’ perspective; and its ramifications for the concept of human consciousness and free-will. To deny our conscious free-will is to invite vigorous opposition.
However, Behaviorism in its appropriate context is undoubtedly a ‘key player’ in understanding the emergence of human thought and its subsequent developments during our perennial search for understanding life; its varietal forms of material and abstract components and systems. Our expansive twenty-first century understandings after all, begin with and proceed from our biological sensory experiences, which shape our thinking processes in conformance to the temporal world around us:
“All our thoughts and concepts are called up by sense-experiences and have a meaning only in reference to these sense-experiences.” (Einstein, A. 1926)
And our peripheral nervous system’s sensory-experiences are relayed to, and processed by, our biological-computer: the central nervous system’s billions of neurons with their trillions of synaptic connections, which in some still unknown way appear to produce, or so we surmise, the experience we refer to ambiguously as Consciousness. an ambiguity for which philosopher David Chalmers (1995, p.91) has coined the terms the “… ‘easy problems’ and the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.”
Chalmers is a proponent of aspect or “Property Dualism”, the projection of our cognitive system as an entwined, integral component of the world around us and this is where the “easy problems” of consciousness[1], the ‘objective mechanisms of the cognitive system’, get left behind. Surely they will be effectively dealt with by neuroscience and cognitive psychology, including ‘Behaviorism’ (Chalmers, D. 1995), leaving the ‘hard problem’ for Philosophy and Physics- and theoretical Neuroscience- to unravel.
The ‘Hard Problem’: “… the ineffable sound of a distant oboe, the agony of an intense pain, the sparkle of happiness or the meditative quality of a moment lost in thought.”… is that which constitutes the hitherto unfathomable mystery of Mind (Chalmers, D. 1995).
And according to Neuroscientist-philosopher Harald Atmanspacher (2006) we now have “Quantum Approaches to Consciousness” to solve this ‘Hard Problem’, in a manner that dispenses with the lack of free will inherent to the physical determinism of Behaviorism. We have the ideas of that same era’s famous pioneers of Quantum mechanics, such as Planck, Bohr, Schrodinger and Pauli (and others) that led to current concept that there is a possibility “… that conscious mental acts can influence brain behavior” (p. 18)
This has an ultimate prospect in the eyes of Physicist-philosopher Henry Stapp (Atmanspacher, 2006), to change our self-image from “… mechanical cog to quantum player” in a potential quantum Universe that “… can be properly conceived only as an intricately interconnected whole.” (p.14)
“Many scientists and philosophers have forced themselves to accept the rationally unsatisfactory and unsupported physicalist position in the mistaken belief that this is what basic physical theory demands. But the converse is true: contemporary physical theory demands certain interventions into the physical! The associated causal gap in a purely physically determined causation provides a natural opening to an interactive but non-Cartesian dualism… With our physically efficacious minds now integrated into the unfolding of uncharted and yet-to-be-plumbed potentialities of an intricately interconnected whole, the responsibility that accompanies the power to decide things on the basis of one’s own thoughts, ideas, and judgments is laid upon us“ (Henry Stapp 2006)
Biologically conceived yet philosophically freed within the perennial mysteries of life, the emerging picture today is of a physically restrained yet theoretically un-fettered humanity responsible for our self-directed future.
References:
1. Myers, D, 2010. ‘Psychology’, Holland, MI, Worth Publishers,
2. Einstein, A., (1926) ‘Space-Time’, From the article by: Jeans, J., ‘Relativity’, (1926), The Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th Edition,
Retrieved from: http://preview.britannica.co.kr/spotlights/classic/eins1.html
4. Chalmers, D., (1995), The Puzzle of Conscious Experience, Scientific American, updated 2002. Retrieved from: http://consc.net/papers/puzzle.pdf
5. Ibid., (1995) ‘Facing up to the problem of consciousness’, special edition of ‘Journal of Consciousness Studies’
Retrieved from: http://consc.net/consc-papers.html
6. Goodman, R., (2009), ed. Zalta, E. N., William James, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Retrieved from: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2009/entries/j ames/
7. Diamond, S. (2010), ‘Redefining Reality: Psychology, Science and Solipsism,Published on Psychology Today (http://www.psychologytoday.com), Created Jan 1, 2010. Retrieved from: http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/36551
8. Atmanspacher, H. (2008), ed. Zalta, E. N., Quantum Approaches to Consciousness, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition). Retrieved from: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/qt-consciousness/
9. Atamanspacher, H., (2006), Clarifications and Specifications; ‘A Conversation with Henry Stapp’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 13(9), 67-85 (2006). Retrieved from: Http://www.igpp.de/english/tda/pdf/stapp.pdf
Endnotes:
[1] “The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:
The ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli; The integration of information by a cognitive system; The reportabililty of mental states; The ability of a system to access its own internal states; The focus of attention’; The deliberate control of behavior; The difference between wakefulness and sleep.” (Chalmers, 1995)
