Posted by Estella on August 30, 2006, at 3:11:03
In reply to Re: Biopsychosocial vs Biological Reductionism, posted by finelinebob on August 28, 2006, at 23:04:09
Hellos :-)
Dualism vs Materialism is a hard one... Still... Seems that in the psychological / psychiatric literature they have something special and specific in mind that is outdated philosophy of mind.
I remember going to a lecture a while back on abnormal psychology. The lecturer said, quite clearly, that the reason for less psychosomatic illnesses now (compared with the time of Freud) was because of the rise of dualism. I said:
Firstly, people are LESS LIKELY to be dualists now than they were back then. Due to the success of science roughly half first year philosophy students surveyed are dualists and roughly half are materialists. People were MORE LIKELY to have been dualists back then due to scientific psychology not having been developed and due to the influence of Descartes. Secondly, one would expect MORE psychosomatic illnesses when Dualism is prevalent (which is precisely what you find) because people don't understand the INTERACTION between mind and body. People in Freuds day were less likely to understand that the physical can affect the mental and vice versa. The idea that psychological factors could result in bodily paralysis, for example, would be more surprising back then (hence less likely to have been picked up on / challenged) than it is now.I thought she had simply got things wrong but I've read other people saying the same thing. I don't understand why they say that there has been a rise in dualism in western culture and I think part of it might be that I don't really understand what on earth they mean by dualism.
In philosophy... The most notable dualist is probably Dave Chalmers. Aside from him (and his followers though don't quote me on that) materialism seems to be the accepted view. He also writes on what implications dualism has for science, however. His variety of dualism doesn't affect things overly much. He says that science is fairly much in the business of finding the neural correlates of consciousness and good luck to them they should keep on with that. His main issue is that it is a seperate matter whether we are going to find correlates of consciousness and he resists making the identity (ie concluding that the reason for the correlation is that they are the same thing). He thinks that conscious properties (like phenomenal red) are irreducible mental properties of this world the same way that physical properties (like mass and charge) are irreducible physical properties of this world. He doesn't deny that mental properties seem to arise from our complex brains, but he does resist the conclusion that the only way you could get mental properties is to have a complex brain like ours. If you would like there to be prospects for AI or if you would like to leave it open that there might be alien creatures with radically different organs to our brains that support mentality then you might just want to agree with him... Doesn't seem to affect psychiatry, however.
> there is a growing body of evidence that suggests childhood "critical periods" aren't the only places where and when environment places a firm stamp on one's mind and it's capabilities or disabilities.
Absolutely. With respect to phenotypes (the way genes express in phenotypes) too. Hard to seperate out nature vs nurture ultimately. Same with trying to keep socio-culture and psychology apart too. I mean surely the social aspects that are relevant are the social aspects that are represented in the persons psychology. And surely being represented in the persons psychology is a biological aspect as much as a psychological one. How to keep those things distinct can be a problem at the end of the day...
> a physicist at a recent conference was quoted as say, "The world is not as real as we think it is."Lol. Physicists don't study mind independent reality they only study inter subjective reality. That is okay... But they don't even make metaphysical claims (or at least they aren't qualified to do so). Physicists are typically pragmatists. They find formula that are great for predicting (hence explaining) the behaviour of particles etc. If you ask them 'what has to be true of the world and what objects have to exist in our world in order for the formula to work?' they don't know any more than the next guy. They just go with pragmatics / utility. Like the Shrodingers cat thing. What is the difference between saying that it is in both states at once and between saying that it is in one state but WE DON'T KNOW WHICH STATE UNTIL WE LOOK? The first sounds crazy (and are they entitled to collapse the epistemology / metaphysics distinction) the second sounds less crazy (but a consequence is that there may be facts about the world that we can know nothing about).
Though apparantly it gets more complicated... And I don't know much about physics...
> One interesting notion to consider, if you want to lift your consideration of your disorder above a biological reduction to the alchemy/chemistry of psychopharmacology is to consider the views of mind developed in the Soviet Union, where the collective (going ages back beyond the rise of communism) was more important than the individual, is that "mind" exists between people. There is no "mind" within a single person, other than what you might play back as "thought experiments" or relived experiences. Mind is a purely social phenomenon.Someone or other wrote about group minds... Can't remember who... Might be a bit much of an abuse of language, however... Searle is fairly interesting "The Construction of Social Reality". Mind is essentially social. In the sense that language is essentially social (controversial but that is meant to be the upshot of Wittgenstein's private language argument)
Though... It is very controversial...
poster:Estella
thread:680731
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060825/msgs/681417.html